With the start of the Triple Crown twenty-some days away, jockey Nik Juarez looks to have pinned down an opportunity to ride in his first Triple Crown race.

It’s not the first time the former high school wrestler pinned something down.

“Wrestling shaped me into the person I am,” Juarez said. “Those things that I learned on the mat are still applicable in my life today.”

Juarez piloted American Promise to a flashy win in the Virginia Derby, the colt earning 50 Derby points. With an additional five points from a fifth-place finish in the Risen Star, American Promise’s 55 points have secured him a spot in the Kentucky Derby May 3.

For three straight Saturdays – March 15, 22, and 29 — Juarez had a mount for the Coach, octogenarian trainer D. Wayne Lukas, in Kentucky Derby prep races aboard horses who were not the favorite. American Promise paid $16.80 to win.

In those starts, he saw the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. After delivering a score in the Virginia Derby at Colonial Downs, March 15, Juarez finished eighth in the Jeff Ruby Steaks aboard Innovator and eighth again, in the Arkansas Derby, on Bestfriend Rocket.

Those outings haven’t discouraged Lukas.

“He’s earned it,” observed Lukas. “I recognized the fact that he could ride, but he still has to go out there and do it. The more he rides, the better he gets.” 

Juarez could relate competitively to the results of his bouts over those three Saturdays. It reminded him of his time, as a high schooler, on the wrestling mat.

“It’s the greatest feeling coming to the center of the mat getting your hand raised and it can be the worst feeling to be next to the person getting the hand raised,” explained Juarez. “You’ve got to have thick skin, knowing it’s the amount of work you put into it is what you get out of it.”

In high school, Juarez started watching video on wrestling, not horse racing. He learned that before success comes preparation.

“Being a student of the game improves you, and it’s the same in horse racing,” he realized.

Juarez has learned how to ride the ups and downs of horse racing, especially with owners and trainers. He’s seeking to smooth them out.

“It’s a tough game,” he said. “You have to get out every day and show your face, win or lose. You’ve got to go back into the room, find a bucket to wash the dirt off your face, find your program and you turn the page. You’ve got to put on a new pair of silks and you got to go out and greet those owners and that trainer with the same enthusiasm as you did in the last race.”

Wresting made Juarez familiar with reversals and helped him develop another trait beneficial to other athletes: a short memory.

“Whether you just won, and it was the biggest race of your life, turn the page.”  said Juarez. “Get back to work. The opposite is also true. When you think you might have messed up a race or you just got beat a nose, you cannot let it sit in your head.” 

That’s good advice for riders, or wrestlers. As it happens, Juarez’s agent was, like the rider himself, both.

“He’s got all the tools,” said his agent, the Hall of Fame rider Gary Stevens, who helped Juarez get assigned mounts for the Coach. “I was a wrestler myself.” 

Stevens won two Kentucky Derbies for Lukas, aboard Winning Colors in 1988 and Thunder Gulch in 1995. When Stevens was starting out, it was Lukas who helped launched his career, sending for him by Learjet to ride Eugene Klein’s Tank’s Prospect to a win in the 1985 Arkansas Derby.

“How do you like traveling like this?” Stevens recalled Lukas asking him. “Because if you win this race, you’ll be traveling like this more often.”

While Juarez is benefiting from his current relationship with the Coach, it was another coach, John Lowe, who helped a then-98-pound high school freshman in Westminister, Carroll County, Maryland. Lowe worked with Juarez to compete in the 103-pound weight class on the Winters Mill High wrestling team. He was also a Spanish teacher and related to isolated kids not only with Juarez but also for many kids that couldn’t speak English.

“I’ve watched that man literally change lives,” Juarez said with emotion. “He was there for me when I really needed somebody as a 14-year-old kid.”

“At first he was resisting about everything to a lot of different people,” Lowe remembered of the young Juarez. “He was rebellious, fighting the wrong battles with the wrong people.”  

Juarez’s wrestling career went full circle as he approached his senior year. He moved forward to wrestle at 112 pounds and was looking to step up to 119 when Lowe suggested that “with the lineup that we have, it would be better if you could make it back to 103.”

So, Juarez dropped back to make 103 pounds and may have developed a career skill without realizing it at that moment.

“My job now, I have to maintain my weight all the time,” explained Juarez. “That’s a constant job and I was taught those things as a wrestler.”

In later years, Lowe kept a pair of jockey goggles in his classroom, pointing them out to his students as evidence that “if you work hard, you will find a way.”

“Sometimes when you are small, you feel the world can be stacked against you,” Lowe said. “But if you work hard it comes back to you.”

That’s proven true for the wrestler-turned-jockey.

Juarez rode his first handful of professional mounts in 2013 with his apprentice year mostly in 2014. But he didn’t make much impact, winning just 40 races while garnering less than $1 million in purse earnings.

In 2015, though, things began to move in a more promising direction for the now-31-year-old, courtesy of a Virginia-bred named Valid.

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Juarez got the mount aboard Valid in the six-horse 2015 Grade 3 Philip Iselin stakes at Monmouth Park as the second choice for trainer Marcus Vitali and owner Crossed Sabres Farm, LLC. In largely a frontrunning score, he won by over three lengths. Over the first weekend after losing his apprenticeship, the feat gave Juarez early confidence.

“He’s the horse that made my career,” praised Juarez. “You’re an apprentice and then year one, day one, you are considered a journeyman and you’re the same as somebody that’s been riding 20 plus years. It’s very hard to transition from an apprentice to becoming a journeyman.”

Following up the win, Valid repeated with Juarez aboard in the Groomstick Stakes in late September at Gulfstream Park before finishing fifth in the Breeders Cup Dirt Mile at Keeneland.

“I went to Florida with him and that’s what started my career going down to Florida,” said Juarez, who spent half a decade in Florida while going to Monmouth in the summers. “He had the heart of a champion, and he was my buddy.”

Juarez followed Valid’s career through his later years, from Fonner Park to Arapahoe Downs. He found his owner, Tom Thurman through a phone call to the racing office at Arapahoe Downs and worked out a deal to take the gelding once his racing career was finished. While Juarez was having dinner one night, Thurman made the call. Trainer Kelly Breen helped Juarez find van transportation, and Valid was picked up and brought to Pimlico.

He retired to Juarez’s mom, Carol Linton’s farm, where horsemanship was never an issue considering the family’s lineage.

Juarez’s father, Calixto, came from Mexico, where he rode horses and bulls, to the US when he was 14 as a hot walker and groom. He developed as a rider when he was 19 and had a career until 2009.

Juarez’s mother ponied horses at Maryland tracks while working through nursing school. It was a match made at the track.

“She was ponying horses, and they met each other on horseback,” cited Juarez. “She said he looked better with a helmet.”

Juarez’s mother still rides foxhunts with Carrollton Hounds, while his father trains a few at Laurel. Nik is the fourth generation of his family to work with horses.

Now Juarez finds himself the protégé of the dean of trainers and a Hall of Fame jockey – and on the threshold of America’s greatest race.

“Wayne likes his competitive spirit,” Stevens said. “Mentally he is in a good place right now. We have a lot in common. He wears his heart on a sleeve and is fiery and competitive.”

Juarez appreciates the opportunity — and the guidance he’s receiving from two legends in the business.

“Iron sharpens iron. I’m very blessed to be around guys where their accolades speak for themselves,” Juarez said. “When you are dealing with guys like that, you can go to them for advice, and it holds value. It holds weight as a young rider and as a young man still. You get their wisdom.”

Juarez does not take his Triple Crown chances for granted.

“You never want to make an assumption,” he said. “I’ve done that before in my career and you end up getting your heart broken. It’s one date, it’s not a marriage. Obviously, you want to ride those type of horses, but you don’t want to get to hung up. It’s part of the game.”