Much has been written about 25-year-old Garcia and the highly unusual choice by Baffert to use him while replacing two-time Eclipse Award winner Garrett Gomez on Lookin At Lucky, the champion 2-year-old of 2009 and an early Derby favorite. Gomez is a veteran, a consummate pro. Garcia has been riding races for only five years. But the colt has been anything but lucky in his past three starts, as ESPN.com's Pat Forde writes in his latest column. It was time to make a change.
So Garcia, who has ridden at just five tracks outside California, flew into Baltimore from the West Coast on Friday evening. He got Indian takeout and helped babysit Bode, Baffert's 5-year-old son. This morning, dressed to the nines, the Mexico native took in the sights and sounds of Pimlico for the first time. And he thought about how lucky he is, and how he hopes his new mount's luck will change Saturday.
"I was wishing, someday, I can be able to ride that horse," he said. "But I don't know. I said 'I'm not going to say I'm going to ride him until I see my name.' I'm excited because that horse is a really nice horse and to ride one of those horses, you've gotta be excited. And I've been working that horse in the mornings. He worked really good for me, really comfortable. I know it is not the same to work a horse and to ride a horse. It is different. But hey, maybe it's gonna work."
Little fanfare met Garcia when the car pulled into the stable area just moments later, but the hype would build in the hours leading up to the race. There would be questions about his ability, and his lack of familiarity with the track, and the odds of him keeping his cool as the pressures of riding a Triple Crown contender began to rise. It would not bother him, Garcia said. Not at all.
"I just do my job," he remarked. "Yeah, because people always say bad things, good things, and then it doesn't matter. I've just gotta do a good job."
Standing outside the stakes barn on Saturday morning, Baffert expounded upon that characteristic in the young rider and backed up the reason they've teamed together to win the Lone Star Derby, the Santa Anita Handicap, the Texas Mile, the Santa Monica Handicap, Harry Henson Stakes, the Joe Hernandez Stakes, the Southwest Stakes -- all in the first five months of this year.
"I like Martin because he doesn't think; he just does it, reacts, rides," Baffert said. "It's more like he just goes, 'Don't worry about it.' That's what he does. He breaks, he gets them out of there and then all of a sudden you wind up in the winner's circle."
In Saturday's sixth race at Pimlico, Garcia will get a leg up on a colt who could have been a Kentucky Derby contender. His name is Quiet Invader, and his main purpose is to win the Chick Lang Stakes, six furlongs sprinting -- not to give his young rider a chance to test-drive the narrow oval.
"He doesn't need that," Baffert said. "Martin, he gets around there, he rides the horse, not the track. I brought him over here to win a race with the [horse]."
The young jockey put it a bit more diplomatically: "That will be very good, I can ride one race before just to know that track. But if I didn't, that isn't a big deal, because I've been riding in different kinds of tracks."
He thought back to his days of riding the bullrings, low-level tracks where a rider's boots could scrape the paint off the rail around the tightest turns you've ever seen. Then he flashed an ear-to-ear grin.
"I've been riding in Pomona, and that is a lot worse," he said.
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