Todd Kabel — The Electric Horseman

By Trevor Cole
Originally published in Toronto Life, 2004




Friday, June 11
16 days before the Queen’s Plate About 1:30 p.m.

What’s the best first impression to give you of Todd Kabel? I could tell you how he looks on a galloping horse—his back flat and still enough to play a chess game on at 70 kilometres an hour, kept that way by his powerful legs pumping in rhythm with the strides of his mount. I could tell you how he looks in the morning, standing outside a racing stable, specially ordered leather boots on his size six feet, a diamond stud in his ear and, underneath the broad beige cowboy hat on his head, fierce eyes flashing so green and Hollywood handsome you half expect a camera somewhere to start rolling. I could tell you how those eyes turn somehow dangerous, even menacing, when he feels passionate about something—winning, say, or defending a dear friend’s honour. Or I could show you Kabel as he is now, an hour before his first race of the day, sitting near the Woodbine jockeys’ room, located next to the paddock, sheathed in white from his form-fitting turtleneck to the filmy nylon stockings on his powdered feet, perched boyishly on a chair with his hands clasped around his knees, and those same eyes, full of fatigue.

Depending on the day, Kabel, who’s 38, weighs maybe 112, maybe 115 pounds. That he seems bigger is due in part to his gruff presence and also to his physiology. His shoulders are broader, his legs thicker than most jockeys’, which makes him stronger, better able to push a horse to the wire four, seven, nine times a day. But it also means Kabel has to work harder than most at getting his weight down.

As Woodbine’s clerk of scales, Bobby Bertrand, will tell you, “Weight’s everything in this business.” If you’re a racehorse, you want as little as possible on your back. This morning, Kabel has spent hours “pulling weight” in the hot box, the steam room he calls “my home away from home,” where jockeys sit before races, playing backgammon and Chinese checkers to pass the time as the heat billows up around them, wringing pounds of fluid from their bodies. Jockeys hate the hot box. It’s not unheard of for a rider to collapse coming out of there—“fish flopping” they call it—especially if he’s already taken a few Lasix pills. Lasix is the diuretic given to racehorses to lower their blood pressure and prevent the capillaries in their lungs from hemorrhaging after a hard workout, but jockeys who are desperate to get down to race weight will pop a few when they wake up, then piss the pounds away.

There were days Kabel used to resort to Lasix and lived with the possible kidney damage and the way it made his muscles cramp up and his moods cartwheel. He doesn’t do that anymore, he says, but to eke out a few extra ounces, he’ll still “flip”—throw up the contents of his stomach—maybe a dozen times a day, standing over the toilet and letting ’er rip, his body so used to the process he doesn’t even need to shove a finger down his throat. At this moment, his mouth is parched from dehydration, he’s worn out, and on top of it, his back is killing him. But no matter how tired Todd Kabel is, he will always find the energy to tease a woman.

A few feet away, Stacie Clark-Rogers, a Woodbine TV commentator who gallops horses for Stronach Stables in the mornings, is setting up for a short on-camera interview with another jockey. Kabel is in the midst of answering questions about his back—he’s had trouble with it for years and wrenched it again two weeks ago—when he sees Clark-Rogers with the mike in her hand and gets a sly smirk.

“Actually, it was Stacie hurt it,” he drawls.

She wheels around, laughing. “You can just forget about it.”

Behind the scenes, Kabel teases the married Clark-Rogers constantly. But really, when he’s feeling especially mischievous, any woman will do. He’s as happy to flirt with a female jockey as with the mother of his girlfriend; he seems to revel in female attention. When Kabel meets his biggest fan out-side the paddock, a hunched woman in her 70s with a papery voice, he greets her with an enthusiastic kiss on the mouth, and says goodbye the same way.

“You’re a brat,” Clark-Rogers tells him with a grin, and he wouldn’t deny it. So here’s as good a first impression of Todd Kabel as any: wrestling with a larger female rider on the way to the daily prayer meeting in the jockeys’ massage room, ending up with his legs hoisted around her hips and chirping, “Giddy-up!”


Sunday, June 13
The day of the Labatt Woodbine Oaks About 9 a.m.

This is the time of day Todd Kabel used to drive John Bell crazy.

That’s Bell there, a jockey’s agent standing a tidy five feet tall, leaning against the rail on the far side of Woodbine’s dirt track, watching his rider “breeze” a filly he’s going to race in a few days. For 20 years, until the mid-’80s, Bell was a jockey himself here at Woodbine, a good one, spending his mornings breezing horses just as Kabel is doing now, making them work hard, blowing them out, giving them the feel of a race. But having reached a weathered 64 years of age, with a hearing aid in his right ear, Bell now makes his living driving around the tight neighbourhood of stables that make up Woodbine’s backside, jockeying relationships.

There’s a lot of strategic chit-chat required of an agent who keeps a top jockey’s book. The backside is home to as many as 2,000 horses, and from these Bell has to find five or seven good rides a day, five days a week. He has to know which trainers and owners have the better horses coming up, and he has to get his rider on those horses or risk losing them forever to other jockeys. He has to keep the key trainers and stable owners happy, even those he’s not working with at the moment, in case one of their two-year-olds should emerge as a potential winner. He has to smile and nod and sound convinced when a trainer says his colt is a comer, then make a note to check around, look at the workout times, to see if it’s true. And when it all comes together and Kabel rides to a win, he has to get fresh bagels, juice and Egg McMuffins to the grooms of that winning horse the next morning, to make sure they know he and Todd appreciate their effort.

Trainers are always happy to see John Bell coming into their barn these mornings. For one thing, there isn’t a finer gentleman on the backside, no man you’d rather hoist a Coors Light with. For another, Kabel, his main rider, is a star, firmly established as Canada’s top jockey, more likely to guide a mount to victory than any other man or woman in silks. You love to ride Kabel, the trainers say, because you get your money’s worth.

But for a number of years, about this time of day, John Bell was too often making the rounds from barn to barn, not just to arrange mounts, but also to apologize. “He was lettin’ me down in the mornings,” Bell says of Kabel, in his light Newcastle accent.

Kabel, now a devotee of restraint and dietary discipline, was a partier in those days, a guy who’d head to a bar for dinner with friends, start drinking and suddenly discover it was two in the morning. Sometimes after a particularly late night, he wouldn’t show up for these early workouts. “I had horses lined up,” says Bell, “and I had to go face the people and come up with an excuse. ‘Well, he’s sick, he was up all night.’ I mean, they kinda wear off a little bit.”

Jockeys, you should know, are not easygoing souls. Their bodies are both their ticket to glory and their curse, and perhaps owing to this conflicted reality, they abuse them in a variety of ways. “His behaviour is almost typical of the profession,” says Sandy McPherson, a trainer who used Kabel a lot in his early days at Woodbine, before he became much in demand. He mentions the name of the best rider in New York: “He was an alcoholic.” A top rider in California: “He’s been suspended for cocaine abuse a thousand times.” Stewart Elliott, the suddenly famous Canadian-born jockey who came so close to the American Triple Crown this year aboard Smarty Jones, was fined for falsifying licence applications because he neglected to mention he’d been convicted of assault. At the track, jockeys mistreat themselves to win; away from it, they fall easily into a self-destructive culture.

You could argue, though, that Kabel fell harder than most. He’d come east from Winnipeg in 1987, when Bell convinced him he could be as big a star in Toronto as he was in the West. And Bell was right—during that first autumn, as a 22-year-old, Kabel was the second-leading rider at Greenwood, Woodbine’s rival track, which was then in its final days. But Kabel also had seven feet worth of brash packed into his five feet four inches, and at night, he’d take his attitude into the bars. “I dropped the gloves at anything that came at me,” he says with a mixture of pride and regret. Whether it was easterners ragging him for being a hick from the West, or bettors frustrated over losing, he says, “I never took it very lightly.” One night, it was a Woodbine trainer who came at him while he was eating his dinner, giving him grief over the fact that Kabel, then married, was in Toronto while his wife, Karen, and his four children were back in Winnipeg. “I asked him to leave me alone twice,” remembers Kabel. “The third time he came back, I dropped him.” Which, along with failing to improve his reputation among trainers, “ruined a good meal.”

Kabel insists that, after a bit of therapy and some attitude adjustment, that’s all behind him now. “I can walk away from somebody knockin’ me or bitchin’ at me.” Though his 13-year marriage ended a few years ago, because all those late nights “led to stray,” he and John Bell have managed to stay together for 18 years. Since, in Kabel’s words, “most jockeys here change their agents more than they change their underwear,” that makes quite a statement about their mutual loyalty, and about John Bell’s infinite faith that, no matter how much trouble Kabel got himself into, he had enough talent and drive to pull himself out.

Sunday, June 13
About 10 a.m.

Kabel, in his helmet and riding leathers, stands outside a Woodbine barn and squints up at the clear sky. “I hope it fuckin’ rains,” he says to Bell. Then he turns and explains. “My filly’s undefeated in the slop. And it’s $500,000 today.”

Last year, Kabel did something no jockey in Canada had done before, breaking through the eight-digit barrier to rack up more than $11 million in purse earnings. He had more firsts, seconds and thirds than any other rider. His 29 wins in stakes races—the events with the best horses racing for enhanced purses—were the most since 1966, when Avelino Gomez, who has an award named after him, set the record with 32. All of which combined to give Kabel his third Sovereign Award as the country’s best jockey (he’s also won one as an apprentice). As of today, he’s on pace to obliterate last year’s record. He has won 30 per cent of his races; his nearest competitor has won 19 per cent. Bettors come up to John Bell at the track these days, exclaiming, “Your man’s riding awesome. I don’t know what you got going, but keep it up!”

Is it the horse or the rider who wins a race? By some estimates, 20 per cent of any race result can be attributed to the jockey, 80 per cent to the horse underneath. But by the hard calculus of purse winnings, even a jockey as good as Kabel gets only 10 per cent of the credit. The stable that wins today’s Labatt Woodbine Oaks, the most important race of the year for three-year-old fillies, will get $300,000; the winning rider takes home $30,000. Kabel’s horse, Eye of the Sphynx, gives him a good shot at that money, although with just five horses in the field, today’s Oaks is a race of strategy, says John Bell—“a jockey’s race.” And that might give Kabel an even greater advantage.

Ask racing insiders why Kabel wins so much, and they’ll tell you a number of things. He never hinders a horse, never puts it in a pocket from which it can’t get out. He strategizes well, poring over the Daily Racing Form to plan his approach to each race. His strength, the way he presses rhythmically on a horse’s neck, can add inches to its stride. He has one of the best left hands in the business, meaning he uses the whip on the left side of a horse more effectively than most, getting it to shift its weight the way it should as it comes down the stretch. He “has a clock in his head,” meaning he can sense the pace of a race to the second as it’s unfolding, allowing him to hold a horse’s energy in reserve if he feels the pace is too fast to be sustained. And—this above all—he’s patient.

Trainer Laurie Silvera, who’s been around many years and has a fondness for Kabel’s exuberance, tells a story in his lilting Jamaican accent about a horse he put Kabel on when the rider first came to Toronto from Winnipeg. It was a chestnut gelding that had a unique way of running; if you worked him at all in the early part of the race, made him stay close to the leaders, he had nothing left at the end. Kabel had never been on this horse before, had no experience with its quirks. To make his challenge even greater, he was racing the horse at Greenwood, a short track only six furlongs in length (there are eight furlongs to the mile); if you didn’t stay close to the pace there, you were usually in serious trouble.

Kabel ran the perfect race for that horse. “He rode him as though he knew him like a book,” remembers Silvera. “He allowed him to drop right out of it—20 lengths behind the leaders—then he came on when he should have, and won. That truly impressed me. He rode the horse in a manner that told me this man must have a natural feel for this business.”

But if there’s no dispute about Kabel’s talent, there’s equal agreement on this: Todd Kabel wins more races because he rides better horses. The jockeys themselves will call them “steer jobs,” horses so well bred, so fast, they say, all Kabel needs to do is point them in the right direction. It’s not true, of course, but inside the jockeys’ room, there’s palpable tension around the subject.

Large and well lit, the jockeys’ room is a bit different from the locker rooms of most pro athletes. Up on a shelf or against a wall, each jockey has a small fridge to hold his supply of Gatorade and pop. (Kabel scammed his large Coke fridge, which he shares with the promising young Barbadian rider Jono Jones, from the nearby communal kitchen.) Much of the room’s floor area is taken up by several built-in work islands featuring sinks, where valets clean the jockeys’ mud-caked tack after races, and centre racks piled with each rider’s array of small, flimsy saddles, the smallest of which is no bigger than a codpiece. Around the perimeter, the lockers—here called “boxes”—are smaller than those of most athletes, and inside them you’ll sometimes find (along with the jockey’s boots, silks and personal belongings) one or two of the jockeys themselves, curled up and sleeping on small foam pads.

Between races, at about two o’clock, Kabel is here changing his silks and talking about breezing his horses when he spies, several boxes away, Richard Dos Ramos, a veteran jockey with more than 1,300 career wins at Woodbine. He can’t resist needling him. “See that guy in the red shirt over there?” says Kabel. “He likes breezin’ my horses.”

Judging by the reaction of Dos Ramos, who’s changing his clothes, this is a big insult. “I don’t breeze shit for him,” Dos Ramos mutters. But it’s the mention of Kabel’s horses that really irks him. “Like breezin’ a couple of his horses is really tough, eh?” he scoffs. He purses his lips and makes a kissy sound, then the motion of a horse taking off like a rocket. “See how fucking good he is—let’s see him ride a couple of ours, huh?”

“I been there,” Kabel jabs back, “and moved ’em up five or six lengths. It’s not hard to do!”

Here’s the thing about Kabel’s horses: they represent achievement. Eighteen years ago, he was, in his words, “a little redneck comin’ into the big city,” and he couldn’t figure out the politics. The world of Toronto racing was faster and more demanding than he was used to, and his cockiness didn’t help. Bell, who was trying to parlay 20 years’ worth of contacts into rides for Kabel, took flak from trainers who didn’t like his jockey’s attitude, and there were a few years in the early going when Kabel couldn’t get enough rides to make a proper living. Now there are trainers who save their best horses for him, and he rides for the likes of Sam-Son Farm.

“Every jock wants to ride for the red and gold,” says Bell, referring to the Sam-Son silks. Founded by the late steel magnate Ernie Samuel and now run by his daughter, Tammy Samuel-Balaz, Sam-Son rivals Stronach as the most powerful stable at Woodbine. In 1991, its most famous horse, Dance Smartly, became the first filly to win the Canadian Triple Crown and the first Canadian-bred horse ever to win the Breeder’s Cup. Last year, eight of Kabel’s 29 stakes wins came on Sam-Son horses. Another 10 came on horses owned by either Stronach Stables or Gus Schickedanz, the other owner ranked in the top three. For a little redneck, especially one with a few black marks on his record, that’s heady company. And other jockeys, aware of Kabel’s history, wouldn’t mind bringing him back down.

“The minute he does something wrong, the word spreads,” says Bell. “And as word spreads, they always add a little bit more onto it.” Someone says he saw Kabel at a bar, and by the next morning the story is he was drunk and never made it home. “They’re all trying to put the knife in because they want to ride his horses.”
That’s why Todd Kabel’s manner turns so dramatically deferential when he’s around certain trainers, like Sam-Son’s burly Mark Frostad, why he talks of the “privilege” of riding for the best stables and why he’s trying to stay on his best behaviour. You don’t mess with the good fortune of riding for the top outfits. “Once you’re in,” says Bell, “you gotta keep your nose clean.”


Sunday, June 13
About 4 p.m.

Wes Adams, a Woodbine horseman Kabel knows from his days in Winnipeg, heads inside from the paddock, grinning. “That’s how you make $30,000 in a minute and a half!”

It didn’t rain, but it didn’t matter. Aboard Eye of the Sphynx, Kabel ran a measured race, staying behind his main threat, Silver Bird, stalking her until the final turn, then easily reeling her in down the stretch. The classic Kabel scenario. You think he’d be happy.

But after he’s interviewed in the winner’s circle, after he smiles for the cameras and says all the right things on behalf of Sam-Son Farm, Todd Kabel comes in from the paddock looking miserable. He heads straight into the clerk of scales office and tells Bobby Bertrand he wants to be excused from racing the horse he’s booked to ride in the final race of the day, Great Pyramid: “I heard he’s a real ignorant son of a bitch.”

Bertrand, who’s worked at Woodbine for 38 years and seen it all, and who will happily extol the virtues of Todd Kabel any time you ask, picks up the phone and dials the race steward. “Mr. Kabel would like to speak to you,” he says, then hands over the phone.

In the past, when Kabel lived too hard, there were times in the middle of the race day when he would “take off” the rest of his horses, not because he didn’t care but because he was physically spent. He’d had to pull too much weight in the hot box, he was cramped up with Lasix, he was done. It made him no friends.

Now Kabel stands by Bertrand’s desk, his face dark with concern. He addresses the steward as “Sir” and makes his case to be let off like a kid explaining himself to the vice-principal. “The horse is a real bad horse, and I don’t know anything about him, and they tell me”—pause—“well, I didn’t know anything about the horse. I just found out about it before this race. Constant [Montpellier, another jockey] said they can’t get near him.”

The trainer of Great Pyramid happens to be Arthur Silvera, Laurie’s son, who is not a major player at Woodbine. If it were the horse of a trainer Kabel hoped to ride for in the future, he’d be keeping his mouth shut. But the fact is, even before he found out the horse was belligerent, he never wanted to ride it. Early this morning, he complained to Bell—“Why are we on this horse? I don’t ride for this guy.” He was even advised by Mark Frostad not to take the ride, and for Kabel, what Frostad says pretty much goes: “Big man says take off that horse, I take off the son of a bitch.”

There’s another factor at play, too. The winners of big events like the Oaks are often excused from mounts in the day’s final races, to handle media demands, for instance. Bell even took the precaution of booking a backup rider for this race for that very reason. Kabel knows, in other words, that the trainer will not be inconvenienced if he chooses not to ride his horse.

On the phone, the steward tells Kabel he doesn’t have to ride the horse if he doesn’t want to. Kabel thanks him and hangs up. And pretty soon, all hell breaks loose.

Walking into the jockey’s room, stripping off his silks, Kabel gets congratulations from the other jockeys. They may be jealous of his mounts, but he commands their respect; he rides clean, he’s generous with advice for younger riders, and he’ll lend you a hundred bucks if you get behind at the slots. In his stall, he finds a set of crystal tasting flutes, engraved with the name and date of the race, a rare example of Woodbine largesse. Roman, his valet—who cleans his tack, gets his silks ready, and can expect about $1,500 from Kabel for the win—gives him a hearty hug. Then Kabel hears Bobby Bertrand call his name.

“Hey, Kabel.”

“Yes, sir!”

“They’re gonna send down a Notice of Hearing for you now.”

Despite the practice of letting a big race winner off his subsequent mounts, despite the case Kabel has made over the phone, the three stewards on duty have conferred and decided to fine him for not meeting his racing obligations.

“Well, that’s nice!” Kabel shouts from his box. “Why didn’t they say, ‘You have to ride him’?’’ He storms bare chested toward Bertrand’s office. “They fuckin’ told me I didn’t have to ride the motherfucker!”

Kabel’s had run-ins with the stewards before. Though he says things have improved since his own outlook has changed, there was a time when he felt “hammered on” by the officials. He took suspensions, he says, for fighting in the jockey’s room, and he felt he was singled out a few years ago for harsh use of the whip when a couple of his horses displayed welts after races. Kabel wasn’t alone in doing this, and he’s extra careful now, making sure to replace the vinyl tips at the end of his whips whenever they start to look frayed. But at the time, he was suspended for 30 days (“made an example of,” says Bell) and his reputation took a hit. One night, driving in Bolton shortly after the suspension, he spotted one of the stewards involved in the ruling, threw his truck into park and tried to go after him. He might have succeeded, too, had his girlfriend, Jodi Allen, not grabbed the collar of Kabel’s jacket from behind, leaving him hung by the neck out the door of his pickup.

This time, as Kabel storms around half clothed, it’s the commentator, Stacie Clark-Rogers, who saves him, locking him into an embrace as he surges by and issuing a firm order to “Relax!” He retreats to his stall, grousing as he gets ready to shower, smearing a dab of Pert into his short, dry hair. Then suddenly, he straightens up with a hand to his chest. “Take a deep breath,” he says with a smile. “That’s what therapy tells me, right?” For the next few hours, as Kabel celebrates his win upstairs in the exclusive Woodbine Club and, later, at the Sam-Son barn, surrounded by the colts and fillies and people he enjoys, he will tell everyone he meets about the bad horse and the Notice of Hearing. He’ll do it with a sense of humour, as an entertaining story. But he will look very much like a man unable to shake the feeling he has been hammered on once again.


Sunday, June 20
Father’s Day About 10 a.m.

At his box, Kabel stabs a kitchen knife into the top of a bottle of Gatorade, leaving a slit just big enough to let him get a spritz of moisture into his mouth without the temptation of guzzling the drink. Then he shoves the bottle into a bucket of ice water and reviews the results of his hearing. “They fined me $100 for not fulfilling my riding engagements,” he says, sounding chastened. “They said I let the public down; they’ve already bet races, and the public are expecting me to ride the horse, and I understand that. I mean, it’s true.”

Today, there’s another decision on his mind as well. For weeks, he has wondered whether he’d have a horse good enough to challenge for the Queen’s Plate. Last year at this time, he had two good choices—Wando and Mobile, both from the Schickedanz stable—and he famously made the wrong pick. As the main rider for both three-year-olds, Kabel thought Mobile had a better shot at running the long mile and a quarter. Wando went to his chief rival, Patrick Husbands, who once used the box next to Kabel’s and shared the services of his valet, and who, until that point, had been without a horse in the biggest race of the year. Not only did Wando win the Plate, he took the Canadian Triple Crown. Nobody can quite remember when the relationship between Husbands and Kabel got so bad that Husbands moved to the other side of the room, but it might have been around then.

So getting the right horse for the Plate means a lot to Kabel. Luckily, another Sam-Son horse, Silver Ticket, has been working out well. He’s not an ideal choice—he had a chip taken out of his ankle last fall, the recovery time restricted him to only one race this year, and he has more experience on turf than on the dirt track used in the Plate. But Kabel insists he’s confident. “I’m pretty excited,” he says. “It was lookin’ pretty iffy for me.”

The chaplain, in khakis and a golf shirt, comes by to ask about Kabel’s back; after days of increasing pain, he’s had to get two cortisone shots. “Gotta let us know, man,” says the chaplain. “We gotta pray about those things.” Then it’s off to the massage room—with Kabel rounding up stragglers—for a short sermon about the importance of fathers.

It’s probably time now you heard the story of Todd Kabel and his father’s dying wish. It’s been said this wish, and the death that followed, is what turned the rider around last year, what got him to stay disciplined enough to record 160 wins and edge past Patrick Husbands to earn his fourth Sovereign Award, not to mention the Leading Jockey Award the Toronto Thoroughbred Racing Club will give him later today.

In 2002, when he was 71, Alex Kabel came east for Christmas and spent the holidays at his son’s home in Bolton. Todd’s four children—two sons and two daughters, now aged 12 to 17—who normally live with their mother in Winnipeg, were there, along with Jodi. The senior Kabel knew cancer was moving through him, that he had only a few months left, and he took the opportunity to talk with his youngest son. He asked him to stop wasting his talent, to shape up, apply himself and become the rider he could be. “It definitely registered,” says Kabel now. There’s no doubt it was an important moment in his life, but you could argue it was the least his father could do.

Short and stocky, with big hands, Alex Kabel was a hard man. After the Korean War, he became a bulldozer operator, and he seemed to move through life with a similar blunt force. He was a drinker and a brawler who raised his four sons and daughter, says Todd, to be “tough in our hearts.” He moved his family around constantly, from their hometown of McCreary, Manitoba, to Brandon, to Winnipeg and beyond. Every year, it seemed Todd found himself in a new school, having to assimilate all over again, having to deal with the hassles of being an easy target—a small boy with no allies. And one day he got sick of it.

His father had moved his wife and kids to Sparwood, a town in British Columbia where Todd finally felt comfortable, where he had made friends he could count on. Then Alex Kabel decided to uproot his family once more and haul everyone back to Winnipeg. Todd made the trip, but he was furious. He told his father he’d been happy in B.C., that he didn’t want to live in Winnipeg. Alex Kabel had a simple solution. “He threw me on the bus and said go,” says Todd. “So I went.” He was 12.

He lived in B.C. for a couple of years, first with one older brother, then another. It wasn’t easy, but he knew how to fend for himself—he’d worked since he was about eight years old—and he says his dad sent money west. Eventually, Todd moved back to McCreary, where the family had started, and lived with his aunt. For a while, that looked like a mistake; at school, people who’d had run-ins with Todd’s father seemed to want to exact some sort of payback from his son. Todd wound up with only three credits that year and the memory of being locked in a room with a teacher who “tried to throw me around.” Away from school, he spent his time like a lot of kids headed nowhere, hanging around the rodeo when it was in town, and at the local garage, owned by the brother of a man named Emile Corbel.

Corbel, as it happened, ran a 4,000-acre farm and trained quarter horses for the western fair circuit. Because there are no secrets in a small town like McCreary, Corbel knew a bit about Kabel’s family history. He could tell just by looking that the boy—he was 14 years old and about 96 pounds—had the physical attributes of a jockey. Then he watched him play hockey and saw an athletic kid who wouldn’t back down. One day, he asked Todd Kabel if he’d like to learn how to ride.

It happens this way sometimes; an almost-lost boy is found. Emile Corbel, the first of several replacement father figures Kabel has had in his life, gave the boy a focus, a job, and eventually a home. It was Corbel who taught Kabel about commitment and respect, who visited the high school principal’s office when the boy was caught fighting, and busted his balls when he acted up at home. It was Corbel who was responsible for a lot of the memories Kabel treasures, including the slightly embarrassing ones. The time early on, for instance, when Kabel could barely ride and his horse started to gallop across a field just as his saddle began to slip, and Corbel eventually found him lodged in a stand of willow trees, upside down, dangling from the animal’s neck. Or his very first race, when one of Corbel’s jockeys broke his leg just before a quarter horse event, and Corbel had no one else available to ride. Out of desperation, he told Kabel, “I need you,” and stuck the teen, untrained, into a big pair of cowboy boots and a sweatsuit, and sat him on the saddle at the gate. He instructed Kabel to wrap his fingers in the horse’s mane and hang on, and when the other horses broke from the gate toward the finish line, Kabel’s hung a right, into the bushes.

Corbel taught him everything. He’d get a picture of the young rider on a speeding horse and lay a ruler over it up and down, in line with the girth. “You only got your bum showing behind the ruler,” he’d tell him. “You’re too far forward. You gotta bring your stirrups up and come back.” He taught him to keep a horse from taking too much of the bit, got him to sense the message coming from the horse’s teeth, through the reins: “Try and feel that through your fingers,” he’d say, “just like a telegraph.” The second race Kabel entered, a year after the disastrous first, he won.

And it was Emile Corbel who got Kabel hooked up with the people who would help make him a name in western racing—men like Shorty Grey, who trained for a big outfit, some 40 thoroughbreds, at Winnipeg’s Assiniboia Downs. It was Grey—“bless his soul”—who put Kabel onto the good horses that led to his first Sovereign Award as an apprentice in 1986, but it was Corbel who made it possible, by doing his best to teach Kabel how to treat people, how to act like a professional around the trainers, to say “Good morning, sir. Do you have anything for me?” And then to thank them when he got off their horse.

A few days ago, the town of McCreary inducted Kabel into its unofficial hall of fame and, in the speech he sent out to be read at the ceremony, he spoke of all the fond memories from his time there. In the same spirit, he says now that his dad was a great man, and that Alex Kabel’s hard ways made his son a better person. If it’s true that after Emile Corbel was done teaching him he lost his direction—hung a right, as it were, and acted out his pent-up aggressions—he insists it’s not his father’s fault. Today, he says, the biggest hurt in his life is that his divorce makes it hard for him to spend time with his own kids. “Society needs good fathers, needs good dads,” the chaplain tells the small congregation gathered around the massage tables. And Todd Kabel stares down at the floor with his arms crossed, because he knows it to be true.


Sunday, June 27
The day of the Queen’s Plate. About 4 p.m.

If you want to know what happens to jockeys when they stop riding, you find out at Woodbine’s Champions bar. There’s Robin Platts, a good friend of Kabel’s, who was The Man for a few years, in the ’60s and ’70s, who tied the record with four Queen’s Plates and continued to ride until just four years ago, when a bad shoulder got him. He still has a big smile, though, and a fine head of hair, but there’s a misty air of sadness about him. Over here is Mickey Walls, once predicted to become the next great jockey after Sandy Hawley, who had a couple of very good years when he was a teenager in the early ’90s, until he grew too big and nearly did himself in pulling weight, turning the hot box up higher than anyone could stand, popping up to five or six Lasix pills a day, and then taking the liquid they give the horses when the pills stopped working. Now he’s “160 pounds and enjoying life.” There’s Neil Poznansky, a former client of John Bell’s—until he couldn’t get enough rides at Woodbine and slipped down a peg to Fort Erie. He’s sporting a bruised face from a brawl at a fundraising event last week that got way out of hand.

And there’s John Bell himself, the smallest and most dignified man among them, wearing a dark suit in honour of Plate day, and drinking a series of Coors Lights to calm his nerves.

Bell doesn’t know it yet, but there’s a picture of him in the souvenir program they handed out under the front awning. It shows him in 1969, aboard Almoner, a horse that went on to win the Plate the next year. The tragedy is that Bell, who’d been Almoner’s main jockey when the horse was a two-year-old, wasn’t on him when he won. In the interim, the owners had sold the horse to a new stable, which wanted to use Sandy Hawley, then in the midst of his breakthrough year. “I tried to get on him, but I never got a shot,” says Bell when he’s shown the picture. “That’s the closest I came to riding a Queen’s Plate winner.”

Todd Kabel has his own experience with being bumped off a Plate ride, although it worked out a lot better for him. In 1995, before he’d ever won the race, he was set up to ride a terrific Stronach horse named Freedom Fleet. But with barely a week to go before the event, the Stronach stable decided to fly in an American jockey. Kabel, in the middle of his third Sovereign-winning campaign, was left without a Plate ride and crushed. Then the jockey for Regal Discovery, trained by Roger Attfield, got injured, and Attfield, whose horses had won the Plate six times, picked Kabel to replace him. During the race, coming down the stretch, Freedom Fleet was far in front and looked to have it won. But then Regal Discovery, urged on by Kabel, flew up the inside, seemingly from nowhere, and beat him by a head. The sweet moment of vindication, his whip hand raised, lives on in a painting that hangs in his home. His other Plate win, five years later, came aboard Scatter the Gold, a horse that had never before won a race.

A half-hour before the $1-million Queen’s Plate, Kabel’s Silver Ticket, which started the day as a 10-1 bet, is named the official “dark horse” by the Woodbine commentators, given a chance largely because it’s Kabel who’s riding him. The favourite among the 13 horses is A Bit O’Gold, who will be positioned on Kabel’s right, ridden by the thin, young Jono Jones. Patrick Husbands, a Barbadian who likes to be called “the brown Triple Crown,” sits on the other side of Kabel aboard a Eugene Melnyk horse, Kent Ridge, a 20-1 long-shot. Stewart Elliott has been flown in to ride the other Melnyk horse, Long Pond, which sits against the rail.

Inaugurated in 1860, the Queen’s Plate is the oldest continuously run race in North America, although these days its air of monarchist celebration seems a touch forced. On the grounds near the paddock, portable kiosks sell cheap imitations of the sort of wide-brimmed sun hats fashionable women wear to Ascot. In the Woodbine lobby, a pair of red-coated Mounties guard the Plate trophies, and at 21 minutes before post time, the bagpipers are out marching on the harness track. The crowd may not be as finely dressed as the traditionalists would like, but it’s thicker than on any other day of the year, and somewhere in the midst of it sits the lieutenant- governor. Doing his bit to meet the call of tradition, John Bell downs another nervous beer.

At 16 minutes to post, Bell looks at his race program. He taps the name of Niigon, at 7-2 odds, with the veteran jockey Robert Landry aboard. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he jumped up and won it.”

Ten minutes to post, and as a cool breeze lifts the rims of the ladies’ hats in the stands, the horses are paraded in their colours on the way to the gate. While a choir sings “The Maple Leaf Forever,” Kabel goes by in the Sam-Son red and gold.

On the way to the gate, with a minute to go, Kabel has to fight to keep Silver Ticket under control. “He’s pretty headstrong,” Bell had said two days before. “Getting him to relax could be a problem.” It’s proving to be true.

Sunday, June 27
Post Time 5:09 p.m.

In any race of more than a mile at Woodbine, the horses have to cross the finish line twice. And when they charge from the gate, Bell watches Kabel, on Silver Ticket, take the lead in front of the cheering stands. “Well,” he says, leaning forward, “I know he’s gonna be in front the first time. I know that.”

Part of the strategy worked out between Kabel and Mark Frostad this morning calls for Kabel to let Silver Ticket, one of the few horses in the race with natural speed, take the lead early on but try to restrain him to keep the pace slow. Natural speed can find itself easily spent, and a first half-mile run in 46 seconds, Frostad has said, would be big trouble. Kabel himself expects a first half of “47 and change.” And sure enough, when the first half is completed, with Kabel and the clock in his head controlling the pace, the time reads 47 and four-fifths.

But something’s wrong. Despite the encouraging workouts he’d had on the dirt, Silver Ticket isn’t used to racing in the stuff, and Kabel can feel he isn’t comfortable. His ears are pinned back unhappily, and he’s not taking the bridle the way Kabel wants. It’s just a matter of time, the jockey’s thinking, before he starts being passed. In the stands, as the horses head into the final turn and Silver Ticket still looks in contention, Bell says, “We’re in trouble.”

First Niigon edges past, then A Bit O’Gold, and then, down the stretch, several more. At the wire, the winner is the horse Bell tapped, Niigon, by almost a length. Kabel’s Silver Ticket fades to eighth, well out of the money.

“It’s a letdown when you don’t hit the board,” sighs Bell. “It really is.” Bell had booked Robert Landry to take Kabel’s rides in the final two races, in the event that Silver Ticket won. Now it’s Landry’s horse being draped in the blanket of purple and gold flowers, and Kabel has more work to do. Bell looks down at his program ruefully. “He’s gotta ride the card out now.”

But there are old saws to provide comfort at times like these, and that, they say, is horse racing. Later, at the Sam-Son stables, the mood will be surprisingly bright. A few hours before the Plate, in the fourth race of the day, Kabel managed a win for Sam-Son. And because it was in the Scotts Highlander Stakes, with $200,000 added to the purse, it ensured a nice payday no matter what the Plate outcome. This is why Mark Frostad’s wife, Pat, will extend a hand to a very quiet John Bell and tell him, “It’s a great day,” and why Kabel himself will show up, in his broad cowboy hat and a glistening shirt, looking like a man with 2,800 career wins, $76 million in purse earnings and a whole lot to be thankful for.

Of course, you can’t measure a man’s accomplishments simply by the races he wins and statistics he records, and in many ways Todd Kabel is like the horse he calls his favourite. It’s a small horse, named Strut the Stage, over in the Sam-Son barn. He puffs up like a bullfrog when he’s excited, he has a big engine for a heart, and he wins because his stride can cover astonishing ground. If you could measure a man’s strides the same way, show how far he’s come, maybe you’d get a better picture of Kabel’s success. If you could gauge, say, the distance from drinking away the evening in a bar to going home to a barbecue with friends, the leap from heading toward trouble as a kid in a small town to ending up in the town’s hall of fame, or maybe just the span stretching between fury and self-control, you’d have an idea of what a man has achieved.

Tonight, at his home in Bolton, north of the city, Kabel, if he wanted to, could measure his strides by the pictures on his walls—the photos of the horses he rode to Queen’s Plate and stakes wins, the picture of him and his dad that Christmas, and the distance from these captured moments back to the image of a brash young jockey taken at the height of his angriest years, that hangs, not quite forgotten, in the basement.