At 42, Sergio Rabadan lands third in first race ride at Monmouth Park

Sergio Rabadan made his first trip to the post as a rider count the hard way, finishing third aboard Richie’s Valentine in Race 2 at Monmouth Park and earning $2,240 for the effort. At 42, the trainer’s debut in the saddle was the kind of backstretch story that rarely reaches the afternoon card, but it landed with real force because it came from years of horse work, not a sudden leap of faith.

Rabadan’s path to the mount ran through the barn, not the grandstand. He spent from 1999 until J. Willard Thompson’s death in 2018 as an exercise rider and foreman for the longtime Monmouth fixture, a man who dominated the local training scene for more than 50 years and won Monmouth training titles in 1975, 1976, 1977 and 2001. That history matters here because Rabadan did not arrive at his first race ride as a novice to Thoroughbreds. He had been around the game for decades before he ever asked for a saddle assignment.

The move into riding came after Joe Ioia kept pushing him to try it, with the idea surfacing in May. Rabadan said becoming a trainer had always been his first dream and becoming a jockey his second, and he said he was not nervous because he gallops horses in the mornings and breaks horses from the gate regularly. Monmouth described him as a 10-pound bug for the debut, and the mount came on Richie’s Valentine, a horse he trains and one owned by his wife, Chelsea Sims.

The race itself was a claiming event at one mile and 70 yards on dirt, and the official chart showed Spanish Girl and Bee N Dee ahead of Richie’s Valentine in the top two spots. Rabadan was back in action later on the same card, saddling Prime Motive to a fourth-place finish in the fifth race. The afternoon fit the profile of the horseman Monmouth has seen for years, one who manages Prancing Hill Farm for Ioia, trains a 15-horse stable of his own and, after going out on his own in 2024, came into the meet with two wins from 16 starters.

That blend of roles is what makes the story resonate on a Monmouth backstretch that has always rewarded people willing to work every angle. Ioia called Rabadan a very hard worker who can do it all, and longtime trainer Chuck Spina, for whom Rabadan has worked the past three years, called him a workaholic who can train and ride horses. On a track where Thompson once built a legacy, Rabadan’s first ride felt like the next chapter starting exactly where it should.