Jockey Mychel Sanchez suspended 60 days for betting

Jockey Mychel Sanchez, who has won more than 100 races a year since 2017, was suspended by Pennsylvania regulators on Thursday for 60 days for violating a rule that prohibits jockeys from betting on any horses but their own mounts in a race, according to racing regulators.

Although officials for the Pennsylvania Bureau of Thoroughbred Horse Racing did not respond to phone calls on Friday, the executive director of the Maryland Racing Commission said on Friday that Sanchez had been removed from his three mounts on Friday at Laurel Park due to the ruling.

The executive director, J. Michael Hopkins, said that he had been told that the suspension was due to Sanchez making bets on races in which he rode.

“I really don’t want to go any farther than that, because I don’t want to comment on another jurisdiction’s rulings,” Hopkins said.

Racing commissions and stewards share their rulings because a ruling in one jurisdiction applies to all other jurisdictions, under a system known as reciprocity.

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Scott Silver, who has been Sanchez’s agent for the past six months, said on Friday he did not want to comment on the substance of the ruling.

“All I will say is that Mychel is one of the hardest working guys you will meet, and this was really out of character for him,” Silver said.

Later on Friday, 1/ST Racing, the owner of Laurel Park and Gulfstream Park in Florida, where Sanchez has ridden recently, said that it will honor the Pennsylvania suspension and had placed Sanchez under an “indefinite ban.”

The suspension was first reported by The Paulick Report.

As a condition of licensure, jockeys are told that they cannot bet on a race unless the bet is to win on the rider’s horse. The prohibition applies to exotic bets that include the rider’s horse.

Sanchez’s best year was 2021, when he rode 155 winners from 1,008 mounts, earning $5.8 million in purses. He has ridden throughout the Mid-Atlantic and in Florida over the past several years and was the leading rider at Parx racetrack outside of Philadelphia in 2020.