When Joao Moreira steps into the Deauville weighing room this weekend, the geography will be the only thing that hasn’t changed.
The last time the Brazilian rode in France he was twenty-two years old, unable to string a sentence together in anything but Portuguese and quietly coming apart. He’d flown over as stable jockey for Stefan Friborg, the Swedish-born, Brazil-based oil magnate whose Estrela Energia operation was assembling horses, stallions and staff with the swagger of a man who told anyone who’d listen that he would one day win the Dubai World Cup. Moreira thought he was mad. “He was convinced,” Moreira recalls. “He said, ‘I will win the World Cup. That’s my dream and I’m gonna win it.'” (Friborg, for the record, was not mad and Gloria de Campeão delivered him that very dream in 2010.)
Moreira had signed on the back of his first São Paulo championship, young and desperate for the overseas break. The plan was three months campaigning out of France before shipping the string to Dubai. It never came together. The horses ran below their marks, the Dubai ratings slid out of reach and inside the stable a war was breaking out among Friborg’s own staff with Moreira stranded in the middle of it. He asked to leave. He’d had, by his own count, “about fifteen” rides in three months. Not a single winner.
“I came home very disappointed with myself,” he says. “My dream to ride overseas, instead of taking off, went down the drain.”
And that is where the story could have ended. But Moreira, now 42, doesn’t re-tell it as a failure – he calls it “the trigger”.
“When I look back, I do not regret it, because that was a massive lesson. A proper lesson. I thought I was good. But I wasn’t.” The humbling sent him back to Brazil to do two things at once: win – three straight São Paulo championships across 2006, 2007 and 2008, including the Group 1 Gran Premio Nacional aboard Eu Tambem – and learn. He finished high school, sat university entrance exams, then enrolled in two years of night classes at an English school instead. France had shown him the ceiling on a jockey who could only speak one language. “It forced me to realise: either I do that, or I had no chance anywhere.”
“It was the trigger for me to achieve what I achieved,” he says. “If I didn’t spend that time in France, my destiny could be different. It made me understand what it takes to conquer anywhere – you have to be able to speak a different language. Otherwise, forget it.”
The rest is the map of a globetrotting career: Singapore, then Hong Kong, four championships apiece in both, more than 1,200 winners as he changed both jurisdictions. A new nickname – the ‘Magic Man’ – and a low-crouching, short-reined riding style so distinctive some have likened it to a motorcyclist’s. That style, too, changed courtesy of that three months of failure, and the change carries France’s fingerprints. The more upright, long-reined French purists made no secret of what they made of the young Brazilian. “The Brazilian style doesn’t fall into line with the likes of the French,” Moreira says. “Not strong enough, and too rough with the stick – which makes a bit of sense.” He came home riding differently: body moving more with the horse, reins held a touch longer, posture altered. “When I came back, I was riding very differently. Everyone said so.”
One other wrinkle of destiny: sharing that weighing room was Christophe Lemaire. Of everyone he met in France, Moreira names Lemaire – alongside Olivier Peslier – as the kindest to him. “Very happy, very friendly, very funky. And he has never changed,” Moreira says with a smile.”I love him as a rider, I love him as a person.”
A similar age to Moreira, newly married, just starting out. Two young tyros in a French jockeys’ room in 2005. Both would cross to the far side of the planet, learn a new language and come to dominate a racing nation: Moreira across Asia, while Lemaire reshaped Japanese racing itself.
Moreira flies out of his Curitiba base on Friday – his first ride in France since that ill-starred stint – to partner the Japanese raider Strauss in the Prix Jacques le Marois at Deauville. He returns to the country that broke him, in a set of iconic colours from the racing nation that helped make him, on the straight Deauville mile that once carried Taiki Shuttle to glory.
He also arrives in ferocious form – last Sunday brought a four-timer and a second from five rides in São Paulo; the day before, three wins and a second from four at Curitiba; the previous weekend a Group 1 among three wins over two days in Rio – all of it on the back of the late-season Hong Kong cameo that helped Caspar Fownes clinch a memorable trainers’ title.
Strauss can be a handful, a hard-pulling son of Maurice whose best trip sits somewhere between a sprint and a mile, and Moreira knows him as well as anyone – having ridden him to his first Group win as a juvenile and, in February, to victory in the inaugural $1 million Abu Dhabi Gold Cup, the first win by a Japanese runner in Abu Dhabi. “It’s always an honour and a privilege to help represent Japan on the world stage,” Moreira told Idol Horse when the ride was announced. The ever-positive Brazilian is hoping for a big performance, and few would put it past him.
But whatever Strauss does on Sunday, the ride is a reminder of when a desperate 22-year-old landed in France, failed to ride a winner and went home in pieces. The man flying back this week has been a prolific winner everywhere from São Paulo to Sha Tin, Sapporo to Sydney – and he’ll tell you, without hesitation, that none of it happens without those three empty months.
“Who knows what would have happened,” he says, “if I didn’t go there.” ∎
