A final ride

On the afternoon of Jan. 29, 2005, Josh Boyd was at his grandmother’s place outside Los Lunas, New Mexico, helping his dad put up a horse barn. The two worked for hours in the crisp, high-desert air. After a while Boyd put down his tools. “I’ll be back soon,” he told his dad. “I have one last horse to ride.” The 29-year-old jockey had been riding racehorses for nearly half his life at that point and was one of the region’s top riders, and so pausing in the course of a day to board a big-money horse was not an unusual adventure for Boyd.

As he was leaving, his grandmother came out from the house to say goodbye. “When are you coming back?” she asked.

“I’ve got one last horse to ride. I’ll be back soon,” he told her, and then he and his fiancée, Ashley, piled into his truck and the two drove three hours south to Sunland Park, where Boyd was scheduled to appear in a race the next afternoon.

SUNLAND PARK CASINO & RACETRACK is one of the oldest racetracks in the Southwest. In fact, the town of Sunland Park itself, which borders El Paso to the east and the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, to the south, takes its name from the venue and continues to depend on the track as an important source of revenue.

Boyd arrived early on race day. It was a Sunday afternoon. He was scheduled to ride in the seventh race, a claiming race open only to 3-year-old thoroughbred maidens — that is, horses who have yet to win their first race.

It would be a light day for Boyd. In his 10 years as a professional jockey, Boyd would sometimes ride seven, eight, nine horses in a single day. One horse was a piece of cake. Over and done.

Boyd changed into his silks and then met with the horse’s trainer near the stables. That day’s horse, Cuervo Brown, had suffered a minor leg injury a few weeks back, and the two men, Boyd and the trainer, had decided to rest the horse between meets and ease him back into a raceable condition. The Sunland Park race would be Cuervo Brown’s first race back.

As is customary in every race, Boyd took his horse for a few brief turns around the grounds. This allowed the horse to warm up. It also allowed Boyd to assess the horse’s overall fitness. Even through post parade, when riders take their horses from the paddock to the gates, allowing the horses to pass before the grandstands, Cuervo Brown felt as solid as any other healthy horse.

The announcer gave the call and horse and jockey loaded into the gate. The weather that day was perfect, a mild chill, the sky a cloudless dome of brilliant blue.

Boyd’s memory of that afternoon is fuzzy but he doesn’t recall anything unusual about his horse’s temper after loading him into the starting stall. But the pedigree report on Cuervo Brown, published after the race, says something slightly different. It describes the horse as being “fractious in gate.” This is the same post-mortem report that tells readers that Cuervo Brown, immediately after this race, was “vanned off & euthanized.”

It was a three-quarter-mile race. Cuervo Brown came out of the gate strong. The horses were in a pack as they passed the quarter pole, and they remained bunched as they entered the homestretch. Still, Boyd had good position. Thoroughbreds at this level of competition average about 40 mph on the track, and this is the point in the race when riders are opening their throttles. Boyd remained center-perched above the horse, the rumble of hoofbeats thundered in his ears. He advanced on the other riders. But then it happened: Boyd passed through a waiting door and into that shaded antechamber where a person’s life divides neatly into everything that happened before and all that will come after.

Just inside the track’s quarter mark, Cuervo Brown’s right front leg snaps in two. Boyd is thrown from the saddle. He hits the ground and immediately tumbles beneath the number six horse, who rolls the fallen rider beneath all four hooves, spitting Boyd out like a rag doll and landing him, improbably, on his hands and knees. Boyd seems about to get up, but there’s not time. At this moment the final trailing horse, New Car Caviar, crashes into Boyd at full speed, driving his knee bone directly into Boyd’s head, crushing the rider’s right temple.

Cuervo Brown, on the other hand, stays up for a few fleeting seconds, hopping on three legs, confused, frightened, his ruined foreleg, below the knee, flaps wildly back and forth in the air, as useless as an empty sock. The horse looks down at it and then up again, and then down again, before sinking to the ground.

It’s an almost perverse point of pride in the jockey world to remind the casual race fan that horse racing is the only professional sport in which an ambulance literally chases its athletes. But it’s not untrue. At every race, after the horses leave the gates, an emergency vehicle pulls onto the track and trails the animals at a short distance.

The Sunland Park ambulance is at Boyd’s side in seconds. Ashley, who’s been watching all of this from the grandstands, races toward Boyd. The crowd lets her through. She’s there beside him. Boyd is still coherent, barely, but not sure what’s happening. He doesn’t understand the extent of his own injuries at this point. No one does. He’s complaining about a pain in his leg. And he’s asking about the dirt and blood that are caking his mouth and nostrils. Paramedics stabilize the rider as best they can and load him into the ambulance. They tell Ashley to follow them to the nearest trauma center, in El Paso. Ashley calls Boyd’s parents from the road to explain what’s happened to their son, and they too light out for the far tip of West Texas.