For the second year in a row, Mexican jockey Victor Espinoza will head to the Belmont Stakes with a chance to win the Triple Crown.

“I feel like the luckiest Mexican on earth,” he said after his win riding American Pharoah at the Kentucky Derby on May 2.
Following his triumph on the same horse in the Preakness on May 16, this will be the third time in his career that Espinoza has gone into the third race of the Triple Crown with the chance of glory.  As well as 2014 (on California Chrome), he also won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness in 2002 (on War Emblem).

Affirmed was the last horse to win the Triple Crown in 1987. Since then, 13 horses have won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, only to lose at the Belmont Stakes.

Espinoza, 42, was born on a dairy farm in the state of Hidalgo, Mexico, the 11th of 12 children. At the age of 15 he traveled to Cancun to assist his brother as a quarter horse trainer. He paid for jockey school by driving a bus in Mexico City at age 17 and within a few years was racing thoroughbreds at Mexico City’s premier horse-racing track, the Hipodromo de las Americas. He moved to Northern California, where by 1994 he was the leading apprentice rider at the Bay Meadows and Golden Gate Fields racetracks. A year later, he moved to Los Angeles.

Espinoza’s big break came in 2000 when he won the Breeders’ Cup Distaff, followed by his run at the Triple Crown in 2002.

The 147th Belmont Stakes – the third leg of the Triple Crown – will be run at Belmont Park, Elmont, New York on Saturday, June 6.