To Maryland horsemen, the dips in the jockey's career are mystifying.
"The first time I ever saw him ride as an apprentice rider ... I recognized it right away," Leatherbury said. "He had the true ability - just the way he rode. The hands. He let a horse relax. He kept them off the pace and always knew where he was. Finished well. Horses ran for him, and they still do. ...
"He has ended up as a great rider. What happened in between, I don't know."
Sonia Desormeaux said when her husband first went to California, he had to learn the lesson of humility, and by the time he came back east, he was working on maturity.
"All I'd ever known before then was leading rider, leading rider," Kent Desormeaux said. "I thought it was me that made the difference between winning and losing. I thought they were lucky to have me on their horses. I needed to remember what they had done for me."
Once that lesson was learned, Desormeaux quickly found better rides and by 1998 was on Real Quiet, His success continued until 2005, when he hit his next skid. His longtime, go-to trainers weren't getting the best horses.
"I was always riding for the same people, but the people I was riding for weren't winning the way they had been," said Desormeaux, who led the Southern California jockey standings 11 times in the 1990s.
Desormeaux was getting what his agent, Mike Sallito, calls "stale" and Desormeaux calls "sulky and sour."
Unhappy, he picked up his tack in 2006 and moved to New York.
"The hardest thing is trying to stay steady in a sport where everything around you is constantly changing," veteran Maryland rider Mario Pino said. "The trainers change, the owners change, the jockey colony changes. Even the horses change."
When Desormeaux moved east, "It was like being a bug boy [apprentice] again," he said. "I enjoyed it. Seeing new faces. Friendly faces. In California, they'd spin like a top when they saw me coming. Here, I'd walk in a barn and they'd say, `Welcome to the East Coast.'"
Big Brown's majority owner Mike Iavarone saw the passion and hired Desormeaux to ride his everyday horses.
"For the last year, Kent has gone down on his belly for us," Iavarone said. "Obviously, all of our horses aren't as good as Big Brown, but Kent rode every one of them the same. Every race is like the Kentucky Derby for Kent."
