Terrible Spill at Belmont

[ELA]

Originally Posted by the_fat_man

Good to hear he's ok.

Hard to make sense of why he went down. He starts out with his left leg out of the iron and, by the turn, the other is out and he's COMFORTABLY riding bareback. Towards the end of the turn, without much of a struggle to stay on, he just falls off. The horse didn't take a bad step and was keeping a straight path.

Odd

Actually it's not. Comfortably is a very relative term to everyone -- except the jock. It's hard to explain, but many jocks have told me that if you lose the irons it's kind of like you can only do one thing to stay on -- for example, either squeeze or balance. Regardless, he is incredibly lucky that this wasn't a disaster, yet along that he escaped virtually unharmed.

Originally Posted by blackthroatedwind

Our cameraman, who's a rider, thought he might have lost his balance when the horse switched leads. Let me know if you can see that.

Either way, pretty scary, and thankfully he sounds like he'll be OK.

Eerily worth noting that today is the very sad 20th anniversary of the death of Mike Venezia.

I haven't spoke to Norberto, but that was my knee jerk reaction and it's very tough to see, especially so as Norberto had no control over it at that point. I thought the horse might have "slid out" slightly or something that caused his weight to shift and him to lose his balance. I wouldn't be surprised if the saddle has slipped as well.

Regarding Mike Venezia -- it's rather ironic to say thank you for pointing this out.

Eric