Roger Franklin: Jockey rode into pages of history

George W. Bush scored all the attention in America this week but in the great cosmic scheme of things, the simple act of putting the First Hand on the Bible and swearing to lead the country for another four years probably didn't warrant such a fuss.

The Inauguration was a formality, after all, and bigger things were happening - the confirmation hearings for Condi Rice as Secretary of State, for example. As Jesse Jackson continued to tramp about Ohio and insist that November's election was "stolen" in that key state by white racist God-botherers, the ascension of a black woman to one of the world's most powerful jobs put paid to the rhetoric of the modern civil rights movement's paint-by-numbers victimology.

Confederate flags may still grace the domes of Southern legislatures, but how bad can bigotry remain in a country where someone from the back of history's bus now sits by the president's side?

But Rice's ascension, milestone that it is, still wasn't the week's most significant or satisfying event.

The most momentous occasion didn't even take place in Washington and went largely unmarked even as it happened - although the key issue still revolved around America's "original sin", as Thomas Jefferson described the Founding Fathers' prickly compromise to rate a white life precisely one-third more valuable than a black one.

For that event, you had to turn some 200 miles to the north - to the winner's circle at down-at-heel Aqueduct race track in New York, of all places, where late on Monday afternoon a three-year-old gelding from Maryland called Maddy's Lion romped home a six-length winner in the $75,000 inaugural running of the Jimmy Winkfield Stakes.

It was worse than frigid, -6C, as the owners accepted the trophy, so cold that fewer than 1000 diehard punters had turned out to brave the arctic wind and witness history being set right, sort of.

That it happened on Monday, the national holiday to celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday, was no accident.

The son of freed slaves-turned-sharecroppers, Winkfield was the last black rider to win a Kentucky Derby. He took the Run for the Roses twice, in fact, his final victory coming 100 years ago. And then, like so many other black notables, the racism of American life squeezed him from both the sport and, until that afternoon, from official memory, too.

Martin Luther King, arguably the greatest and most noble American, preached that discrimination robbed his country of its dignity. In Winkfield's case, it also stole the record and laurels of a remarkable life.

In allowing that to happen, white America cheated itself big-time, because if ever there has been a story to awe, inspire and amaze, it is that of the dapper, 48kg "maestro of the home stretch".

From the walls of Aqueduct's clubhouse, sepia photos of racing's long-ago white aristocracy looked down on the presentation. What the plutocrat Vanderbilts and Whitneys would have made of the belated honour accorded Winkfield can never be known, although chances are they wouldn't have been pleased. Those grand poobahs of the sport didn't lift a finger when the horse game was being bleached to the uniform lily-white that it pretty much remains today.

Hard though it is to believe, no black rider has taken a Derby mount to the starting gate since 1921. As apologists for the racist past like to point out, times were different a century ago.

The wowsers who would soon foist Prohibition on America were limbering up for the coming crusade against demon rum by restricting opportunities to gamble.

In the South and Midwest, the hymn-singers and bar-wreckers shuttered racetracks and banned bookmaking, forcing jockeys to head north and compete for a vastly reduced number of rides and purses.

Blacks like Winkfield never had a chance. On the track, the only mounts they could get were fit for the gluepot, and beatings and mob assaults by white jockeys drove them from the changing rooms.

So Winkfield left for Russia, where he became the top rider in the Czar's stable and, by the time of the Revolution, a favourite trainer.

When the Revolution came, he mounted a midnight raid on the Imperial stable and led a mob of 200 horses and as many refugee Russian nobles on a snowy trek to Warsaw, staying just one jump ahead of a Bolshevik posse that regarded thoroughbred horse flesh as protein for the masses.

Later, in France, Winkfield's black skin forced him to flee yet again, this time from the Nazis, whose racism made the hatred he encountered on returning to his native land seem almost enlightened by comparison. He survived being shot by a jealous white lover; won, and trained winners of, some of Europe's biggest races; bedded a dance card of Old World debutantes, and died in Paris in 1974.

But none of that impresses racing writer Edward Hotaling as much as the man himself.

"Probably more important than his brains and his talent was his self-esteem," says Hotaling, who recently restored the black jockey to the historical record with a long-overdue biography. "You could take his money and take his fame and take his house and take his horses, but you could never take his self-respect. It's hard to imagine anyone could have lived this life."

It may be easier to imagine soon, as Steven Spielberg is said to be mulling a biopic. Great as Condi Rice's achievements may be, her story can't hold a candle to that of a small man with a champion's heart.