Morning Line of Fire

Nine days ago, on the first anniversary of Monarchos’ victory in the Kentucky Derby, Yvonne Azeff struggled to get to Churchill Downs for a television interview. Then, before the 128th Derby was run, she went back to her Louisville home to watch the race on TV.

Azeff, an assistant to John Ward Jr., the trainer of Monarchos, has been getting about with a walker since her release from the hospital three weeks ago. At Gulfstream Park near Miami this winter, she suffered serious brain damage, among other injuries, when a stable pony inexplicably spooked, careened into a chain-link fence and fell on the 40-year-old career horsewoman. Azeff was in a coma for three weeks and didn’t utter a word for four.

“I’m doing good, but I’m not much at covering a distance of ground,” the good-humored Azeff said the other day, lapsing into the racetrack vernacular that she frequently uses. “Right now I think I’m more suited for a sprint rather than a route [race]. We didn’t have a horse in this Derby, and the hassle of the crowd [more than 145,000] would have been too much.”

On Saturday, Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore will run the Preakness, the second race in the Triple Crown series, and Azeff thus far has resisted the temptation to travel to Maryland, where Booklet, a colt she and Ward have trained, will try to foil War Emblem, the Derby winner. Azeff is getting better after her serious accident. She remains, however, a paradox, an unkept statistic in a sport that otherwise thrives on minutiae.

The Jockeys’ Guild, for instance, keeps accurate records that reflect how dangerous it is to ride in races--144 rider deaths since 1940--but the horse industry fails to catalog the deaths and crippling injuries that occur during the morning training hours at racetracks, where hundreds of horses, many inexperienced and high-strung, vie for space as their handlers prepare them for their racing assignments.

“I don’t have any statistics--nobody does--but I’ll grant you that there are just as many serious accidents in the mornings as there are during the races,” said Charlie Woods, a Kentucky jockey who has been riding for more than 25 years. “I’ve seen [morning] riders killed. I’ve seen guys wind up in wheelchairs. This is because you’ve got so much going on at one time. Some horses are working [running against the stopwatch], others are just galloping, and with all these horses, there’s no real traffic pattern. Many of these horses are galloping the wrong way [clockwise] around the track.”

Woods, about to work a nervous filly out of the starting gate at Churchill Downs four years ago, was crushed when the horse fell on him.

“She had a history of not liking the gate, but I wasn’t told that,” said Woods, who has won more than 2,800 races since breaking his pelvis in four places in the 11th race he ever rode.

The nervous filly’s name was Marty’s Party. Another horse nearby kicked dirt as Marty’s Party was ready to enter the gate. Frightened, she wheeled around, dumped Woods and fell on him, breaking his thumb and shattering his wrist. He underwent four operations in the next two years, with plates and screws inserted each time to reinforce the wrist, and finally a nerve was cut to alleviate lingering pain.

That accident happened on July 29, 1998.

On July 29, 2001, Woods was riding at Ellis Park in northern Kentucky when he went down in a race spill, breaking a knee and some ribs and injuring a shoulder.

“I think the message is clear,” Woods said. “I shouldn’t be anywhere near a horse this July 29.”

Many states, California among them, have helmet rules for morning riders. In Florida, where Azeff was injured, the helmet is optional and she wasn’t wearing one--but the average rider is outweighed 9 to 1 by a horse, which makes for a physical mismatch when the animal panics.

Sheri Garcia, 37, was killed on a drizzly morning at Pimlico in late March, less than two weeks from the day she’d hoped to ride in her first race. Garcia, aboard an unraced 3-year-old filly she and her husband, trainer Michael Garcia, had just bought, lost control and was slammed into the half-mile pole on the track’s backstretch. She was wearing a safety vest as well as a helmet.

“It’s funny about the helmet,” said trainer Charles Frock, who employed Garcia and tried to revive her at the scene of the accident. “As hard as she hit, the helmet was intact. It wasn’t broke or anything.”

When Azeff was injured at Gulfstream Park, trainer Allen Jerkens instinctively recalled 1994, when one of his exercise riders was killed during the early morning hours at the same track. In New York, trainer Del Carroll II was reminded of how his father, a consummate horseman, had been killed while trying to control a runaway horse at Keeneland 20 years before.

Track safety standards--at Santa Anita, two ambulances with crews stand by in the morning, same as in the afternoon--are not failsafe. The Carroll death, at the bucolic Keeneland track in Lexington, Ky., occurred in 5 a.m. solitude, when the racing strip is not congested. There were no other horses to get in Carroll’s way--and no witnesses. The details of Carroll’s death at dawn remain unknown. Del Carroll was a rugged 62. Aboard the multiple stakes winner Sportin’ Life, he wasn’t wearing a helmet.

“My father wouldn’t wear a helmet, no matter what,” Del Carroll II said. “I remember a time when we had some horses in Maryland and the people at Pimlico were insisting that he wear a helmet. He told them, ‘The day you get Woody Stephens to wear a helmet is the day I’ll put one on.’”

The legendary Stephens, who is in the Racing Hall of Fame, wore a beat-up gray fedora when he rode his pony to the track. Another Hall of Fame trainer, John Nerud, shunned helmets and was seriously injured when his horse got away from him in New York in the 1960s. Charles Fager, a Boston neurosurgeon, helped Nerud pull through, and the trainer later named one of his most promising horses after the doctor. In 1968, in Chicago, Dr. Fager carried 134 pounds as he ran a mile in a record 1:321/5.

“It’s a rider’s prerogative whether or not to wear a helmet,” said Ward, the trainer who hired Azeff two years ago and later entrusted her with Monarchos. “In New York and Kentucky, they’re stricter with helmet rules, but in Florida a trainer or assistant trainer doesn’t have to wear one.”

Jerkens, a Hall of Fame trainer, is still disturbed about the death of Mary Rafferty, one of his exercise riders, eight years ago at Gulfstream. Vindication, a 4-year-old filly, broke down during a workout and threw the 41-year-old Rafferty to the ground. Jockey Jean Luc-Samyn had been scheduled to ride Vindication that day, but was tied up with horses for other trainers.

Jerkens was on his pony when Vindication and Rafferty went out. His rider was not wearing a safety vest.

“Mary [went down] at the quarter pole, and after that I lost track of her,” Jerkens said. “I’ll always feel bad because there was no special reason for me to work the filly that day. I didn’t have a race in mind, and could as soon have skipped the work. It was a shame. Mary loved horses, and hoped to train someday.”

The injury rate might be high in the mornings, but Del Carroll II, who ponies his own horses, suggests that it could be even worse.

“You’re in close quarters with all these horses and there are a lot of busy moments,” he said. “It’s the law of averages that something eventually is going to happen. When you think about all the traffic, it’s amazing that things run as smoothly as they do. It’s a tribute to the quality of the horsemen that more accidents don’t happen.”

At Santa Anita and Hollywood Park, many trainers still board their ponies without helmets.

“When we first put in the helmet and safety-vest rule, which wasn’t a tremendous number of years ago, we had trouble getting the riders to wear them,” said Pete Pedersen, a California steward.

Many morning racetrack accidents happen away from the actual racing oval, in the open barn areas, along the shedrows and in the stalls where the horses spend most of their hours.

Elizabeth Arden Graham, the cosmetics magnate who loved to visit the horses she campaigned under the Maine Chance Farm banner, lost a finger when Jewel’s Reward, a champion colt, literally bit the hand that fed him.

Eddie Whittingham was icing the legs of a horse at the San Luis Rey Downs training center in Bonsall, Calif., when he was fatally kicked in the chest.

Years later, Whittingham’s half-brother, Hall of Fame trainer Charlie Whittingham, narrowly escaped serious injuries when Sunday Silence, the day before his second-place finish in the 1989 Belmont Stakes, was riled by a photographer near the tunnel just off the track paddock. The Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner, Sunday Silence reared and clipped Whittingham on his right temple. A dazed and bruised Whittingham was still thankful.

“It would have been a lot worse,” he said, “if he had caught me coming down.”

Jeff Lukas, an assistant trainer, has never fully recovered from near-fatal injuries suffered when, arms waving like a semaphore signaler, he was unable to slow down Tabasco Cat, a renegade 1,100-pound colt, outside his father’s barn at Santa Anita in 1993. A few years earlier, Wayne Lukas had been more fortunate, but still suffered three cracked ribs when his stable pony threw him and ran off.

At 6 feet 5 and more than 250 pounds, trainer Doug Peterson was still overmatched against a 2-year-old filly that knocked him 20 feet, bruised his heart and collapsed his lung in a van-loading accident at Hollywood Park. The driver of the van broke an arm.

The list goes on. A few days before the 1992 Preakness, Casual Lies, who had run second in the Kentucky Derby, reached down and bit his trainer, Shelley Riley, on the lower back as she walked him after a morning gallop.

Even track announcers are not immune. Joe Hernandez, who called 15,586 consecutive races at Santa Anita, was kicked in the stomach by a horse in 1972. He returned to the booth, then collapsed there later that day and was taken to a hospital, where he died a few days later.

Jeff Lukas, 44, has lived in Florida for several years, working with Satish Sanan’s Padua Stables near Ocala, an operation originally managed by Wayne Lukas. When Tabasco Cat, who would go on to win the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes in 1994, ran over Jeff Lukas, he was his father’s No. 1 assistant. A solid horseman, he had successfully run the stable’s New York division for several years, and had worked closely with Winning Colors, his father’s 1988 Kentucky Derby winner.

Tabasco Cat changed all that, and eliminated almost all of Jeff Lukas’ options. Left with limited sight in his right eye, memory lapses and years of tedious therapy, Lukas slowly returned to his father’s operation at Santa Anita, but in a limited capacity.

“He couldn’t continue to work in California,” Wayne Lukas said recently. “It’s imperative that you have a car out here, and Jeff can’t drive. In Florida, he lives right on the grounds and can work the farm from a golf cart. He finished up his therapy in 1998. He’s lost a lot of the weight he gained when he was put on steroids. His condition has stabilized.”

Azeff, who rode briefly on the California fair circuit, won 60 races as a jockey before she turned to training. She would like to return to the track before the year is out.

“My right shoulder still really hurts, and keeping my balance is the hard part,” she said. “I’ve been getting physical and speech therapy three times a week. My memory, which wasn’t very good, has gotten a lot better. But I’ll be back--110%--before it’s all over with.”