Post by Laurence Aikens

Alonzo "Lonnie" Clayton (March 27, 1876 – March 17, 1917) was an American jockey in Thoroughbred horse racing described by author Edward Hotaling, as "one of the great riders of the New York circuit all through the 1890s" and who holds the record as the youngest jockey to ever win the Kentucky Derby. He was given a job as a stablehand and exercise rider for the Baldwin stable then the following year he moved east to the Clifton Race Trackin NJ where the fourteen-year-old began his professional riding career. Immediately successful, in 1891 at Morris Park Racetrack in The Bronx, he won the important Champagne Stakes aboard Bashford Manor Stable's two-year-old colt, Azra. On May 11, 1892, he rode Azra to victory in the Kentucky Derby which at age fifteen. At Monmouth Park in NJ he won the 1893 Monmouth Handicapand went on to win the fall riding title at Churchill Downs. One of the leading money winners on the East Coast racing circuit during the 1890s, he won races from NY to CA. He captured back-to-back runnings of the Kentucky Oaks, the latter a year in which he won 144 races and finished in the money sixty percent of the time. In 1895 he won the Arkansas Derby and in 1896 finished third in the Preakness Stakes aboard the filly, Intermission. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence