Pandemic allowed young Keith Asmussen to fulfill Keeneland dream. ‘It’s unbelievable.’
The result was not what he wanted, a 10th-place finish in a 12-horse maiden race on Thursday afternoon, but that did nothing to take away from the experience.
“To be riding at Keeneland,” said Keith J. Asmussen, “is nothing short of amazing to me.”
Asmussen? Where have we heard that name before? Well, there’s Cash Asmussen, the retired jockey who rode over 3,000 winners in his long and illustrious career. And there’s Steve Asmussen, who just this summer became Churchill Downs’ all-time leading trainer and who just happens to be Keith’s dad.
“The best horseman I know,” said Keith on Thursday.
And it was for his dad that the young Asmussen rode this week, finishing 10th aboard Super Stock in that aforementioned maiden race on Thursday before finishing eighth on Vasariano in a maiden claiming race on Friday at Keeneland, just the eighth start of the young jockey’s career.
“We had been working down at Lone Star, but then they suspended racing there, so we came up here,” said Keith Asmussen. “It’s very cool to check our boxes.”
A 22-year-old based in Arlington, Keith Asmussen is actually a full-time accounting student at the University of Texas. But when coronavirus hit and the school went to remote classes, Asmussen followed up on the dream of riding for his father.
“This experience is definitely the product of a unique situation,” he said Thursday. “When I was in high school I would gallop for him before school and I’d work all summers. But when I went to college, I go to college in Austin, there are no racetracks there, so it was put on hold. I would still work for him in the summer, but it’s very brief. It’s hard to get fit enough (to ride) at that level.”
Coronavirus changed that. Asmussen left Austin and headed to Hot Springs, Arkansas, to work for his dad at Oaklawn Park.
“The horses were calling,” he said. “I was able to take classes online while working. I’ve been galloping horses since March and it allowed me to get to this level of fitness to make this possible.”
He made his riding debut June 15 at Lone Star, finishing second in an allowance race on a horse named Señor Jobin. A week later, he finished second in a maiden race on a horse named Comic. Six races later, he’s still looking for his first win, but it’s the experience that counts.
What does the younger Asmussen like about riding?
“Oh, gosh, I could list a million things,” he said. “Probably the two greatest would be true competition and adrenaline.”
He says he wasn’t forced into riding, in fact far from it. But when your grandfather Keith was a longtime jockey, your father is Steve Asmussen and your uncle is Cash Asmussen, well, why pass up the chance.
“To be able to absorb everything that I can off of (my dad) in addition to working some of the best horses in the country, I think it’s an opportunity unparalleled,” said Keith, who said of Cash, “I joke about it sometimes, but you tell him two words and he’ll know exactly what you’re talking about, what you’re feeling and what you need to work on.”
After Friday’s race, Asmussen returned to the reopened Lone Star where he will ride until the meet closes Aug. 11 before “most likely” going to Saratoga.
“I will be returning to school in the fall, per a promise I made to my father to ride in the first place,” he said.
That you would stay in school?
“That I’d finish,” said Asmussen, who just completed his third year at Texas.
What he was thrilled about this week was merely riding at Keeneland, a place he had not visited since the Breeders’ Cup in 2015.
“It’s a cliche to say pinch me, I must be dreaming, but it’s unbelievable,” he said. “Getting the opportunity to ride here is a dream come true. Getting to ride with the best jocks in the country, I’m dumbfounded. I can’t explain it with anything other than it’s nothing less than amazing.”
