Page 76 - Speedhorse June 2020

Kelsi Purcell in the post parade at Ruidoso Downs opening weekend 2020.
Kelsi Purcell and Eyesa Special Lady
win the 2012 IZYK 870 QH & TB Stakes by 1 1/2-lengths over a sloppy track at Arapahoe Park.
KELSI PURCELL
“There’s a lot more that I want out of my racing career.”
Kelsi Purcell debuted as a professional jockey in 2007. She didn’t mince words when discussing what it was like breaking into the sport.
“I rode too many bad horses, got a bad rep for riding garbage,” she said. “I didn’t get a lot of great mounts until I started riding all breeds: Quarter Horse, Arabian.”
Purcell believes that gender is “always a factor” for female jockeys. “It doesn’t matter if you had a horse in an allowance
that runs second, it’s your fault; if he’s run by a guy and wins, it’s the guy’s doing. ... it’s, ‘if he did it, she could have done it.’
But I rode a lot of horses the boys could not get and I either won on them or got a lot of seconds and thirds.”
Purcell said that, in those early days of her riding career, she didn’t know about the importance of being selective in her mounts.
Instead, she rode anything offered because she was “trying to prove a point.”
“But because of that,” she noted, “I did get other opportunities to ride more difficult horses.They ended up
being really good horses, too, that won a lot of races.”
Fifteen years have produced a lot of wins, more than $4.3 million in earnings, several thousand
mounts... and plenty of injuries, unfortunately.
“There’s a shorter list of what bones I haven’t broken than what I have broken,” she said.
The most gruesome injury came in 2010, when her horse had its heels clipped. The horse teakettled three times, leaving Purcell with a broken chest bone and multiple fractured vertebrae.
She was back in action mere months later. Purcell also recalled running a meet at Lone Star with a broken leg and a broken foot.
“It’s a tough sport,” she said. “And there’s less and less female galloping riders, less and less female jockeys, and they don’t last as long. I’ve seen a lot of great female riders come along, but they didn’t want to grind it out. Through all of the broken bones and almost getting killed, I just had compassion for the horse. It drove me a lot harder.”
For Purcell, if you want to break into the sport as a jockey, you have to have the drive— especially as a woman.
“If you really wanted to be riding horses, then you would be riding horses. You would be somewhere riding, just getting on,” she said.
“I used to fight with one of the gallop boys at 4:30 in the morning to go gallop in the dark.
I just wanted to get on the good horses. I may not be that enthusiastic anymore, but I still have that drive.
“After last summer and fall,” she continued. “I realized there’s a lot more that I want out of my racing career.”
74 SPEEDHORSE June 2020