Talliyah Timentwa may be introverted and small of stature, but no one will ever confuse her for being timid. To the contrary, the word that her acquaintances use most frequently to describe the 19-year-old apprentice jockey is “brave.”
The daughter of a former jockey, Ernest “Rocky” Timentwa, who competed at Desert Park in the British Columbian interior, Talliyah grew up just south of the Canadian border in central Washington’s Okanogan County, home of the Confederated Tribes of Colville, to which she and her family belong. She started riding horses at age 3 and soon began participating in rodeos. At age 12, she began racing in Indian relays, jumping off and on moving, bareback horses with little to no protective equipment.
“My mom wanted me to stick with rodeo,” she said. “I wanted to start racing a lot earlier in the relays, but it took two years to convince my mom.”
At 13, Timentwa won the ladies’ national Indian relay championship in Walla Walla, Wash., and won it again four years later in Casper, Wyoming. She also took part in qualifying heats for the Omak Stampede’s famously intimidating “Suicide Race,” where horses and riders race 225 feet down the side of a bluff and must cross the Okanogan River before reaching the finish line.
After that, Timentwa set her sights on becoming a Thoroughbred rider, and her family had some friends who could help her.
Dione Asmussen, a distant cousin of Steve Asmussen, also grew up in Okanogan County and trains a small string of horses at Emerald Downs. She’s known Rocky Timentwa and his family since she was a kid, and her husband, Brad Zabreznik, raced with Rocky in B.C. Together, they hatched a plan to approach Candi Cryderman, a veteran Emerald Downs trainer with a slightly bigger stable, about taking Talliyah on as a groom and exercise rider, and Cryderman agreed.
“The tribe that she’s from worked with me,” said Cryderman. “She came over for the first four months and they actually paid her salary. It was a win-win on both sides. I super appreciated that. Dione and Brad knew the talent that she has. I talked to Talliyah and just knew immediately she was very bright, seemed like a very nice young lady.”
Timentwa moved into a dormitory on the Emerald backstretch and began mucking stalls and hot-walking horses for Cryderman. There was a learning curve to clear, but it wasn’t long before she was working horses on the Emerald oval for Cryderman, who describes her as “phenomenally talented.”
“I had never switched a stick,” Timentwa said of adapting to Thoroughbred racing. “Riding just came kind of naturally. Now I have to think about clocking and lead changes and navigating what different trainers want with their horses. Figuring out babies has been really fun as well. I’d broken horses in a different way, not for racing. Thoroughbred babies, training them for racing is a totally different ball game.”
On June 21, Cryderman decided to up the ante, naming Timentwa as her rider in a claiming race, where she finished seventh aboard Ruby Rendezvous. The following day, she finished second aboard another Cryderman horse, Internet Bidder, and has twice ridden Gracie’s Choice for Asmussen.
“There’s not a jockey here that can get a horse out of the gates better,” said Asmussen. “She’s a horsewoman first and foremost. She cares deeply about the horses and has a huge connection to them. She’s fearless.”
Entering Friday night’s races, those attributes had yet to translate into a win at Emerald, where she has that lone second-place finish to show for 10 local starts. But from Aug. 8-10 at the Tillamook Fair meet in Oregon, Timentwa went 3 for 10, winning the Don Hooker Jenck Memorial Stakes, and this is the first racing week in which she has mounts on all three days at Emerald.
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On Sunday, Timentwa has two mounts in a pair of six-furlong claiming races – one aboard Jazzy Love in race 2 and another aboard Cause I’m Lucky in race 9. Like Timentwa, the trainers of these horses are winless at this Emerald meet, but they’re racing at a level Sunday where victory at least seems possible, if not especially plausible.
Asmussen has no doubt the tide will soon turn for Timentwa.
“I see amazing qualities in her,” said Asmussen. “I see her probably ditching us and moving back east eventually.”
For her part, Timentwa praised the mentoring ability of fellow Emerald jockey Javier Matias and said her “ultimate career goal would be to be remembered.”
“Coming where I’m from, there are still barriers as girls, like there’s always been,” she added. “My hope would be that people will look at me as an equal to the rest of these jockeys, not being looked at as a girl. I’m just a jockey.”
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