Lifestyle Change In The Making For Jockey Gary Stevens And His Girlfriend, A Victim Of Horse-Racing Tragedy, The Bonds Grow

Silver Charm is trying to become the 12th Triple Crown winner in history, and that would mean a $5 million bonus for his owners, who don’t need the money. The horse’s share will be an extra carrot in his feed bucket.

The biggest winner here could be the jockey, Gary Stevens, who cut his racing teeth in the Northwest, who stands 5-foot-3 and weighs 113 pounds, and whose next mile-and-a-half on Silver Charm’s back might move him into a star category that rarely finds room for athletes his size. There hasn’t been a famous jockey in years. They may know your name at the racetrack - and tell you where you should go if you lose on the favorite - but that doesn’t mean you’re famous.

A first-place finish in Saturday’s Belmont for the horse and Stevens, who was born in Caldwell, Idaho, and raised in Boise, may change that.

Stevens has a talent agency working for him. He’s handsome. He has no trouble speaking in complete sentences. He plays the drums. No telling what the next mile-and-a-half will mean for him.

“When he doesn’t win a big race, he gets real quiet and a little down,” says Charlene Pineda, the jockey’s girlfriend.

We were sitting on a bench in the Belmont paddock Saturday. She was remembering the 1995 Breeders’ Cup, when he lost on two favorites. When a potentially huge day became an afternoon of frustration. She told him then, “You know what, honey, you did have a good day. You’re here. You’re with me. You walked away. You’re smiling. You’re healthy.” She raps her knuckles against the bench in the Belmont paddock.

Pineda knows, better than almost anyone, about jockeys who don’t walk away. Her father was Alvaro Pineda, a leading West Coast rider. On Jan. 18, 1975, Pineda was sitting on a horse named Austin Miller in the Santa Anita starting gate. The horse reared and the jockey’s head was crushed against the top of the gate. He died that day in Arcadia Memorial, the hospital across the street. He was 29.

Forty months later, the jockey’s bother, Robert, fell from his horse at Pimlico and was kicked in the head by the horse behind him. He was dead an hour later. Robert Pineda was 25.

“I know about the good and the bad of this sport,” Pineda said. “It’s a scary sport, a scary life. When my dad died, a part of my mother died, too. She didn’t want my brother and I around the races. She wanted a different life for us, away from the track. She dedicated her life to bringing us up. She taught me how to be a lady. To go after my dreams. To be a fighter.”

Her father’s scrapbooks and pictures - “so many pictures,” she said - are still in the house. The silks, the whips, the goggles, were put in storage.

His best years were the late 1960s, and then winning stopped being important. “He was drinking, womanizing,” his daughter said. “They’re athletes, there’s a lot of girls around, they do those things. He hit rock bottom and he and my mother separated.”

A year before he died, Pineda was given the George Woolf Memorial Award, an honor given to the rider who has brought the most credit to his profession. Only the jockeys vote. He was winning again, “and really pulled himself together,” she said. “He was with my mother and they were totally happy. He was on fire.” She was born in the happy time, named Charlene, named for her father. When he came to this country from Mexico, people had trouble with Alvaro, so they called him Charley. “To my friends, to my mom, to Gary, I’m Charley,” she said.

Her mother didn’t want her around the track, but they live 5 minutes from Del Mar, hard for her to stay away.

“I know a lot of the jockeys and trainers,” she said. “I’ve known Gary for years. But I didn’t follow racing. It didn’t interest me. I didn’t fall in love with Gary because he’s a jockey. If he wanted to do something else - go to law school, play the drums, whatever - that would be great.”

He’s 34, 11 years older than Pineda.

“When I was 13, I fell in love with his blue eyes,” she said. “It was a little crush.” Two summers ago, when Southern California racing moved to Del Mar, “we saw each other in a restaurant and it was, ‘Wait a minute, that little girl’s grown up.”’ She was living in New York, studying theater at Fordham. His marriage had just ended, and they began dating. An hour after he won the Derby on Silver Charm, he raced to a plane and was in New York for her graduation.

She intends to stay in New York, an apartment on the Upper West Side. “I have to get an agent,” she said. “I have to pursue my dreams.”

She thinks the jockey will spend the summer in Saratoga, and may split his year between New York and Los Angeles. She isn’t making any plans for them beyond that. “He’s just getting out of a marriage - well, not just - but why put pressure on him,” she said.

A day after winning the Preakness, they took a vacation in Mexico. They fished.

Stevens, she said, caught a yellow-fin tuna. She put her hands just far enough apart to hold a small box. “I caught a mahi-mahi,” she said, laughing, and moved a hand just below her chin. That big. “Oh, God,” she told herself, “please let him catch another fish.”

Stevens, still winning, hooked an 8-foot marlin.

“We’re lucky,” said Charley Pineda. “We catch a lot of fish.”