The bugler sounded his call. A bone-numbing chill rushed through the paddock, tearing into the jockey’s silks and biting at his skin. 
It was the ninth and last race on Saturday, a frigid afternoon at Aqueduct, and the only people left in the stands and on the track were those down to their last chance. 

“Go get ’em, Frankie,” someone yelled from the crowd gathering along the rail. 

“Go get ’em, old man.”

Frank Amonte Sr., the wiry 71-year-old jockey, hadn’t won a race in his last 61 tries. He probably will not make it to the Hall of Fame. He has never ridden in the Kentucky Derby, or indeed in any major race. And at his age, he would not be considered by many trainers for the quality mounts they give to big-time jockeys.

But he was chasing something far more important to him than a catalog of impressive wins: the one victory that would make him the only jockey over 70 to win a race. 

“We all want to be a somebody,” Mr. Amonte said. “And that will be the only thing I’ll ever be famous for.”

Willie Shoemaker was merely 54 when he became the oldest jockey to win the Kentucky Derby, in 1986. When Mr. Amonte won his last race, on a summer day in 2005 at Northampton Fair in Massachusetts, he was a day shy of 70. 
It made him the oldest American jockey to win a horse race. He is also the oldest jockey still racing in America. 

Horse racing is a dangerous, grueling sport, in which broken backs, limbs and necks are common. It grinds athletes to permanent disability and sometimes death on the track. 

“But we don’t ever speak about that,” Mr. Amonte said, shortly before Saturday’s race. “We don’t like to talk about the death.” 
He appears to be in impeccable shape, and he says he rarely thinks of retirement, let alone his own mortality. He says his key to longevity and health is eating right and being in bed by 10 each night.

He is a vegetarian and he doesn’t smoke, eat butter or salt, or drink alcohol, except for the occasional glass of wine with dinner, he said. And unlike many jockeys who “waste money and good food” by purging or heaving before a race to make weight, he said he always placed a premium on healthier living. Aqueduct Race Track in Queens and many tracks across the country still accommodate those jockeys who want to purge with a “heaving bowl” in the locker room: a large basin used strictly for vomiting. 

Before Saturday’s race, Mr. Amonte seemed cool and confident, strolling through the track’s betting hall in a gray Kangol hat, crisp white turtleneck and gray cotton trench coat. He and his wife, Ligia, who live in the Boston suburbs, watched the earlier races on monitors from inside the halls. 

“I have my concerns for him, at his age,” said Mrs. Amonte, who is 62. “But this is his thing, his habit he has had for a very long time.”

From the stands, his wife, an ex-wife, two sons — Frank Jr. is a horse trainer; Andrew was once a jockey — and a gaggle of nieces, nephews and old friends wished him luck in cheers and kisses sent with cold hands and chapping lips.
Mr. Amonte weighed in at 125 pounds. Lowering his goggles, he trotted onto the track for a race of six furlongs, or three quarters of a mile, for older horses with no more than two career wins.

He gazed into the lonely stands and smiled as a small legion of fans waved proof of their wagers above their heads. 

His face turned red in the cold; he looked sturdy and fragile at the same time. 
The jockeys entered the starting gate on the far side of the track, urging their horses into the slots on either side of Mr. Amonte, who was riding Eightyninecentsday, an anxious 20-1 gelding with speed and what the jockey later called suspect ankles. Frank Jr. was the trainer.

The last horse slipped into the gate. For the final time of the day, the bell went off, the gates crashed open and the horses were off.

“Nerves. Too late for any of that,” Mr. Amonte said before the race. “After 56 years of riding, it’s too late for any of that.”

As a kid in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Frank Amonte wanted to be a prizefighter like his neighborhood role models, Rocky Graziano and Willy Pep. He was tough, but he was slight, even for the lighter weights.

Back then, it was not uncommon to see beer companies using horses to pull their wagons. Stable owners would let the neighborhood kids ride them and on occasion groom them. 

A fan of horses by age 16, he went down to the Aqueduct looking for a trainer a friend had referred. He never found the guy, but what he saw that day changed his life.

“I got to the gate and there were so many activities going on,” Mr. Amonte recalled. “They were washing the horses, the jockeys were coming back from racing on the track, there was so much going on. I was captured that day and I never left.”

He entered the world of thoroughbred horse racing. It was rougher then, with ruthless jockeys and cutthroat agents.

“Back then you could really get away with a lot of tactics,” Mr. Amonte said. 

“I’ve been whipped in the face; my horse has been beat in the head. We just rode rough back then.” 

Later that year he rode at the Fair Grounds Race Course in New Orleans and finished last. But a fire was ignited that burns in him today, thousands of races later.

So it was on a cold Saturday afternoon in January, in the last race on a slightly muddy track at the Big A, that Mr. Amonte took to the saddle, again, nearly 55 years after first entering the gates there. 

Eightyninecentsday jumped to an impressive start. Mr. Amonte hunkered down; his stirrups were slung low, old-school style. 

Shamrock Trick, Afleet Force and Feelin’ the Blues were the only horses with a jump on him. The group jammed down the first stretch heading toward the bend, when Sultry City began to edge past Eightyninecentsday. Then Speeding Jim crept from behind. Mr. Amonte showed Eightyninecentsday the whip and brought it thundering down to the horse’s behind. His mount made a move, trucking among the pack, stealing ground, inch by inch.

“The gates fling open and it’s 40 miles an hour around the corner,” Mr. Amonte said before the race. “Then you hit the gas and open her up. That last eighth of a mile is something else, though.”

Coming down the stretch toward the finish line, Eightyninecentsday was beginning to tire. The horses in front of him kicked up mud that splattered in Mr. Amonte’s face, speckling his goggles. He stopped whipping the horse, saying later that he had not wanted to ask more than the horse could give. 
Eightyninecentsday labored in the rear of the pack, second to last, where he finished the race. 

“Sorry I couldn’t do it for you,” Mr. Amonte told Vincent Racanelli, the horse’s owner.

Removing his helmet and walking over to the scales in the paddock for a post-race weigh in, he was alone. The fans shouting from the stands had gone, as had most of the family members and friends who gathered in the bitter cold to watch him make his go at history. 

“People think it’s easy to win,” Mr. Amonte said, walking from the paddock into a darkened tunnel leading to the jockey’s room. “But it’s not. Don’t worry though. I’ll get them next time.”

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