Veteran Jockey Luca Panici Retires After 943 North American Winners

The son of Vittorio Panici, Italy's leading jockey through the 1970s and 1980s, Luca Panici rode his last race at Gulfstream Park on March 29, bringing down the curtain on 15 years in South Florida and a North American career that reached 943 winners. He is 52. He is done riding. And he is not going anywhere.

Panici closed out the 2025-2026 Gulfstream Championship Meet, the same venue that became his professional home after he first arrived in the United States in 2005, returned following a stint in Italy, and eventually settled permanently in South Florida around 2010. Over that stretch he became as familiar a fixture at the Hallandale Beach track as the rail itself, working through barn schedules, building relationships with local trainers, and stacking wins at a pace that never grabbed national headlines but never stopped either.

The career totals demand a second look: 943 North American winners to go alongside more than 500 European victories, giving Panici a combined ledger north of 1,400 wins across two continents. Three of those North American wins came in graded stakes. He broke through in the 2012 Azalea Stakes (G3) aboard Another Romance, then waited eight years before Sole Volante carried him to a Grade 3 victory in the Sam F. Davis Stakes at Tampa Bay Downs in 2020, a race that briefly put that horse at the edge of the Kentucky Derby conversation. His final graded win landed at home: Maryquitecontrary in the 2023 Inside Information Stakes (G2) at Gulfstream Park, exactly where he belonged.

During the just-concluded Championship Meet, Panici rode 14 winners, the kind of quiet productivity that defined his entire Florida run.

"I feel good. It's time. I'm 52. I made the decision to retire right now when I still have business," Panici said Sunday.

That sentence is the whole biography. Jockeys rarely leave cleanly; the sport tends to make that decision for them through injury, weight, or simply the slow disappearance of mounts. Panici himself dealt with broken ribs, a fractured collarbone, and foot injuries at various points, and at one stretch absorbed three fractures in six months. That he reached the closing card of a full Championship Meet and walked away upright, on his own timeline, is a rarer outcome than his win total alone suggests.

His post-riding plans keep him in the ecosystem he never left. Panici will join Gulfstream's operations and track crew, swapping post-position battles for the early-morning work that keeps a racetrack running. The specific duties are still being sorted out.

"I don't know yet what I'm going to do, but I will be on the track crew," he said. "I'm not going to ride, but I'm not leaving the track."

For a regional colony built on continuity and personal trust, that matters. Panici's institutional knowledge of South Florida racing, from turf course nuances to the individual tendencies of horses he watched develop across multiple seasons, is the kind of accumulated experience a track cannot simply hire off a résumé. His presence on the operations side puts a rider's perspective inside a crew that shapes the surface where every subsequent race will be decided.

The Italian-born son of a champion who came to South Florida chasing a career and stayed to build one finishes with a record that holds up: more than 1,400 wins across two continents, three graded stakes, and a final season that ended on his own terms. The saddle is retired. The backstretch is not.