YUTA SATO
Slowly but surely, I'm going to start introducing a few Japanese jockeys through these pages, as hardly anything gets written about them in English, and even less if they're NAR people as opposed to JRA riders. I'm going to start with Yuta Sato - the softly-spoken but determined NAR jockey that I feel will make a great trainer one day.

Yuta was born on the 6th July 1975 in Kawasaki City, Kanagawa Prefecture, on the opposite side of Tokyo Bay to where I'm based. Good at a number of sports and wanting to be a professional sportsman of some sort, his small frame was naturally suited to Keiba. He started racing in April 1993, being attached to the Kawashima Stable virtually from the day the legendary Funabashi operation opened for business.

His win tally eventually passed the century mark in 2005, which would tend to point towards slow progress, but, in actual fact, his winning rate is over six percent. More than the actual racing, it was recognized early on that working as a training partner was his forte, and he helped bring through the likes of Adjudi Mitsuo and Furioso, to name but a few.

Currently the head of the Chiba Prefecture Jockey Association, early on in the year he had awful fall involving several horses, but - despite all the broken bones - came back quickly and fearlessly, and with a characteristic smile on his face. It's always a pleasure to see his distinctive pink silks in the starting gate...