Oaklawn starter feels fortunate to work the races

The Sentinel-Record/Richard Rasmussen FROM THE START: Oaklawn Park starter Terry Walker walks near the starting gate after starting a race recently. Walker has been the starter for Oaklawn since 2004 and depends on 13 crew members to ensure all horses and riders are safe before breaking from the gate.
The Sentinel-Record/Richard Rasmussen FROM THE START: Oaklawn Park starter Terry Walker walks near the starting gate after starting a race recently. Walker has been the starter for Oaklawn since 2004 and depends on 13 crew members to ensure all horses and riders are safe before breaking from the gate.

EDITOR'S NOTE: It takes hundreds of workers each live race meet to ensure race days run smoothly. This is the next in a series of articles highlighting occupations surrounding the sport of thoroughbred racing, and how they work together to make each meet a success.

Beth Reed

The Sentinel-Record

Terry Walker is in his 56th meet as a starter in thoroughbred racing, a career he said he feels grateful to have.

"It's been a long journey but it wasn't very long ago I was a pretty young guy, too," Walker said, sipping his coffee during a break in morning training at Oaklawn Park. "When I first came to work, I was the youngest guy on the crew and now I'm the oldest, luckily. Fortunate I'm still going."

Walker is the third generation in his family to work in horse racing. Born and raised in central Illinois, he said he's worked all over the circuit and his ties to Oaklawn started long before he made his way here.

"I had an uncle that was a jockey that rode here in '52," he said. "Won just a few races when they used to run two-year-olds here. I had some win pictures -- I had three copies of win pictures that I showed to Bob Holthus a number of years ago and he knew a couple of the people in the pictures. I think they said at that time Bob had been licensed here as a trainer so that's how he knew a couple of the people in the win pictures."

In 1977, Walker got his pari-mutuel license and started working on the gate.

"Before that, I galloped and rode a little bit, of course, that was a short-lived career because I was heavy starting," he said. "I rode quarter horses and thoroughbreds, won my first race on a quarter horse. Before that, I just grew up walking hots and cleaning stalls and all that good stuff. I worked on the ground for quite a long time."

Walker has been coming to Oaklawn for 21 years. In 2004, he became the starter.

The starter manages the gate crew and it involves much more than pressing the button to allow horses to break from the gate, he said.

"The most important part of the job is the safety of the riders," he said. "That's the number one and that's my guys' number one thing, too. I have to turn it over to them during the races. But even in the morning, the riders are the number one priority, whether they're exercise riders or jockeys or whatever. Then the horse is next. And then my people are last, but that's just procedure -- that's just the way it is, as the shed row turns. That should be a novel 'as the shed row turns.'"

During morning training, maiden horses are brought to the gate to learn how to break.

"(Horses) are just like children. The first time they come to the gate, obviously they don't know what they're supposed to do and you hope you have the right riders on them, which this is a really good place here with accomplished riders," Walker said. "But first of all the most unnatural thing to do is put any animal in a cage and that's what we ask of them. We leave the front doors open the first time and walk them in through there. If there's no problems, we shut them and if there are problems, we lead them on through a couple times.

"As they progress you've got to have the right rider and the first time they come out you want them just to walk out and go straight, do everything right. Then the next time the rider will kind of ask them a little bit more, and each time they come to the gate you ask them a little bit more when they're leaving (the gate) to go a little bit faster. Generally, when a horse gets to their fifth time, they're leaving there pretty good."

But Walker said not all horses progress at the same rate. Some will take longer to break while others are ready after just a few times.

"But usually around the seventh time, they're ready to break," he said. "Hopefully somewhere along the way, you've caught some other babies at their same level so they can break with company. But I usually don't ever OK a horse without company because they're going to run with other horses, and almost all trainers want their horses to have company so they can see everything and know everything that's going on."

For the more experienced horses, Walker said some trainers will have them stand in the gate for there betterment.

"A relaxed standing horse is going to do more good than a horse that is nervous and agitated," he said. "Many trainers just bring them up and stand them before they run them. And some of these horses it might be a couple months between their races, but they'll continue to stand right on through it. Now there's some that don't do that, but it seems as though most of the trainers that win most of the races continually stand their horses. They'll also sometimes take them into the paddock area and try to get everything as close to the race scenario as you can get."

When a horse causes a problem in the gate prior to a race, Walker will mark that horse on his starter's list which signifies a need to continue practicing breaking from the gate.

"I don't have to put too many on the starter's list here," he said. "But we have a list we put them on and get them corrected and show they're capable and satisfactory to me to be able to run again.

"It could also be a horse that in the morning breaks and takes a left out of here. It might be a horse that's run before, but obviously, you don't want that happening in a race. Ninety percent-plus of them are in the afternoon, but you have a small window of them that can happen in the morning. They demonstrate something that you know they're going to do it again when they run so you want to get it corrected before you get to that point."

Walker said his job depends on the 13 people he has on his gate crew, adding he rarely hires people who haven't worked the gate before. His crew includes Lane Stovall, Cash Vaughan, Ryan Roesly, Dillon Lynn, Jimmy Hild, George Soape, Shawn Mann and Wayne Baswell, and gives him one person for every horse.

"This is the first time that I've ever hired a guy that never worked before," he said. "As it turned out I'm so glad that I did get him because he's a farm boy. I had a guy that got sick who's always been my tractor guy, and this one I hired this year got in the tractor and knew what to do. I'm blessed he showed up this year, otherwise, I would have been driving it myself."

It takes a certain amount of agility, Walker said, to be on the gate crew. Crew members have to stand in each stall of the gate with the horses and jockeys, holding the horses steady and letting them go as soon as the gate opens.

"When you're up there, you've got maybe three inches to stand on and you learn how to get balanced," he said. "It doesn't take much for (a horse) to throw you down in the hole so you've got to be a little bit agile to do it. It's a very dangerous job."

Local on 03/09/2018

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