Delgado earns first training win at Laurel Park with In Honor of Jeff

In Honor of Jeff turned Alberto Delgado’s training breakthrough into a comeback, rallying from last to win Laurel Park’s sixth race and give the former jockey his first victory as a trainer. The six-furlong, $12,500 non-winners-of-two claimer for 3-year-olds and up went off at 2:37 p.m. on a fast dirt track, and In Honor of Jeff stopped the clock in 1:13.32 with Jean Gregor Briceno aboard.

The win was Delgado’s ninth starter since he stepped away from riding full time on Dec. 28, 2025, and it arrived in the same place where his next career began taking shape. Laurel Park’s retirement notice said Delgado was ending more than 40 years in the saddle and moving on to train horses, a shift that gave this first victory a different kind of weight than an ordinary maiden in the charts. For a horseman who spent decades making his name from the tack room and the winner’s circle as a jockey, the sight of one of his own runners finishing fastest on the far turn carried the kind of emotional charge that box scores never capture.

Delgado’s riding résumé explains why the first training win drew attention beyond a small claimer. Equibase lists him with 2,951 wins from 25,533 starts and earnings of $42,069,132, along with 115 stakes victories and 10 graded wins. He was the Eclipse Award champion apprentice jockey in 1982, and his best-known big-race moment came with Oliver’s Twist, who won the 1995 Federico Tesio before finishing second in the Preakness four weeks later. That career is what made the transition to training worth watching, and the Laurel result suggested the move was overdue rather than ornamental.

The ownership tag made the victory feel like the first page of a business, not just a personal milestone. The winner was owned by A. Delgado Racing Stable, LLC, tying the trainer directly to the horse in the winner’s circle, and the breeder was No Guts No Glory Farm. On the Mid-Atlantic circuit, where a trainer’s early success often decides how quickly horsemen keep sending stock, a first win from a veteran like Delgado matters because it tells the backstretch he can do more than ride a good horse well. It tells them he can start building one, too.