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European Exercise Riders in America

By Ken Snyder
First Published: 05 February 2010 - Issue Number: 15

GIVE me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses...” who can gallop Thoroughbreds in early morning darkness, breeze them in desired times over specified distances, break them from a starting gate... 
This amended version of the Statue of Liberty’s message might as well be at the gates to any backstretch in America – there are that many foreign exercise riders plying their trade in the United States. English, Irish, even Scandinavian riders, and an occasional South African constitute a modern-day melting pot on American racetracks.
What has brought them to America is not too far from what has always led immigrants “across the pond.” The U.S. is still the “Golden Door,” to borrow again from the Statue of Liberty, or more precisely, the door to gold for “Euros” of the human variety.
Gold as in pay, however, is actually a relative term. Exercise riders in the U.S. earn anywhere from $600 to $800 a week – comparable to what is paid in pounds or euros in, say, Newmarket or Kildare. But what is required to earn the wage is as different as a Newmarket training yard is from a shedrow at Aqueduct.
In simplest terms, exercise riding in the U.S. is, well, riding. In Europe it’s riding plus work, and a lot of it. Speaking of her homeland, Leigh Hogben of Kent, England, said, “It’s more of a farm environment. You have three or four horses to look after, and they are your responsibility. You feed them.  You muck their stalls. Then you ride and come back and groom them. You hold the horses for the blacksmith. You do everything – turn them out, bring them in, take the horses racing.”
Hogben, who rides for Graham Motion at Fair Hills Training Center in Maryland and other U.S. locations where Motion stables, states the obvious: “It’s longer days.”
In the U.S. exercise riders may be on as many as eight horses in a day, but be done by 11 a.m. – all without touching a rub rag, brush or pitchfork. In short, riders in the U.S. earn roughly double what their European counterparts do if a comparison is made on an hourly wage basis.
“I gallop the horses here, and I work in a bar a couple of nights a week and do other stuff. You have a lot more free time,” said H...

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