DEL MAR — In the Moet & Chandon champagne room at Del Mar racetrack on Saturday, family and friends of trainer Richard Mandella cradled glasses for a toast.
Retired jockey Laffit Pincay Jr., the namesake of the trophy Mandella had just been awarded for those who served the sport “with integrity, extraordinary dedication, determination and distinction,” spoke up.
“Thanks for all those winners,” Pincay said.
Few in the sport, from coast to coast, are blanketed in the type of respect Mandella receives. In a sport where the public-relations bumps can outnumber the applause, he is the near-unanimous exception.
The snappy dresser, decked out in a checkered jacket, dress pants and shoes, has spent tens of thousands more hours in the dirt and dust of barns.
He’s perceived as the do-it-right guy. That’s how you win awards like the champagne-bound one he lugged.
“What do I do with this?” Mandella, the self-deprecating track legend, said.
“It’s yours, so keep it,” a Del Mar staffer shot back.
The parade of symmetry was too delicious to ignore. Mandella saddled one horse Saturday, in the third race. The award ceremony was held before the fourth.
Pincay, the man who handed it to him, rode Mandella horse Irish Nip in 1999 at now-shuttered Hollywood Park to break the riding record of icon Bill Shoemaker — a neat and tidy quarter of a century ago.
“We had it all planned,” Mandella riffed. “The game has been good to me. As a teenager, Laffit was my hero.”
The winning appetizer came in the third race of the day, with star jockey Mike Smith aboard Joyrider. It was the 2,311th win in a career that began in 1974.
He won that debut, too, with a horse named La Mesa as Shoemaker got to the line first at Hollywood Park.
“All class, man,” Smith said as the dust from the winning ride cleared and the award ceremony slipped into the spotlight. “Just a brilliant horseman, but a great person as well.”
Mandella, 73, had given so much to the sport for so long.
While many suffer the slings and arrows of criticism and perceived doubt, he is the example of the right and righteous path. The son of a blacksmith, he was hooked before he knew it.
“He’s been good for racing in every way,” Pincay said. “Winning (the race before), that was perfect.”
Mandella’s son caught the bug and became a trainer, too.
“There’s a bit of full circle to all of this,” Gary Mandella said. “It’s not the kind of thing you can find one word and sum the whole thing up. The thing that’s most remarkable is how instinctual everything he does is.
“What he sees. What he feels. What information he gets from horses that’s non-verbal. He’s able to do that more than any other horseman I’ve ever known.”
The commitment is almost incalculable.
“Let the horses get into your blood and good luck getting a real job,” Gary said. “It’s every single day. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Christmas, your birthday. It doesn’t matter if your dog’s sick. Horses always need you. They always need something. You’re on call at any hour of the day.
“You can’t do this just for the love of competition. It’s too much work. It’s too many hours.”
The elder Mandella sipped and reminisced.
He had the most monster day in the history of the money-soaked Breeders’ Cup in 2003 with Action This Day in the Juvenile, Halfbridled in the Juvenile Fillies, Johar in the Turf and Pleasantly Perfect in the Classic.
“You couldn’t make something like that up,” he said. “I had a barn full of horses doing good. But to come together like that, it’s hard to imagine.
“When I’m having a bad day, I try to lean back and that.”
Mandella trained super horse Beholder, a $6.1 million-plus winner and three-time Breeders’ Cup winner. And his jaw dropped when Dare and Go beat mega-horse Cigar in the Pacific Classic, stopping its 16-race win streak.
At 40-1.
“When the TV was on me, you can read my lips,” Mandella said. “I said, ‘Son of a (expletive).’ I had no idea I was on TV.”
It’s rare for the sport to deliver such bankable joy.
Mandella entered the 2019 Kentucky Derby with morning-line favorite Omaha Beach before the horse was scratched for something called an entrapped epiglottis.
“In this sport, you need to be ready for the bumps,” he said. “I had a really strong connection to that horse.”
On this day, though, the champagne flowed.
“If I had to get a real job, I probably wouldn’t have made a living,” Mandella said. “Because I can’t do anything else.”
This thing?
Mandella has that all figured out.
