For Reylu Gutierrez, Books Taking Backseat to Horses

Reylu Gutierrez came to Aqueduct Racetrack with a deadline. He would race through this winter's New York Racing Association meets, and if he did not earn enough by May, the 23-year-old would make a life decision familiar to many his age but atypical for a Thoroughbred jockey. He would go to graduate school.

College graduate Gutierrez has an offer to study Health and Human Performance at Canisius College in Buffalo, N.Y. He applied last spring and deferred a year. By May, he must give a final answer. 

At 5-foot-1, with circular shoulders and a quick smile, Gutierrez has emerged as one of the top young riders on the East Coast. Since graduating SUNY Cortland in May 2017, he has won 139 races and purses of nearly $5 million. In 2018 he earned a pair of stakes wins and was a finalist for an Eclipse Award as outstanding apprentice jockey.

His personal earnings have allowed him to pay off $40,000 in undergraduate debt.

"I never expected I'd do this well," he said. "I don't want to be reading books right now."

Still, Gutierrez's post-graduate school options—physical trainer, nutritionist, physical education teacher—afford steady paychecks and a life free from city-hopping, strenuous training sessions, injury risk, and monitored calorie-intakes. In his 18 months as a jockey, he has lived in three states. When he goes out with friends in New York City, he can rarely eat or drink with them. But as a child, Gutierrez daydreamed of racing at the Triple Crown venues.  

He was raised in a working-class Panamanian-American family, 30 miles outside Rochester, N.Y. His father, Luis, was a trainer at Finger Lakes Racetrack. His uncle, Jose, raced at Finger Lakes for 21 years, retiring in 2007. Gutierrez could see the racetrack through his living room window.        

"Bro, they put me on a horse as a baby," he recalled.  

Gutierrez rode for fun through high school and briefly considered racing after graduation. But his mother Rosy, a registered nurse and the older generation's only college graduate, wanted her son to have career options. Money, unlike horses, was not always available growing up.  

"We knew what it was like to be struggling, and when I start a family, I never want them to feel the way I felt," Gutierrez said. He chose SUNY Cortland over racing, much to his mother's delight. "She doesn't really like horses anyway." 

Four years later, after staring down a graduate school financial aid form, the notion of riding professionally re-emerged.

"I told my dad I wanted to be a jockey," Gutierrez recalled. "We started boot camp the next day."

For the next eight months, as his college friends applied for office jobs, Gutierrez awoke at 5 a.m. for two-mile jogs in a sauna suit. Under his father's watch, Gutierrez dropped 16 pounds, from 124 to 108.

"I basically had no friends for eight months," Gutierrez said.

He would debut at Finger Lakes in October 2017. He won his first race within a month, on one of his father's horses.  

"He could see I was pretty good at it," Gutierrez said of his father. "He would ask if this is what I really wanted, and I was like, 'Dad, you obviously really want me to do this too.'"

Last summer, he raced at Gulfstream Park, spent a month competing in the Mid-Atlantic, before returning to New York State in November. Arriving at Aqueduct to compete on the NYRA circuit was meaningful to Gutierrez.

"This is considered the best colony in the sport," Gutierrez said. "My first race here was with all these hall-of-famers. Going into the gate I was like, 'Dude just don't mess up.'"

Gutierrez's athleticism allowed him to play a year of college lacrosse. His college education sets him apart from many riders and may be helping him with horsemen. 

"I think with the degree, he knows how to present himself," said Kevin Bond, assistant trainer and son of trainer James Bond. "He is very diplomatic. It puts everyone at ease."

Gutierrez speaks with stress-free intonations, dense in casual lingo best suited for a Cortland frat house. At work, however, he projects a formal tenor.

"Jockeys are usually all laid back as people," he said. "But as riders, we take this very seriously."

He affirms trainers' instructions and offers his own post-race assessments. He expresses with his arms and pinpoints moments when the race was won or lost.

"He is very analytical, and it makes an impression," Bond said. "You can see from the type of trainers who are starting to use him."

Gutierrez has been up to the challenge at Aqueduct. Overall this year through March 11 he has 29 wins from 217 starts for earnings of nearly $1.5 million. He ranks fifth in wins at the current Aqueduct meet that started Dec. 7 with 42 winner's circle trips.

On March 9 Gutierrez secured the first graded stakes win aboard Three Diamond Farm's Do Share, rallying past three horses in the Aqueduct stretch to post a 6 1/2-length win in the $200,000 Tom Fool Handicap (G3).

"It was a great trip, talk about a great horse. He just took me to the wire," Gutierrez said. "Any rider probably could have won on him today."

Trainer Mike Maker named Gutierrez to ride Do Share. In April 2018, Gutierrez picked up his first stakes win aboard Maker-trained Susie Bee.

"He gave me an opportunity to ride in Oklahoma for him and here," Gutierrez said. "My first open stakes for him was down in Gulfstream and now my first graded stakes win is for him here in New York, so I have to get a great Christmas present for Mr. Maker and his team."

In taking up the sport of his father and following his mother's advice to complete college, Gutierrez has options should he not continue with racing, but at the current meet alone his pay has reached six figures. It's nice money for a 23-year-old but he knows the sport's hurdles are about to get higher.

In April, top riders will soon be returning to New York from South Florida. On March 10, Gutierrez lost his five-pound apprenticeship status.

Gutierrez intends to weather the transition and scrap out enough mounts to compete at Belmont Park in the spring and Saratoga Race Course in the summer. If that first plan doesn't work out, he's prepared to move to another circuit, if need be.

"It's going to hit me like a bat," Gutierrez said of the new challenges. "But I'm kind of excited for it. One day I'm top apprentice, then I'm going to be starting from the bottom again."

And a return to school to get a master's degree? It was an option Gutierrez was seriously considering as recently as November. Now he reacts to the words grad school like they are a second cousin he vaguely knows.

"Yeah, no, I don't really think about it right now," he said. "The way things are going, there's no way I can stop riding."