Sunday Reads

Jockey Victor Espinoza, who piloted American Pharoah to a Triple Crown in 2015, is now just trying to survive after being seriously injured in a riding accident a couple months ago.  His mount suffered a fatal heart attack and collapsed, throwing Espinoza.

Now Victor has to relearn everything.

His riding career is probably over.

Espinoza never saw the horse again. He crashed into the track and wound up on his back, covered in dirt, unable to brush it off.

“I couldn’t feel anything; the paramedics even had to get the dirt off my face,’’ he recalls. “Then I saw the look in their eyes and I said, ‘Oh no.’’’

His mind flashed to memories of paralyzed jockeys visiting the backstretch. He thought of another Triple Crown jockey, Ron Turcotte, the rider of the great Secretariat who is a paraplegic after being injured in a fall in 1978.

“I thought, I’m being paralyzed. My mind is going crazy, thinking a lot of crazy things,’’ he says. “In my mind I see all the wheelchairs around the barns. I was so scared. I saw was like, why does this happen to me?’’


I wish him well.
_____

It takes a lot of guts to challenge the trans narrative.

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