Espinoza keeps tight rein on riding future

Victor Espinoza was too busy on Wednesday heading to a doctor’s office to notice the name of Accelerate at the top of the 19 pre-entries for the $6 million Breeders’ Cup Classic on Nov. 3. It was just as well.

If he thought about it for too long, Espinoza might let himself feel rotten about missing a chance to fill a hole in his Hall of Fame portfolio, not to mention earning the jockey’s cut of the monster pot. Accelerate and Espinoza won both the Santa Anita Handicap and Gold Cup at Santa Anita this season at the Classic distance of a mile and a quarter, so history seemed to be lining up on their side.

That all changed on the morning of July 22 at Del Mar – one year to the day Espinoza first rode Accelerate – when the stakes-winning sprinter Bobby Abu Dhabi fractured an ankle during a workout with Espinoza and suffered a fatal fall. Espinoza lay conscious near his stricken nd mount, in mortal fear of the paralysis that seemed to have taken hold of his left arm and leg.

The fear eventually passed as feeling and movement returned, but damage had been done to cervical vertebrae. Now, three months after the accident, Espinoza is still working hard to return to full health at home in Del Mar. Both physically and mentally, he could not be further from the racing world going on without him.

“Some days I forget the races exist,” Espinoza said, adding a laugh at how strange that must have sounded.

“My health is the most important thing I need to know about right now,” he added. “I know I got lucky.”

Since he was released from the hospital and freed from a restrictive neck brace, Espinoza has been on a steady rehabilitation program that carefully tests the extent of his recovery.

“I walk in the morning, two or three miles around the house,” he said. “I can only run a little bit, maybe 20 yards, because the impact on the ground tells me I’m not quite healed yet. I lift small weights, but I’m only up to about 20 pounds in my left arm.”

Since the pull on the reins attached to a halfton Thoroughbred in flight is considerably more than 20 pounds, Espinoza is aware of the challenge.

“My doctor never talks about me going back to work,” Espinoza said. “I asked if I could start lifting more than 20 pounds. He said no. Did that mean I could forget about going back to work this year? Or then how about next year, which is only in a couple months away? That got him laughing.”

These are the negotiations all jockeys attempt when injured. On the ground they are at sea. The sooner they can return to competition, risking their health at high speed wearing a helmet, a vest, and paper thin pants, the sooner life returns to their version of normal.

Espinoza has been blessed with a successful career wildly in contrast to his tough childhood in the Mexican state of Hidalgo, to the northeast of Mexico City. His older brother Jose also became a U.S. jockey, and suffered a careerending brain injury at Saratoga in 2013. Jose had 856 winners, while Victor is stalled at 3,358. Between them they rode in more than 32,000 races.

Not surprisingly, Jose was at Victor’s side soon after the Del Mar accident. And, of course, brothers will be brothers.

“For a while I was not allowed to drive, but Jose was here, and we had a handicapped parking sticker,” Espinoza said, warming to a story. “He’s handicapped, too, but to see him it looks like there’s nothing wrong with him. So we’d go out and we’d park in a handicap space and get out of the car walking perfectly fine. I said to him, ‘I know what people are thinking – look at those lazy Mexicans!’ We had to laugh about it.” It beats the alternative. “One day we went to a nursery across the street to buy a couple of plants for the house,” Espinoza continued. “We got home, and he started to dig a hole, but the impact of the shovel made him dizzy. I told him he’d better lay down, but what could I do? I could only hold the shovel with one hand! So we asked my housekeeper to dig the hole.”

Espinoza was surprised to learn that so many horses wanted to line up against Accelerate in the Classic. Still, he knows enough to hedge.

“He can be a very complicated horse,” Espinoza said. “He would come up with something different each race. Like when I rode him at Oaklawn, going into the first turn, he suddenly turned his head and started looking to the outside.”

They were beaten a neck by City of Light in the Oaklawn Handicap, Accelerate’s only loss of the year.

“Over time I figured out what he liked and what he hated,” Espinoza added. “Now it looks like he’s really put it all together.” And now he must put himself back together. “The bones are healed, so the doctor’s main concern is the spinal cord,” Espinoza said. “An injury involving the spinal cord is no joke. For that reason, who knows? I might not ever be able to ride again. But we don’t know yet.”