Doctors Have Said I Will Never Ride a Horse Again Due to My Back
The Hall of Fame jockey is riding a difficult-back dining room chair, the only one in his house his broken body tin can navigate.
His weakened easily are clutching invisible reins, grabbing at the air, again and again.
His head is motionless because of a cervix brace, but his eyes are moving, filling, brimming with tears.
"Ane minute, I'm winning the Triple Crown,'' Victor Espinoza says softly. "The side by side infinitesimal, I can't feed myself.''
The spacious Del Mar home is quiet. The room with the shiny silvery trophies is darkened. A mechanical horse no longer creaks.
This is a peek beyond the silk. This is the other side of the roses. This is where the ride ends, and reality begins.
On a July Sunday morning at the famed seaside Del Mar race track, Espinoza was riding Bobby Abu Dhabi in a conditioning when their worlds literally disappeared from underneath them.
Bobby Abu Dhabi suddenly complanate of an apparent middle attack. Espinoza all of a sudden constitute himself riding on air.
The giant horse immediately died. The 5-foot-1, 112-pound man flew into the dirt and broke his neck.
(Alex Evers / Getty Images)
(K.C. Alfred / San Diego Marriage-Tribune)
Espinoza was initially paralyzed. He has since regained feeling in everything except his left arm, yet his mobility is greatly limited and his muscles are wracked with uncertainty.
He requires a 24-hr caregiver to assist him go out of bed, clothes and bathe. He can walk, just non always steadily. He can feed himself, but slowly, and more often than not with i hand. He is getting stronger every day, but remains confined to the neck caryatid and experiences occasional bouts of searing pain.
"Your trunk has to reset itself, to learn how to do everything all once again,'' says Espinoza, 46. "Information technology'due south the toughest thing I've ever done in my life."
He plans on riding again simply says he can't even recollect well-nigh it right at present. He spends his days abroad from the rail where he one time won seven races in one 24-hour interval, fighting through the isolation of physical therapy and mental frustration.
"What happened to Victor is the thing we fear the most,'' says boyfriend Hall of Fame jockey Gary Stevens, who has visited Espinoza. "A spinal injury. Somebody who might non exist returning to the saddle. It's a existent heart-opener.''
That fear lives daily with Espinoza, and he discussed it openly in a contempo 90-minute interview in his dwelling house. The usually clean-shaven athlete, once glamorous plenty to appear on "Dancing With The Stars,'' was sporting a scraggly goatee because he cannot shave. His hair is growing long because he cannot remove his neck brace for a trim.
He spent most of the interview sitting in that hard-back chair, but at the terminate of the conversation, he summoned caregiver Rosie Aponte to accompany him on a slow trek up a set of stairs to a glistening souvenir sitting in a glass case.
(K.C. Alfred / San Diego Marriage-Tribune)
He wanted to prove his company the brownish leather and black-cushioned saddle that he used to ride American Pharoah to victory in the 2015 Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes, resulting in racing's kickoff Triple Crown winner in 37 years.
"I was one time a champion,'' he says. "But when we ride the horses, at that place is a reason nosotros are followed by an ambulance.''
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To outsiders, it sounds absurd, this idea that a legendary jockey would climb out of bed on a Sunday morning to ride a horse for practice, for gratis.
Why on earth would a guy like Espinoza, who has been aboard winners in seven Triple Crown races, with more than iii,300 career victories, do that?
Turns out, it'south function of the game. Trainers value a jockey's input on certain stakes horses, and if those jockeys value their mounts, they will come up when called.
"That's part of our job; that's only what nosotros do,'' Espinoza says, then on that 3rd Sunday in July, he hustled across the highway to work out Bobby Abu Dhabi as a favor to trainer Peter Miller.
Espinoza had ridden the 4-year-old in his previous iv races, twice finishing first, and was going to race in the post-obit weekend's Bing Crosby Stakes. When he saddled Bobby Abu Dhabi that morn, he hugged him like an old friend and whispered into his mane.
"You have intendance of me, I accept care of you.''
Information technology is the aforementioned thing he whispers to all of the horses he rides, horses with whom he believes he shares a eye. Since riding everything from donkeys to sheep to bulls while growing up as the 11th of 12 children on a farm in Hidalgo, Mexico, he has shared this feeling with everything he has saddled.
He and so badly wanted to ride horses for a living, he paid for jockey school by driving a motorbus in United mexican states Urban center. Today he notwithstanding views his task as a privilege, and his role as a flagman.
(M.C. Alfred / San Diego Marriage-Tribune)
"They're similar humans. It's my job to take care of them. It's just me and the horse; only us, together,'' he says. "The horses know. They take conviction in me. They know I will never let anything bad happen to them.''
But then, several long strides earlier the finish line at the end of that Sunday morning workout, the bottom dropped out.
"My equus caballus disappeared from nether me,'' Espinoza says. "Gone. Just similar that. Gone.''
Espinoza has twice broken his hand and arm from falls, but both times he had a few seconds of warning from a stumbling. Not this time. This equus caballus didn't stumble, it crumbled.
"In 30 years of training, I've never had one autumn like that,'' Miller said. "I've never seen anything similar information technology.''
Espinoza never saw the horse again. He crashed into the track and wound up on his back, covered in clay, unable to castor it off.
"I couldn't experience annihilation; the paramedics even had to get the dirt off my face,'' he recalls. "So I saw the expect 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 passenger of the great Secretariat who is a paraplegic afterward being injured in a fall in 1978.
"I thought, I'g being paralyzed. My heed is going crazy, thinking a lot of crazy things,'' he says. "In my listen I see all the wheelchairs around the barns. I was so scared. I saw was similar, why does this happen to me?''
After all, it is Espinoza who is unremarkably helping the afflicted, as he donates 10 percent of his winnings to City of Hope. It is Espinoza who seemed invincible in winning a remarkable 5 out of six Triple Crown races in 2014 and 2015.
(K.C. Alfred / San Diego Spousal relationship-Tribune)
"He's a large-race rider,'' Miller said. "He's got ice h2o in his veins.''
On that Lord's day morning concluding month, Espinoza simply prayed for feeling in his limbs. He got information technology back, slowly, the right leg coming to life in the ambulance, the left leg moving at the Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, where he was diagnosed with a fracture of his c3 vertebrae in his neck.
He still couldn't move his left arm. Doctors initially thought he had suffered a stroke. A day later, as he was being fed vanilla pudding, it finally sunk in, and he began to cry.
"I idea, I ride all these horses like it was nada, and at present look at me,'' he says.
He also began mourning the loss of Bobby Abu Dhabi, his teammate who was gone before he knew it.
"I cannot save that horse, and I cry for that,'' Espinoza says. "I sat on that powerful animal, felt its speed, such a beautiful thing, and it falls, and I couldn't do annihilation to assist it, and that hurts.''
During his third of 12 days in a hospital and rehabilitation center, his attitude began to brighten when the kickoff trainer visited him. Information technology was — who else? — Bob Baffert.
It was Baffert who worked with Espinoza as American Pharoah'due south trainer. It was Baffert who wanted Espinoza to know how much his bravery was appreciated.
"We forget these jockeys are laying their lives on the line for the states every day,'' Baffert said. "There is nothing worse when you see something happen to them. All the fun and excitement ends. Information technology changes the way yous await at everything.''
Espinoza hopes his story can alter the mode the world looks at jockeys, and understand how quickly they can go from the winner's circle to the arms of a caregiver helping them go out of bed in the middle of the night to use the bathroom.
"Our lives, our dangers, they are real; they are no joke,'' he says. "People should know, this is what we hazard every time nosotros get on a horse.''
The interview complete, Espinoza graciously stands up and begins slowly walking his visitor toward the forepart door. He passes walls of beautifully framed memorabilia, championship silks and photos everywhere. He tin't turn his cervix to meet them. He keeps walking as if they aren't fifty-fifty there.
bill.plaschke@latimes.com
Go more of Bill Plaschke'due south work and follow him on Twitter @BillPlaschke
Source: https://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-victor-espinoza-plaschke-20180818-story.html
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