Do jockeys matter at the Breeders’ Cup?

By ITM Staff

The Breeders’ Cup will be without one of its most successful riders. Irad Ortiz Jr. broke his left ankle at Keeneland on Thursday, Oct. 22, when his mount stumbled leaving the gate in the ninth race and unseated him, and he will miss the World Championships on Oct. 30–31 (Daily Racing Form, David Grening, Oct. 22, 2026). It’s a rough stretch for one of the best in the game: he had only just come back on Keeneland’s Oct. 2 opening day after missing about two months with a foot injury suffered at Saratoga in August. His reported Breeders’ Cup mounts included Further Ado, Rhetorical, Splendora, Built and Salahudin, and their trainers now have riders to find.

That got us asking how much jockeys matter at the Breeders’ Cup at all. In our trainers piece we were skeptical about how much the numbers really predict. With jockeys we went in more doubtful still, because the best riders mostly ride the best horses, and the market prices that in. So we ran the same tests on the riders that we ran on the trainers.

The short answer: across the last 15 Breeders’ Cups, the gaps between jockeys look about like what luck alone would produce. There is one rider whose record is hard to put down to chance, and he’s the very one who sparked the query in the first place: Irad.

Who beats the market

Only a handful of riders have won more Breeders’ Cup races than the odds said they should, and most of them did it on small samples. The table covers every jockey with 25 or more Breeders’ Cup mounts from 2011 to 2025, sorted by wins vs. odds (often called A/E): actual wins divided by the wins implied by each mount’s final odds. Anything above 1.00 means the rider won more often than the prices suggested. The $2 return is what a $2 win bet on every mount would have paid back on average.

A few things stand out:

• Irad Ortiz Jr. is the one big-sample rider well clear of the market. He won 23 races from 122 mounts when the odds pointed to about 16. America’s Best Racing has the same 23-for-122 record and puts him second all-time behind Mike Smith’s 27 (America’s Best Racing, Noel Michaels, Oct. 16, 2026).
• Luis Saez is 1-for-75, and that one win was Essential Quality in the 2020 Juvenile. The odds said he should have won about five.
• Tyler Gaffalione is 2-for-71. His mounts have still finished in the top three 17% of the time.
• The busiest riders sit close to 1.00. Joel Rosario (142 mounts), John Velazquez (138) and Flavien Prat (110) have won almost exactly as often as their prices said they would.
• Top three % tells a different story from wins. Saez, Talamo and Hernandez hit the board with between 23% and 30% of their mounts. They just didn’t win.

Where they win

The splits are where the eye-catching numbers live, and where samples get smallest. Each cell shows wins from mounts, with wins vs. odds in brackets. Sprints are races under a mile.

• Irad Ortiz Jr.’s edge is in sprints. He is 14-for-38 in sprints, when the odds implied about 6, and 9-for-84 in routes, right at market rate. Repeat winners helped: Golden Pal, Elite Power and Goodnight Olive each won twice for him.
• Ryan Moore is a turf-route rider at the Breeders’ Cup. All 14 of his wins since 2011 came in turf routes. He is 0-for-29 everywhere else.
• Joel Rosario splits the other way. He is 8-for-53 in dirt routes and 2-for-51 in turf routes.
• Jose Ortiz has done his winning on turf. He is 4-for-36 in turf routes and 2-for-62 in the other three categories combined.

Splits like these mostly reflect who rides what. Moore rode for Aidan O’Brien on 78 of his 95 mounts, and 13 of his 14 wins came for O’Brien, so his record says as much about those horses as about him.

Is there any signal?

Not much, and not in a form you can rely on. We ran two tests on the jockeys, and the same two on the trainers from our earlier piece for comparison.

Test 1: is the spread wider than luck? Even if every rider were equally good, some would beat their odds over 15 years and some would fall short, just by chance. We simulated 2,000 Breeders’ Cups using each mount’s real odds and compared how spread out the riders’ results were. The 24 jockeys were somewhat more spread out than chance, but a gap that size turned up in about 18% of the simulations. For the 20 trainers with 25 or more starters it turned up in about 10%. Neither is strong evidence.

Test 2: does it carry forward? We split the 15 years in half (2011–18 and 2019–25) and asked whether riders who beat their odds in the first half also did in the second. Among the 12 jockeys with at least 15 mounts in each half, the answer was no: the correlation was −0.10, which is essentially zero. The trainers came out at −0.30. If anything, a good first half was followed by a slightly worse second half.

The one exception is Irad Ortiz Jr. Going 23-for-122 when the odds pointed to about 16 is the kind of result that comes up only about 4% of the time by chance. His sprint edge also held up in both halves of the period. But test enough riders and one will look this good by luck alone: with 24 jockeys, we’d expect about one result this extreme at each end of the table. Luis Saez (1-for-75) and Juan Hernandez (0-for-27) are about as far out on the bad end.

The honest conclusion is the one we suspected going in. At the Breeders’ Cup the best riders get the best horses, the odds already account for that, and what’s left over is mostly noise. Ortiz’s sprint record is the one pattern worth noticing, and this year it doesn’t apply.

This year: Ortiz’s mounts need new riders

DRF reported five Breeders’ Cup mounts for Ortiz “among others”, so this list may not be complete. TDN has since reported a sixth, defending Turf Sprint winner Shisospicy, along with the first replacement riders (TDN, Bill Finley, Oct. 23, 2026). Riders marked ??? had not been named as of that report; Bob Baffert said he would wait until entry time to choose one for Salahudin. Several of these horses were pre-entered in two races. Prices are David Aragona’s pre-entry morning lines for DRF (Oct. 22).

Built is the case where the jockey switch matters most on our numbers: a sprinter losing the one rider whose Breeders’ Cup sprint record stands out. Even so, the tests above say not to overreact. For the rest, the new riders will matter less than the horses’ form and the prices.

How we counted

Records come from the official result charts for every Breeders’ Cup race from 1984 to 2025, with the focus on the 15 runnings from 2011 to 2025. “Wins vs. odds” divides a rider’s actual wins by the number implied by each mount’s final win odds, with the odds in each race scaled to remove the takeout. Sprints are races under a mile. Modern Games, who won the 2021 Juvenile Turf for William Buick after being declared a non-starter for betting purposes, counts as a win but is left out of the odds figures. Jockey names were matched across the old and new chart formats by hand.

The chance test simulated 2,000 sets of results from each mount’s odds and compared how widely the riders’ results spread against the real spread. The carry-forward test compared each rider’s wins above or below expectation per mount in 2011–18 and in 2019–25. Our all-time count matches America’s Best Racing’s for Ortiz (23 from 122) and Mike Smith (27 wins).

Sources

• Daily Racing Form (David Grening), Oct. 22, 2026: Irad Ortiz Jr. to miss Breeders’ Cup with broken ankle
• TDN (Bill Finley), Oct. 23, 2026: Trainers scrambling to find Breeders’ Cup replacements for Irad Ortiz Jr.
• Turf Diario, Oct. 23, 2026: Irad Ortiz Jr. fractures left ankle, set to miss the Breeders’ Cup
• America’s Best Racing (Noel Michaels), Oct. 16, 2026: All-time leading Breeders’ Cup jockeys
• Del Mar / Breeders’ Cup press, Nov. 1, 2025: Irad Ortiz Jr. wins sixth Bill Shoemaker Award
• 2026 pre-entries (Oct. 23) and David Aragona’s DRF morning lines (Oct. 22)