Meet the Women Jockeys of Woodbine Racetrack

Miss Giacomo prefers Scotch mints. The bay mare is nosing around Skye Chernetz, looking for a treat, as the jockey preps her for a gallop around Woodbine Racetrack in Toronto on a soft morning at the start of April.

It's not, by a long shot, the oddest name you'll hear at the track. Chernetz once rode No Soup For You to victory and the track has also hosted Coltimus Prime, a thoroughbred with its own Twitter account.

Though the racing season starts in less than a week, the stalls are half empty. There are about 1,300 horses in the 45 long and low barns on the backstretch, the employees-only area south of the main racing track. Come the busy summer season and the Queen's Plate in July, it'll house more than 2,000 thoroughbreds.

Woodbine Racetrack operates like a small town on 650 acres of land on the northwestern periphery of the city, an almost-rural anomaly where pickup trucks piled high with straw bales make their way through a grid of muddy streets named for big winners that have raced the track—Secretariat Drive and Awesome Again Avenue.

Chernetz, 21, who has raced at Woodbine since getting her jockey's licence at 18 years old, usually works about three horses a day during this quieter part of the season, galloping them at speeds that mimic the pace of races.

"How do people react when I tell them I'm a jockey? Most people don't even know what it is. They'll be like, a DJ? Like a disc jockey? It takes a little while to click," Chernetz says.

And people outside the horse world are especially surprised to hear of a woman riding.

"Now there are a lot of females everywhere you go, doing everything: training, exercise riding and racing," she said. "Women are really covering all aspects of the sport."

Over the past few decades, the so-called sport of kings—lionized by the likes of Charles Bukowski and long associated with cigar smoke and good ol' boys betting on the ponies—has had to make way for more women. Many of the new riders and rising stars at Woodbine are female jockeys.

In 2014, four of the six apprentice riders at the track were women, as were six of the nine apprentices in 2013. It's a big jump from 2011, when it was just four out of the 13.

The past decade has seen Emma-Jayne Wilson and Chantal Sutherland figure among the top riders in Canada.

In 2013, her last year as an apprentice rider, Chernetz won 54 races, which added up to about $2.2 million in purse earnings (winnings are split between owners, trainers, jockeys, and agents). Her successful season was recognized at the Canada-wide Sovereign Awards when she was singled out as the top apprentice rider in the country.

The favourite to win the outstanding apprentice award for the past season is Sheena Ryan, another Woodbine rider. When her shoe-in status for the award is brought up, it's the only time Ryan's sharp blue eyes break eye contact. She shrugs off the suggestion.

Ryan grew up racing horses in the back field of her parents' property outside of Coburg, Ontario. But after high school, she sold her horse and enrolled in accounting classes at Durham College. After a year and half of working as a junior accountant, itching under the routine of office work and always chatting to her co-workers about horses, she decided to give her two weeks notice and moved to Alberta for the Exercise Rider/Jockey Training Program at Olds College.

As for what's behind the uptick in women jockeys, Ryan's not too sure.

"Girls love horses. You know how it is," she says and laughs.

"It's so much more accepted now. There's no discrimination at Woodbine—I don't feel it, anyway. Especially since you have Emma, Chantal, Skye and everybody else. More girls want to give it a shot compared to back in the day."

It's a stark contrast to Bonnie Eshelman, Cherentz's mother and agent, and one of the first female jockeys in North America when she started her career in 1972.

"I was hated by everyone!" Eshelman says. There's no bitterness in her voice, just a bit of disbelief. "Absolutely, everyone. It was really hard."

Eshelman, who raced under her maiden name of Csuzdi, had a hard time finding an agent willing to work for a woman. She's kept newspaper clippings from the time in her life when track stewards made bets on whether she would even make it to the opening gate. As the sole woman in many races, her locker room was often the first aid station.

Her inspiration at the time was Kathy Kusner, an Olympian and record-breaking show horse rider who went on to become the first female jockey to be licensed in North America. After three hearings at the Maryland Racing Commission where the men in charge argued she was too weak to control a horse and therefore a danger to the other riders, Kusner's case landed in the courts in 1968. The proceedings were watched closely by those in the nascent women's liberation movement and the legal fees were footed by the Marjorie Cook Foundation, a non-profit with a history of focusing on women's rights and equality issues.

It took the judge just three minutes to decide: the Racing Commission had acted in a discriminatory manner based solely on the applicant's sex. It was an early gender discrimination win with the Civil Rights Act only passed in 1964.

Eshelman was then in her late teens, working with show horses in Minneapolis when she heard the news. "My heart just went thump, thump, thump because I knew that opened the door for me."

Her career as a jockey lasted for 15 years. Eshelman raced at Woodbine and throughout the US, at Arlington Park near Chicago (one newspaper called her "Arlington's Darling") and the famed Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby.

Now an agent herself, Eshelman connects her daughter with trainers: the more horses Chernetz can work, the better chance she has on getting a mount on race day. Though Eshelman recognizes things have changed in the industry, she says there's still pushback when it comes to women riders. And life at Woodbine can be "extremely competitive" with few open spaces for newcomers.

Eshelman has had just about every job in the business—agent, owner, trainer, and jockey—and she thinks her connections helped get them established at the track when they moved to Toronto from a farm outside of Winnipeg, Manitoba, when Chernetz was 16 years old.

"Skye didn't really show any enthusiasm or interest for anything else. And so I just thought, if she wants to do this, we'll go to Woodbine, the best track in Canada, and try it," Eshelman said. "Work hard, and see what happens. And that's exactly what we did."

The work is not just hard, with early mornings and seven-days-a-week training, but dangerous, too. When Ryan quit her office job, she had plenty of pushback from some co-workers.

"I had one guy, this older man that I was good friends with, he pulled me aside, and said, 'You can't do this, you know. You're too small and you're not that strong, and you're going to hurt yourself,'" she says.

"He was just being nice, looking out for me. But he didn't know who I was. He never saw me on a horse, nothing."

Ryan has no regrets about giving up an accounting career, though she's suffered serious setbacks. After stints exercise riding horses in Alberta and Florida, she was only at Woodbine Racetrack for two weeks when the horse she was on reared back outside its barn. They both went down and Ryan's pelvis was shattered. An exercise rider at Woodbine died in June 2014 under similar circumstances.

Ryan's slow recovery took seven months and extensive rehab.

"Everyone was really concerned. But that's when my family really knew how much I love it, because I was working so hard to get back doing it," Ryan said.

"I just love when a horse is trying for you and you actually connect with that horse. It's like a dance—you're both in perfect rhythm. There's no feeling like it."

Chernetz concurred.

"It's just the feeling that you get, that the horse gives you. You're going so fast and you have to make decisions so quick. Every go around is different, even if you're on the same horse," Chernetz says. "I love just being in a race. Everything after that is just part of the job."

Chernetz and Eshelman start the day at 4:30 AM in a condo not far from the track. "Basically, barn and home is one big circle," Chernetz says. Though a number of Woodbine workers commute from an hour or more away.

Ryan drives in from Caledon, Ontario with her boyfriend, an exercise rider at the track. He has to be there by 5:30 AM and since Ryan doesn't start working horses until 6:30 or 7 AM, she'll sometimes sleep in the car before she needs to be on the backstretch.

Every single morning is occupied with galloping the horses. Post times for races begin at 1 PM on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and come summer, Wednesday nights as well.

Any leftover time is devoted to exercise—running, yoga, turns on the equicizer, a specialized piece of equipment that mimics the movements of a horse, or in Ryan's case, the gruelling Insanity workout videos.

It's all in the effort to improve balance and core strength.

"(When you're racing), you're right up on your toes and down in a squat position and you want your chest touching your knees. Your knees have to be wide enough to get down low," Ryan says of the hard to hold position that requires incredible balance just to stay on the moving horse.

The first race of the season is on a mercifully sunny Saturday. The crowd skews grey-haired and male, but in the stands outside there are families with strollers, couples and a straight row of serious young men in their early twenties, heads bent over the number-logged racing forms. People eat plates of roast beef sandwiches, tall cartons of popcorn or sip beer.

Chernetz is in the first race of the day on a horse named Ginger's Hero. The odds for her to win are 15-to-1, but she still ends up doing better than expected, rounding the bend and pulling up fast in the last seconds of the race to place third after Sexy Operator and Circle the World.

Between races, a jumbo screen in the centre of the track airs ads for pizza places and Massey Ferguson farm equipment, plus shout outs to spectators ("Happy 85th birthday Nana!").

Chernetz is back at the post for the fourth race, the odds against her 6-to-1. A horse called Scindia starts in the lead, trailed by La Montagne. But about 20 seconds in, something changes. Chernetz, on Her Majesty's Flag, "pokes her neck out front," in the words of the very suprised announcer. Just before the finish line, Her Majesty's Flag overtakes Scindia and wins.

It's all over in 58.1 seconds.

Chernetz pats the chestnut horse and poses for the winning photo. A groom, the trainer, the owner's son, and Chernetz's best friend, toddler in tow, crowd around.

She then gets off the horse, hoists her friend's daughter on her hip, and walks out of the winner's circle.