Eddie Arcaro. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Arcaro, Eddie (19 Feb. 1916-14 Nov. 1997), jockey, was born George Edward Arcaro in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Pasquale Arcaro and Josephine Giancola Arcaro. (It is not known what his parents did for a living.) At birth he weighed barely three pounds, and though he was not a sickly child he remained small in stature throughout his life, growing to an adult height of only five feet two inches and weighing a maximum 114 pounds. From an early age he loved all sports, especially baseball, but because of his size he was never chosen to play on school teams. To make matters worse, a devastating sledding accident when he was twelve, following a move by the family to Southgate, Kentucky, almost cost him the use of his right leg, but the spunky youth began walking on his own even before the doctors allowed him to.

Still determined to be an athlete, yet realizing by adolescence that he was always going to be small, the teenage Arcaro focused on a career as a jockey and discovered that here at last was a field that welcomed him. He loved horses and began riding at area tracks, and he proved to be a natural in the saddle. In May 1931, at the age of sixteen, he competed in his first race, at Bainbridge near Cleveland. He did not win, but that loss--and forty-four more that followed over the next nine months--did not deter him. Less than a year later, in January 1932, he rode his first winner at Agua Caliente, in Mexico, launching him on a thirty-year career that would see him ultimately hailed as "the king of jockeys."

But there were to be a few pitfalls along the way: the occupational hazard of jockeys is spills, and Arcaro had his share. His first serious throw occurred in 1933 at Washington Park, a major track south of Chicago: unconscious for three days with a fractured skull, a broken nose, and a punctured lung, he remained hospitalized for three months. But by 1934 he was riding again, thanks to the tutelage of trainer Clarence Davison, who had signed him to a contract after his first win at Agua Caliente and given him valuable pointers on handling his mounts. That year his contract was bought by Warren Wright at Calumet Farms in Chicago, and he rode for that stable until 1936, when he was hired by the famed Greentree Stable owned by Helen Hay Whitney.

Meanwhile, by May 1935 Arcaro was ready to enter his first Kentucky Derby, atop Nellie Flag. Though the horse finished fourth, Arcaro was determined to someday reach the winner's circle at Churchill Downs, the Derby site. That moment came three years later: riding the thoroughbred Lawrin, Arcaro won the 1938 Derby by a length to great acclaim. In seven years he had risen to the top of his profession, and he was only twenty-three years old.

There were other prizes to covet, however, chief among them racing's so-called Triple Crown--the Derby, followed at brief intervals by the Preakness, held at Pimlico in Baltimore, and the Belmont Stakes in New York. Arcaro's opportunity to make that sweep came in 1941 with a mount named Whirlaway, nicknamed "the little horse with steel springs," though at first he was a reluctant rider. Acknowledging later that he found it difficult to warm up to Whirlaway, Arcaro nevertheless brought his unique gifts of instinct and intuition to his handling of the horse, and it responded, winning the Derby in the then-record-breaking time of two minutes, one and two-fifths seconds. Victories at the Preakness and Belmont followed in quick succession, earning Arcaro his first Triple Crown. That same year Whirlaway was named Horse of the Year, an honor that would be bestowed on Arcaro's mounts seven more times in the course of his career.

Even more honors were to come for Arcaro himself. He won the Kentucky Derby three more times: in 1945 on Hoop Jr.; on Citation in 1948; and on Hill Gail in 1952. He also won the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes a total of six times each. But his greatest honor came in 1948 when he won a record-breaking second Triple Crown with Citation. He remains the only jockey to win more than one Triple Crown, and his record of seventeen Triple Crown event wins has not been surpassed.

One of Arcaro's most famous races occurred in the summer of 1955, nine years after he had become a freelance rider. The two celebrity horses of that year were Swaps, ridden by Arcaro, and Nashua, the mount of another celebrated jockey, Willie Shoemaker. Shoemaker on Nashua had narrowly defeated Arcaro at the Derby, but Arcaro and Swaps had gone on to win the Preakness and Belmont. In a special match race at Washington Park that drew the rich and famous from around the world, Arcaro rode Swaps to a third victory--just as he had proclaimed he would prior to the race.

Street-smart and sometimes pugnacious, Arcaro had a colorful personality to complement his jockey silks, and occasionally it got him into trouble--most notably in 1942, when he was suspended for a year from racing after crowding a Cuban jockey at Aqueduct in New York. He might have avoided the penalty had he simply acknowledged to investigators following the race that he had perhaps been a bit out of line. But when he was asked what he'd been up to, the piqued Arcaro--perhaps unaware that a tape recorder was at hand--screamed, "I was trying to kill the S.O.B.!" He spent the year at a horse farm in South Carolina and later acknowledged that the break had been productive, allowing him "time to think and take stock of myself."

Arcaro needed a certain amount of bravado to carry him through the upsets, literal and figurative, that are standard for jockeys. His most serious spill occurred at the 1959 Belmont Stakes, when his horse went down in the final turn. The throw landed him unconscious and facedown in a six-inch puddle, and he narrowly escaped drowning. After several weeks of recuperation from head, neck, and back injuries, he was ready to return to racing, but the years were taking their toll. Though still a relatively young man--he was only forty-three--he was getting too old to be a jockey. By this time he had already received racing's highest accolades, including election in 1955 to the Jockeys' Hall of Fame--one of the first three jockeys to be named--and induction into the Racing Hall of Fame at Saratoga Springs, New York, three years later. In November 1961 he rode for the last time, but he remained active in the sport for several decades as an occasional commentator for ABC. Though Arcaro's final three years as a jockey produced no more Triple Crown racing victories, he had the distinction of seeing two of his mounts named Horse of the Year during this time: Sword Dancer in 1959, and Kelso in 1960 and 1961. Kelso, he later said, was the best horse he ever rode.

An intense but graceful figure in the saddle, Arcaro was known for being a "smart" dresser off the track--he owned numerous pairs of shoes and custom-tailored suits. He was also an astute businessman, investing his purses in oil wells, drive-in restaurants, and a wholesale saddlery and making himself a multimillionaire in the process. He also cofounded, with fellow jockeys Sam Renick and Johnny Longden, the Jockeys' Guild in the 1940s and served as president of the guild from 1949 until his retirement twelve years later. Under his direction the guild began providing jockeys with life and health insurance as well as old-age pensions.

Arcaro and his wife, Ruth (maiden name unknown), a former model whom he married in 1937, had two children. They lived for many years in Garden City, Long Island, not far from Belmont. After his retirement he began spending more time at the couple's home in Miami, Florida, where he could frequent racetracks and play golf, his longtime hobby, year-round. His friends and frequent golfing partners included not only prominent racing figures but also baseball Hall-of-Famer Joe DiMaggio. Arcaro suffered from liver cancer in the final months of his life. He died at his Miami home.

Arcaro rode in 24,921 races and won 4,779 of them, winning some $30 million along the way. Although he often said he always rode to win, a sentiment echoed in the title of a 1951 memoir, he was not "the winningest jockey of all time": that title still belongs to Willie Shoemaker, whose string of victories totals nearly twice that of Arcaro's and may never be broken. Nor did Arcaro even place or show in the record book of lifetime wins: at present, Johnny Longden and Gordon Richards are also ahead of him. Arcaro's total earnings have been far surpassed by others as well. But total wins and money earned are not the only measures of an outstanding jockey. Arcaro will be remembered as one of the greatest figures in the history of American racing not only for his record-breaking Triple Crown wins but also because he rode some of the greatest horses of the twentieth century, and rode them well. As his longtime friend, the venerable Calumet Farms trainer Jimmy Jones, said, "He was the perfect extension of the trainer on the horse. And nobody had his sense of the way the race was being run."

For biographical information, see "Arcaro, Eddie," in Current Biography Yearbook 1958 and an obituary from the New York Times in Current Biography Yearbook 1998; see also Who Was Who in America, vol. 12 (1998) as well as Arcaro's anecdotal memoir, I Ride to Win! (1951), written with Jack O'Hara. See also Stanley Frank, "A Visit with Eddie Arcaro," Saturday Evening Post, 28 June 1958, pp. 26ff.; W. C. Heinz, "You Have to Ride Rough," Look, 17 Apr. 1956, pp. 116-23; and W. C. Heinz, "How to Win the Derby," Look, 1 May 1956, pp. 90ff. For a description of Arcaro's riding and racing techniques, see a five-part series, "The Art of Race Riding," written by Arcaro, which appeared in Sports Illustrated in the summer of 1957: part 1, in the issue of 17 June 1957, pp. 14ff., includes biographical information; subsequent installments appeared in the issues of 24 June, 1 July, 8 July, and 15 July. For a posthumous assessment of Arcaro's career, see especially William Nack, "The Headiest Horseman," Sports Illustrated, 24 Nov. 1997, pp. 21-22. An obituary appears in the New York Times, 15 Nov. 1997.