CYPRESS — At Los Alamitos Race Course in Orange County, there’s nobody better than Angela Aquino at training thoroughbred horses.
Or at teaching people a lesson.
It’s 2015. On video still floating around online, a couple of trackside broadcasters are heralding a new name at the top of the thoroughbred trainer standings for Los Al’s night racing meet. Angie Aquino holds an early-season lead in race victories over Chuck Treece, who has been winning training championships year after year.
One of the broadcasters ends on a skeptical note.
“She just doesn’t have the same amount of horses as Chuck Treece,” he says of Aquino, “so there’s no way that she’s going to be able to carry that all the way through December.”
She almost does, though, taking the contest down to the final week before settling for a close second to Treece in victories and purse earnings.
Now it’s 2024. After winning the Los Alamitos thoroughbred training title last year, Aquino is on her way to defending it, leading the thoroughbred standings (nine wins, 22.5%) and overall standings (19 wins, 16.8%) at the track whose Friday and Saturday night races feature quarter horses and thoroughbreds. She has carried her success not just for a season but for going on a decade, moving up to fourth on Los Al’s all-time thoroughbred trainer standings with 346 wins.
“I’ve proven people wrong,” Aquino said one morning this week.
Aquino, 43, began her equine education early as a fourth-generation horse woman.
She’s the daughter of trainer Betsy Mora, who’s retired, and jockey Carlos Aquino, who died in 2020 at age 64. Her sister, Elena Andrade, trains quarter horses at Los Al. Elena’s husband, Oscar, was a jockey before a 2021 racing accident left him paralyzed from the waist down. Their son Oscar Jr. is a quarter-horse jockey at Remington Park in Oklahoma City – the family’s fifth generation in the sport.
Angie was born in Santa Rosa, a stop on the California…
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