Grim History of the Sprint Adds a Chapter

HALLANDALE, Fla. —  Lester Piggott’s career has played like a cross between Dickens and Shakespeare in recent years, and it took another ugly twist during the first Breeders’ Cup race Saturday. His mount, Mr Brooks, was destroyed after a spill, and the 56-year-old English riding legend was hospitalized for treatment of serious injuries.

The accident occurred at the quarter pole of the six-furlong Sprint. Riding the 5-year-old Mr Brooks, a son of Blazing Saddles who was named after actor Mel Brooks, Piggott sensed something was wrong from the time the horses left the paddock.

Mr Brooks was the 7-1 fourth choice, based on a steady career that included a strong victory in France on Oct. 4. But after 20 races, he was running on dirt for the first time.

As the horses stood behind the gate, waiting to be loaded, Piggott told a fellow Brit, Walter Swinburn, that he didn’t like the way Mr Brooks had warmed up.

Then the assistant starters had to force Mr Brooks into the gate.

Mr Brooks never did get into the race. As he approached the quarter pole, he was near the back of the pack. Piggott looked over his left shoulder. Then the horse’s right foreleg snapped. Piggott went down with him, unwilling to let loose of the reins. The jockey’s left collarbone was broken in the fall, and Mr Brooks rolled over on him, causing additional injuries. The few trailing horses were not affected.

Mr Brooks suffered a compound fracture of the cannon bone and was given a lethal injection.

Piggott left the track on a stretcher. A statement from a nearby hospital said that besides the collarbone, he had a broken rib, spleen damage and a partially collapsed lung. Another source said that Piggott had suffered cuts on his face and elsewhere on his body.

Piggott will be in intensive care from 24 to 48 hours and might be hospitalized for three or four days, a hospital spokesman said.

“He is doing fine,” Dr. Lawrence Lottenberg said. “There is no neurological damage. He is awake and alert.”

Piggott was scheduled to ride Rodrigo De Triano, a short-priced British hopeful in the Classic, the final race on Saturday’s card at Gulfstream Park. With Swinburn substituting, Rodrigo De Triano finished last.

Piggott, the winner of 30 of England’s classic races, including the Epsom Derby nine times, had ridden only three other times in Breeders’ Cup races. In 1990 at Belmont Park, not long after he had served 15 months of a three-year prison term for non-payment of taxes and paid the government more than $5 million, Piggott emerged from a short-lived training career to ride Royal Academy to a narrow victory in the Breeders’ Cup Mile.

Southland-based Thirty Slews won the Sprint at 18-1 by a neck over Meafara, a 13-1 shot.

The death of Mr Brooks was at least the fifth for horses that have run in the Sprint.

Only days after Eillo won the first Sprint, at Hollywood Park in 1984, he died after surgery was performed because of an intestinal disorder.

At Gulfstream in 1989, the start of the Sprint was marred by Sam Who, who took a left turn out of the gate and wiped out the chances of seven horses. One of them, On The Line, suffered severe leg cuts, never ran again and was eventually destroyed.

Mr. Nickerson, one of the horses that survived the Sam Who incident, suffered a heart attack near the far turn in the next year’s Sprint at Belmont. He fell and died almost instantly. Another horse, Shaker Knit, stumbled over Mr. Nickerson and was destroyed that night.