RYUJI TATSUSHIRO has enjoyed a late-career bloom in the last 12 months, notching a breakthrough Graded race win with Sure Gait in the SIII Santa Anita Trophy at Oi in July, 2023, followed this year by wins in the SP1 Blue Ribbon Mile at Kasamatsu and the SP1 Wakakusa Sho Donko Kinen at Nagoya, both on Grace Ruby.
The rider, 45, whose racing silks are black with peach ‘sawtooth’ pattern across the shoulders, had just ridden the winner of the second race at Oi on 11 July 2024 when he spoke to Idol Horse. He later completed his work with a double, a win in race 12 taking his total for the year to 26: that gave him a career tally of 673 NAR (National Association of Horseracing) wins since his first victory, which he achieved on June 8, 1996, two months after he debuted at age 17.
But his journey to becoming one of Oi racecourse’s most experienced and recognizable riders did not follow the usual route one might expect from the grandson of a racehorse trainer. Then again, he is not exactly a conventional jockey, given his entrepreneurial sideline filming and snapping pictures of racecourses and races using drone technology.
Tatsushiro’s early years were not spent at the track or the stables, despite his close family connection to the sport, instead he was on stage and in front of the camera as a child actor, appearing in a handful of TV dramas.
“When I was two-years old, my parents just sent me to a theatre company,” he laughed, and admitted that he realised after a while that he “didn’t have any talent” for that, nor for his other childhood interest, baseball.
While many a jockey with a family connection to the sport is immersed in all things horses from a young age, Tatsushiro can remember only one visit to the track as a child, even though Kawasaki racecourse was where his grandfather plied his trade as a trainer on the NAR circuit.
“My family lived away from Kawasaki racecourse, and I spent most of the time with my family,” he said. “Then one day I was watching TV, and I saw the Oguri Cap and Yutaka Take race (the legendary 1990 Arima Kinen): at that time it was right in the middle of the second wave of horse racing fever in Japan.
“I fell in love with horse racing immediately and thought it was the only thing I would enjoy doing. I wasn’t tall, which also helped. Although my grandfather was a trainer, I didn’t grow up with him, so I chose horse racing not because of him, only because of watching that amazing race on TV.”
Fitting then that he has a business which tries to enhance the fan and viewer experience. The venture, Byerley Turk Industries Inc., came about when he suffered an injury that made him think about an alternative future out of the saddle.
The reality struck that jockey school was no substitute for an education if he was unable to ride: he had no High School diploma, so at age 28 he enrolled in an online High School programme and completed it in three years. He then signed up for an online college course, but the summer term proved to be a bad clash with his day job at Oi.
“I was enrolled in the programme for two years, but I barely attended, I’m sorry,” he laughed.
“But I wasn’t sure I could even continue riding when I suffered the injury, so I came up with the idea of starting this company,” he continued. “I’m very interested in overseas racing, and I watch those overseas races frequently. Outside of Japan drones are frequently used for racing broadcasts, but it’s not a thing in Japan.
“The JRA races will sometimes use helicopters for broadcasts, but they are not like drones which are actively used for broadcasting overseas. So, I felt this might be an opportunity and started the company as preparation.”
His enterprise means he must navigate strict Japanese laws regarding drones, under radio law and aviation law, which makes the use of drones less easy to facilitate than in other places.
“But I do expect that one day the drones will be introduced to Japanese racing broadcasts,” he said.
今日まで良馬場。明日からTCKです。 pic.twitter.com/p8L3fbw8ae
— 達城龍次 RyujiTatsushiro (@tatsushiroryuji) May 12, 2024
Tatsushiro keeps tabs on what is happening in racing around the world and has been interested to see first-hand the development of the NAR, Japan’s ‘second tier’ local council administered racing circuit, along North American lines.
“I feel like Oi has been learning from and getting close to the United States and some other overseas racing,” he said. “When I started riding, Oi was just an old-school local track, but it has really progressed a lot.
He noted the surprise performance of Mandarin Hero, who advanced from Oi’s Tokyo City Keiba ‘Twinkle Nights’ to finish a nose second in the 2023 G1 Santa Anita Derby in the US, and then attempt the G1 Kentucky Derby a year before the JRA’s Forever Young placed a close third in the same world-famous contest.
Tatsushiro himself had tried to make that cross-over to US racing many years before, but found things much tougher than Mandarin Hero or Forever Young, and he is thrilled at the progress Japanese horses and horsemen have made since then.
“It was unimaginable for something like that to happen at the time I went to the US. Nowadays Japanese people really try international racing frequently, and those horses now have legitimate chances,” he said.
His travels to the US 21 years ago saw him ride at Penn National, Delaware Park and Laurel Park, and took him to the 200-horse stables of the late Hall of Fame trainer Jonathan Sheppard at Fairhill in Maryland, a world away from the Oi stable blocks.
“Mr Sheppard was a very strict person, very focused, he hardly smiled that I saw,” he said. “I worked at his stables, and later I also worked at his track; I did a variety of work. I left him after a couple of months. I went to the racecourse, worked at stables and farms, and what I felt was, at that time twenty years ago, US racing was just far ahead of Japanese racing.
“It was a culture shock for me, so I worked passionately, hoping to bring some of the stuff back to Japan. It was just amazing. The horse racing industry, as a whole, seemed perfectly organised. Nowadays Japan has learned from overseas, and gets better and better, but at that time I felt US racing was an already completed product.”
He met Hall of Fame jockeys while he was there: Ramon Dominguez took him out to bars and introduced him to people, and for that he is grateful to this day, but Jerry Bailey gave him a grumpy telling off one afternoon at Delaware Park.
“He was there to ride in a stakes race and I was at the racecourse just as a racegoer. I handed my racing programme to him for an autograph, but unfortunately I didn’t have a pen with me, and I can still remember he was not too happy. He said, ‘Why don’t you bring a pen when you’re asking for an autograph?’” he recalled and laughed at the memory.
Tatsushiro’s own career has not been ‘Hall of Fame’ standard, but it has been successful. He has worked hard continuously to better himself on and off the track, but he is conscious that being in his mid-40s means time is counting down on his race-riding.
“I don’t feel like I’m getting old stamina-wise, but now there are more younger jockeys here. I’m starting to feel old when I’m in the mix,” he admitted.
“I have been taking the trainer exam for a while, but since there are so many trainers right now, it’s very hard to pass the exam.”
So, will that be his next enterprise?
“It will,” he said. “I think training is an exciting job, and I hope I can succeed as a trainer.”
He may have arrived into racing by his own path and done things his own enterprising way, but Tatsushiro is walking a path ever-closer to his grandfather’s footsteps.
