On Saturday at Pimlico Race Course, eight horses will be ushered expertly into their starting gate stalls. Assistant starters will yell out when there’s two, and then only a single horse left to load, and again when all the doors are shut.
Bruce Wagner will listen intently for any signs of hang ups, before hitting a button that opens the stall doors and kicks off the 149th Preakness Stakes, the culmination of a process that typically unfolds in a minute or less.
“When it gets quiet, boom! I hit the button and off they go,” said Wagner, who this weekend will be starting the Preakness race for his 21st time.
Wagner, the Maryland Jockey Club’s head starter since 2002, is not the only regular who’s amassed decades of experience making Preakness run. He and other longtime racetrack characters shoulder big responsibilities during the second leg of the Triple Crown.
“I still get butterflies, but I’m getting better at it,” Wagner said. “It’s the biggest race in the country for that one day.”
Wagner, 60, grew up around horses in York, Pennsylvania, and was a jockey as a teenager, before he got too heavy. After working as an assistant starter at Delaware Park, he moved on to Maryland, working Preakness and other races.
Now living on the Eastern Shore, Wagner starts races in Laurel and Timonium in addition to Pimlico. He recalled the 2009 Preakness win by Rachel Alexandra as one of the most memorable, seeing the “impressive” filly beat the boys.
Information about how each of the competing horses behave at the starting gate is compiled leading up to the race, Wagner explained, so that the assistant starters know what they’re working with. The job of an assistant starter — loading the horses into the starting gate — is a physically taxing one, he said.
Edmund Benson and Jeff Dzbynski have both spent over two decades working as assistant starters for the Maryland Jockey Club.
“We’re like an offensive line in football,” Dzbynski said.
For a brief moment before the horses take off on Saturday, all eyes at Pimlico will be on Wagner and his team.
“I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable,” Wagner said of his role, noting that he aims for clean starts to all of his races. “I think if you lose your butterflies … that’s when you should quit.”
The Preakness race generally lasts just under two minutes. Then it’s Dick Hageman’s time to shine as the man who paints the storied weathervane to honor the winning horse and jockey.
“I really feel like I’m the current keeper of the tradition,” said Hageman, who lives and grew up in College Park.
This will be Hageman’s fifth year painting the weathervane atop a cupola in the winner’s circle on the infield, a tradition that dates back to 1909. Before Hageman — who works at a commercial sign shop in Jessup called Art At Work, owned by his wife, Vicky Hageman — it was Lawrence Jones who painted the two-sided horse-and-jockey-shaped weathervane for over 30 years before retiring after the 2019 Preakness.
Hageman, 69, said one year he helped Jones find a workaround for an intricate detail that would have been tricky to paint on the iron jockey outside the stakes barn, and the pair became friends.
On Saturday, after having studied the jockeys’ silks, he’ll paint the weathervane to match the winner’s colors, ascending in a lift with Vicky as his helper and with plenty of lettering enamel. In just 10 to 15 minutes during the trophy ceremony, he’ll complete one side of the painting before finishing up the flip side.
He starts with the cap — a method he picked up from Jones.
“The first time, I was extremely slow,” Hageman said with a laugh, adding that he was nervous. He first painted the weathervane during the 2020 Preakness, which had no crowds. The next year, Hageman said the winning horse’s trainer commented on his excitement seeing the painted weathervane.
“Now with a couple years under my belt, it’s easier to do,” he said. “We’re settling into it.”
He doesn’t think he’ll match Jones’ decades-long streak, but said he’ll continue as long as he can.
Michael Singletary, the Maryland Jockey Club’s vice president of security operations since 2014, also has decades of experience at Pimlico.
Singletary began working during Preakness when he was hired as a security guard in 1990, when he was a correctional officer with the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. Ten years ago, he became head of security for the race.
Singletary, 59, said he’s responsible for making sure that Pimlico is “safe and secure.” His morning will start hours before the sun rises on Black-Eyed Susan Day and Preakness Day, putting into action plans that call for over 1,000 security workers on Friday and more than 1,500 on Saturday. They’re contracted or coming from federal, state and local law enforcement to conduct bag checks, help attendees find their way around and manage crowd access to the infield for the Saturday evening concert, among other duties.
“We eat, sleep and drink security,” said Singletary, also known as Major Mike. “We’re never comfortable, because you never know what could happen.”
Whereas Preaknesses of the past allowed attendees to bring in their own alcohol — and featured rowdy crowds — he said the infield experience now is more of a “family-friendly type event.”
Growing up in Edmondson Village, Singletary attended Carver Vocational-Technical High School and said he’d never been to Preakness. Once he got a glimpse while working at Pimlico, he was hooked.
“I fell in love with the sport,” said Singletary, who now lives in Pikesville. “Most people don’t see the behind-the-scenes operation, and how these horses are really cared for and loved.”
In an office at Pimlico, he said there’s a clock that counts down to Preakness. For Singletary and others, the highly-anticipated day is something special.
“We got a different gallop,” he said.
