You may have seen him ride the winner of the odd race or two at Woodbine (tongue in cheek) and you have certainly heard him shout ‘Good luck to everybody.’ Eurico Rosa Da Silva gets candid with Canadian Thoroughbred about his whirlwind 2018 season, his love for horses (including a very special one), his routines and more.

Happy New Year Eurico and what a year you had in the saddle. You won 237 races in 127 days of racing at Woodbine in 2018, the most any jockey has won at a Woodbine meeting. On Dec. 1, aboard a little filly named Souciologist, you broke Mickey Walls’ record of 221 wins in one meeting set in 1991. When did you think you had a chance at breaking that record?

“When I first won 200 races (2015) at Woodbine, I knew I had set up a challenge for myself. You know, when you ride a race and make a mistake in a race, you need to forget right away and go for the next race. That’s not an easy thing to do. I was just learning how to do that and I thought, ‘If I could do it, I could break the record.’”

You had to sit out the first six racing days of the season because of a suspension from an accident which saw Luis Contreras and Rafael Hernandez both fall in the Sir Barton Stakes late in 2017. Did the accident and suspension affect you negatively?

“In the heat of the moment, after the accident, I was upset. I wasn’t sure I wanted to ride anymore. When you see your friends fall from their horses, you think the worst about everything. But a couple of days later I said to myself, ‘C’mon Eurico’ and I started to analyze and work on points where I can get better. I worked a lot with meditation and visualization. I trained myself to be super focused.”

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