Hit Show To ‘The Big Show’: Florent Geroux Is In Japan To End His Strange Year

IT’S BEEN a strange year for Florent Geroux, a year he aims to see out with a positive debut stint in Japan. But the Frenchman is no stranger to strange things – he did after all win the 2021 Kentucky Derby almost three years after he’d passed the Churchill Downs winning post a half-length second.

It was in February of 2024 that Mandaloun’s victory in the ‘Run for the Roses’ was confirmed on Medina Spirit’s disqualification. Talk about surreal. An “odd situation” is how Geroux describes that win.

There was no controversy around his victory in the G1 Dubai World Cup this past April, though. There was drama, for sure, but it was all on the track: the Frenchman driving late on Hit Show, reeling in Mixto when third had seemed more likely 200m out, pinching the Meydan race in a thriller and with it a cut of the US$6.9 million winners’ purse.

But, in his own words, that too was “surreal”. Hit Show was an unconsidered outsider, priced up at 66/1 with British bookmakers and $42.30 with World Pool against Japan’s $2.10 favourite, the G1 Saudi Cup winner and subsequent G1 Breeders’ Cup Classic hero, Forever Young.

The win was for Qatar’s burgeoning powerhouse owner Wathnan Racing and the big-hitting Brad Cox operation, Mandaloun’s trainer; Geroux was an established name on the US jockeys’ roster, a Kentucky Derby winner, a Pegasus World Cup winner, an elite rider with Breeders’ Cup wins and Arlington Millions on his record; a jockey ranked top 10 for earnings in North America in each of the previous five years and between 123 to 217 wins on the board for 11 years straight.

It was logical to expect the man who has ridden stars like Horse of the Year Gun Runner, Monomoy Girl and Idiomatic – all trained by Cox – would springboard from such a high-profile win into another century-plus season. It didn’t happen.

As the Kentucky-based rider prepares for his first weekend in Japan and a ride on Luxor Cafe in the G1 Champions Cup, he has only 75 wins in the US this year. And while he has still taken his cut of a healthy US$10.4 million in purses, that tally is US$6 million down on last year’s North American earnings and well below the US$15.1 million he averaged in the preceding 10 years.   

“Honestly, I mean, I thought after a massive win like this, I really thought things would have started getting better,” Geroux tells Idol Horse. 

Why his campaign did not gain traction after the Dubai World Cup is likely a mass of factors colliding: for starters, every jockey must roll with the general fickleness of the sport; the wheels of fate turning one way can suddenly shift direction and momentum is stalled, even lost. But Geroux adds in another factor, one linked to the uncertain state of racing in most parts of the US outside of its Kentucky heartland.    

“It’s just the fact that Kentucky racing now has become extremely tough,” he says. “We have a lot of new jockeys coming in, especially Irad and Jose Ortiz. Guys like Luis Saez used to be based in New York too. And those New York guys, they are coming to ride in Kentucky. So that’s the main change, I would say.”

Heightened competition. It’s what makes good sport great but in horse racing, a sport in which the human athletes are reliant on their equine partners to make it work – you can’t go without the horse, as they say – reduced opportunities can squeeze out even a top 10 performer.

While he still benefits from Cox’s longstanding patronage – he is five from five on the stable’s  recent Dwyer Stakes winner Disco Time – it’s obvious that Irad Ortiz, North America’s number one jockey, is the primary go-to for Cox.

The recent Churchill Downs fall meet ended with Ortiz the leading rider for the first time since he relocated there earlier this year, with 44 wins – Jose Ortiz second and Saez third – and Cox the leading trainer, with Ortiz having ridden 17 of Cox’s 20 winners.

Geroux is not complaining about any of that, he knows the landscape. And he knows fine well the attraction of living and working in the Bluegrass State.

“Kentucky is a good place to live, especially with a family. Prizemoney is excellent,” he says. “And you can live in New York and the area is not as nice as here, and the money right now, it’s about the same or a little bit less there. So if you know how to count properly, you’re going to make more money in Kentucky.

“You can see all the kind of money Kentucky has put into racing and also on the racetracks. It doesn’t matter if it’s Keeneland or Churchill Downs, they just keep on building, so when I see things like that, it makes me think okay, it’s gonna be around for a few more years.

“But in some other places, it doesn’t look that great,” he adds. “Racetracks get torn down and things like that, the prizemoney drops, and it doesn’t seem like the sport has a very good future in some places.”

It’s a different story in the Japan Racing Association (JRA) where the sport right now has a healthy fan base, a strong, centrally-controlled programme with sound infrastructure and good prizemoney.  

Riding in Japan has been an ambition of Geroux’s for some time and JRA officials have been in touch in the past few years, inviting him to ride at the World All-Stars Jockeys championship in Sapporo. It’s just been a case of finding the right confluence of commitments and scheduling to make it happen. 

“The jockey challenge there in August is always during a big weekend here in the US and the last few years I’ve had to turn it down,” he says. “This year I was thinking about it a lot, about going, and it was the same thing again, I turned it down. So from there, we just kept in touch a little bit.”

JRA officials encouraged Geroux to apply for a short licence. He checked his eligibility and the word came back that an application would likely be accepted. 

“So, I just did that a couple of weeks ago and somehow got the ball rolling and this is it,” he says. 

He will dive straight into the Group 1 theatre, riding the Noriyuki Hori-trained Luxor Cafe on Sunday and he feels he has a fair handle on racing in Japan thanks to the prevalence of information and replays on social media platforms, on which he is pretty active – @fgeroux on Instagram and @flothejock on X.

“I follow-up with racing all over the world as much as I can,” he says. “Since Luxor Cafe ran in the Kentucky Derby this year, I’ve been following him. When I knew I was riding the horse, I was excited because it’s a horse I’ve been following.

“You can really follow horse racing around the world just by following someone on Instagram or X. And you can watch short clips, videos of finishes, things like that. And not only that, but also Japanese horses having success in the Middle East and most recently winning the Breeders’ Cup Classic with Forever Young.

“I’ve been watching as much Japanese racing as I could, especially the last few years’ editions of the Champions Cup. It’s a dirt track, it doesn’t seem very complicated. If the horse takes to it, and you have the best horse, it’s pretty simple.”

Geroux is the latest Frenchman to sample the JRA and he is following in some mighty footsteps including Olivier Peslier and the man who has created his own legend in Japan, the JRA’s seven-time champion, Christophe Lemaire. 

But Geroux is a rarity among US-based riders, who have a long history of riding in Japan for the jockey challenge or for one-off weekends around the Japan Cup, but not so much for weeks-long stints. Geroux will be riding through the Arima Kinen day on December 28.

He feels that his European background and his affinity for both turf and dirt racing makes him a good fit for Japan, more so than his peers in the States.

“Most of the American jockeys never rode right-handed,” he points out. “I mean, I was in France for a couple years, so I’ve ridden many races going straight, going left-handed, going  right-handed.

“And I’m a bit different as well because most of the European jockeys, they don’t necessarily bring that (all-round) experience with them. I’ve ridden thousands of winners on dirt as well as on turf, I’m very familiar with dirt racing, it doesn’t matter if it’s positioning, kickback, pace, I think it’s a very different sport than turf racing and I’m hoping I can bring a little bit of my experience over there and hopefully it will be beneficial for me.”

Lemaire, who he has known since he was “15 or 16 years old” and for whom he has a deep respect, has offered him helpful insights, including the advice to hook up with Adam Harrigan as his interpreter and liaison.

“Christophe is a good friend, he’s a very nice guy and he’s always here to help, especially when you come on his home turf, of course,” Geroux says.

“He was already amazing in France. He won a lot of massive races, having contracts with the Niarchos family, the Aga Khan, those are the best owners you can possibly ride for over there. And he was able to secure those types of contracts, so of course, he’s always been at the top. But for him to be able to have the JRA licence year-round, it’s not very easy because you need to study extremely hard, so of course there’s a lot of pride (in France) that he has done this.

“It’s not easy to leave everything behind and go to another country. It takes a lot of determination and belief in your ability to do something like that.” 

Geroux, of course, did similar, albeit at an earlier juncture in his career development. It was 2007 when at age 21 he left France – his late father was Dominique Geroux, a jockey turned trainer – and tried North American racing, encouraged by Patrick Biancone who was then based in California. 

He made the move full-time at the end of that year, had to battle and scrap for rides in Chicago at first and gradually worked his way to the top via a breakthrough move to Kentucky in 2015. He met his wife, Kasey, the daughter of the late jockey Louis Spindler, and they have two daughters, Olivia and Celine; he gained US citizenship in 2018.

His family will join him for a short stay in Japan once school has finished for the Christmas holidays. He says he is going to Japan with no expectations of what might happen but he is well aware of the opportunities that overseas jockeys have had riding Japanese horses off the back of successful short-term spells in Japan.

“It would be good to have a foot in the door,” he says. “The timing seems great to go in at this time of year with those Group 1 races around. I’m just going for experience, something I always wanted to do and never really got the chance of doing.”

Japan in December was not on Geroux’s radar when January 2025 dawned, but it might yet give him the perfect end to an unusual year. ∎

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