Castellano breaks own record for single-season earnings

Javier Castellano quietly broke his own single-season record for earnings by a North American jockey with a second-place finish in the New York Stallion Series Stakes at Aqueduct on Sunday, according to figures from Equibase.

With $25,000 in earnings for riding Saythreehailmary’s in the $125,000 stakes race, Castellano’s 2015 earnings shot up to $26,237,639, more than $17,000 higher than the record he set in 2013. Of course, there’s still six weeks left in the racing season, and Castellano will have plenty of opportunities to add to his total.

Castellano entered Sunday’s card approximately $90,000 shy of his own record. His mount in the first race earned $6,000 for finishing third, his winning mount in the second race earned $34,800, his mount in the fourth race earned $1,750 for finishing fourth, and his winning mount in the seventh race earned $41,400. At that point, he was $7,268 short of the record before Saythreehailmary’s put him over the top.

Castellano, the Eclipse Award winner for outstanding jockey in 2013 and 2014, has won 300 races in 2015 from 1,352 starts. His average earnings per start has been a whopping $19,407, nearly double his career average. In October, he won two Breeders’ Cup races, the $2 million Distaff and the $1 million Dirt Mile.

According to Equibase, Castellano’s mounts have earned $13.19 million in purses from graded stakes this year, almost exactly half of his earnings total in 2015.

Although Castellano is having a great year by any measure, setting records for purse earnings has become somewhat easier over the past five years, due in large part to contraction within the industry and the reliance of racetracks on subsidies from casinos, which currently provide approximately 40 percent of the purse money distributed at U.S. racetracks. Castellano rides primarily in New York and Florida, two states where racetracks are heavily subsidized by casino revenue.

In addition, field sizes over the past five years have dropped by approximately half a horse per race after foal crops contracted sharply in 2010-12. That has led the average purse per start to hit record levels in the U.S. Thoroughbred industry, with the figure jumping to $21,505 in 2014. That figure is up 31.4 percent since 2010 despite stagnation in the industry’s handle figures.

For a jockey, the drop in field size means that there is less competition when attempting to earn purses (at least for those riders, like Castellano, who attract enough mounts to make up for the decline in total mounts available to all jockeys). When the purses for those races are subsidized by casino revenue, it also means fatter paychecks for finishing in the money.

In 2013, Castellano broke a record held by Ramon Dominguez, whose mounts earned $25.63 million in 2012. Dominguez had broken a record set in 2008 by Garrett Gomez.