Hard times revisited by Miller, Espinoza

So what kind of weekend did you have? If you were lucky, you had a weekend like John Sadler and young Drayden Van Dyke, who together seized both Saturday and Sunday at Del Mar with victories in the San Diego Handicap and Eddie Read Stakes, both Grade 2 events of some consequence.

If it started well but ended poorly, like a road trip gone wrong, be thankful you did not ride the same roller-coaster as trainer Peter Miller, who won the Grade 2 San Clemente on Saturday with the indomitable filly War Heroine, then spent Sunday dealing with the loss of the quality sprinter Bobby Abu Dhabi to what appeared to be cardiac arrest.

And if your weekend was a total wash – if the picnic was rained out or the relatives lingered too long – Victor Espinoza would have traded places in a heartbeat. After his top mount, Santa Anita Handicap winner Accelerate, was scratched from Saturday’s San Diego, the Hall of Famer fractured his C-3 vertabra the next morning when he fell while working the mortally stricken Bobby Abu Dhabi.

Espinoza, 46, spent Sunday night in Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, just south of the racetrack. His agent, Brian Beach, was at his side that evening as doctors stabilized Espinoza’s neck and continued to monitor his left shoulder and arm for possible nerve damage.

“He’s doing okay,” Beach reported. “They don’t want him to move too much until the nerves calm down. They’re doing sensitivity testing on his limbs every hour just to make sure things are progressing in the right direction.”

Espinoza and Beach have been together since early 2013, when the rider was coming off his worst earning season in more than a dozen years. A much better 2013 was capped in late December when Espinoza landed the mount on a 2-year-old named California Chrome.

Over the ensuing seasons, Espinoza won the 2014 Kentucky Derby and Preakness with California Chrome, the 2015 Triple Crown with American Pharoah, and the 2016 Dubai World Cup with California Chrome. In 2017 he became the first native of Mexico to be inducted into the Thoroughbred Racing Hall of Fame.

Presuming Espinoza will be sidelined for the summer, this is the first significant injury suffered by the popular veteran for several years. Espinoza has attributed his resilience to not only good fortune on the racetrack, but also to a daily fitness regimen that girds bones and joints with constantly toned muscle.

His small stature allows him to put on the kind of muscle taller jockeys must avoid. That was not enough, however, to protect him from the damage of being launched head first to the Del Mar dirt Sunday morning when Bobby Abu Dhabi collapsed in mid-stride.

“It was awful,” said Peter Miller, who was clocking Bobby Abu Dhabi’s work from the grandstand. “He fell like a ton of bricks, but I guess they won’t know for sure what happened until the autopsy.”

Bobby Abu Dhabi, winner of the Grade 2 Kona Gold earlier this year, was prepping for a possible start in the Grade 1 Bing Crosby Stakes this coming weekend. He was owned by Gary Hartunian’s Rockingham Ranch.

“Someone once told me this business is ‘hours and hours of anguish surrounding seconds of joy,’ ” Miller said. “When something like this happens I’d like to stay in bed under the covers, but a trainer doesn’t have that luxury. You’ve got to get back out there and do the best you can for your horses every day.”

Miller, who has started 322 horses this year, was asked to recall the last one he lost, morning or afternoon. He paused. “The fire,” was his reply. Five from Miller’s 80-horse stable at San Luis Rey Downs were killed as a result of the fire that ravaged barns at the training center northeast of Del Mar last Dec. 7. One of those 80 turned loose by Miller’s brave crew to escape the flames was War Heroine, an impressive maiden-race winner who was entered to run in the Starlet Stakes at Los Alamitos on Dec. 9. Her scratch card could have read “missing,” since it was days before all of the horses turned loose at San Luis Rey were accounted for.

“I mean, she could have been dead by the side of Highway 76, for all we knew at the time,” Miller said.

War Heroine, owned by Gary Barber, was located at a nearby farm and joined the evacuated horses at Del Mar. She returned to the races in January with a disappointing effort in the Santa Ynez, then rebounded to win the overnight Sweet Life Stakes sprinting on turf. A subsequent trip to New York for the Busher was a flop, but War Heroine flashed brilliance once again sprinting on grass in her race before the one-mile San Clemente.

“Are they limited in their lung capacity after what they went through in the fire?” Miller noted. “I’m not smart enough to know the answer. She was a young horse without established form, so we didn’t know yet what she could do, and it has appeared as if she didn’t want to go long – until Saturday.”

War Heroine led the one-mile San Clemente from the start under Tyler Baze and held off Ollie’s Candy and Ms Bad Behavior in a threehorse blanket finish.

“I was very proud of her,” Miller said. “What a heart.”

What an understatement.