The return of Shannon Beauregard
The hot sun coppering her face, barely a teasing, whisper of a wind coming out of the west, jockey Shannon Beauregard was doing what she had done a thousand times — working a good-looking, young chestnut thoroughbred down the stretch at Northlands Park.
“I had just asked the horse to pick up his pace for the last sixteenth of a mile,” she said of Senor Jerry, a horse she had won with the last time she was on its back. “It was no different than any other morning.”
Then, in a plaintive heartbeat, it all went black. Without warning, Senor Jerry took a crippling bad step, shattering one of its front legs, the violence of the loud crack echoing down the lane. Beauregard was catapulted over the horse’s shoulders; her limp body launched headfirst onto the track.
“I don’t remember anything after that,” said Beauregard, wincing at the haunting memory of last year’s July 5 morning. “I don’t remember going down or anything else.” Others do. “It was scary. Real scary,” recalls trainer Ron Grieves, who unhesitatingly hurdled himself over the outside rail and ran to her side. He was the first one there.
“She was face down, and I dug her face out from under the dirt. There was dirt and mud everywhere,” he said of the track that had just been watered. “In her mouth, in her nose, all over the place. I cleared that out as best I could so she could breathe.”
Beauregard’s agent, John Heath, was quickly next on the horribly, ugly scene.
“I was standing beside Grieves, and we were watching her work the horse up the lane. I saw it all unfold,” said Heath. “When she went down, the horse somersaulted and rolled on top of her.
“Shannon was crying in pain. The first thing you worry about is a broken neck. But she was moving her legs, so that was at least a good sign.”
It was about the only good news. Beauregard broke six vertebrae in her thoracic spine. Altogether, there were 20 fractures.
“Everything was busted,” Beauregard said with a pulled-back smile.
For almost five months, about the only thing Beauregard, 33, could do was to lie down on a recliner chair. Lying in a bed was virtually impossible. At the time, most people thought that was it for her riding career. But most people aren’t Beauregard, who has three mounts on Saturday’s card with Northlands’ thoroughbred season kicking off on Friday.
“I never once thought I wouldn’t ride again,” she said.
Her doctors at the Royal Alexandra Hospital, where she spent three weeks, weren’t so sure.
“At first, the decision was whether to operate or not and put two rods in my back,” said Beauregard. “But if they did that, then I probably wouldn’t have been able to ride again, and I just couldn’t bear that thought. I love horse racing too much. It’s something I wanted to do ever since I was a little kid. Before I ever even got on a horse.”
Beauregard got her start riding horses competing in equestrian when she was 12 in her home province of Quebec, winning first-place red ribbons just about everywhere she competed.
“I don’t know if it was because of the movie Black Stallion, which I loved, or what. But something in my head told me I wanted to be a jockey,” said Beauregard, who has won close to 700 races. “Thank God, I got lucky.” It wasn’t the first time. Three years ago, Beauregard was concussed so badly that she was out of action for a year and a half. That happened innocently enough, too. “I wasn’t even going fast,” she recalled. “I was galloping a horse when he started to duck and dive. Both reins were on one side, so I couldn’t control him. I lost my balance and jumped off, but my foot got caught in the stirrup and I landed head first. I had nausea and dizziness for a year.”
That, of course, didn’t stop her either. Nor did a long series of other injuries.
“I’ve had two knee surgeries, two ankle surgeries, broken my fingers, my toes and a couple of ribs. I’ve broken a lot of stuff. But I never once thought I’d never ride again. Instead, it was just a matter of when I rode again.”
In horse racing, it’s also never a matter of when a rider will get hurt. It’s always a matter of when they will get hurt.
“People ask me that all of the time. You can get seriously hurt; you can die doing it. But you can also die just by just crossing the street and getting hit by a bus,” said Beauregard, who clearly knows what a dangerous sport thoroughbred racing is with all her injuries.
“People think I’m crazy. But if you focus on the injuries, you won’t be able to ride properly. You’ll be afraid to take chances and, in horse racing, sometimes you just have to do that,” said Beauregard, who rode in her first race in Kamloops, B.C., in 2002, finishing third in a three-horse race.
“The day you start worrying about getting hurt is the day you should quit.”
The back injury, however, would seem to be on a completely different worn rung.
“There’s going to be a lot of trainers watching her pretty carefully before they commit to riding her again,” said Heath. “It’s not going to be easy.”
But then, nothing has come easy to Beauregard.
“I’ll be fine,” she said. “I can hardly wait to start riding again. I’m ready to kick some butt and start living the dream again.”