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No one should need any reminders that the training and racing of Thoroughbreds is a dangerous endeavor. We get them anyway. On Thursday at Delaware Park, five jockeys went down like living dominoes on the far turn of the turf course when the lead horse slipped and fell. Three jockeys got up. The two that did not were Victor Carrasco, who suffered a badly fractured leg, and Jose Ferrer, whose damage report makes for grim reading: at least eight fractured ribs, two fractured vertebrae, partially collapsed lung. Carrasco, 25, won the Eclipse Award for his 2013 apprentice season during which he won 215 races and $4.3 million by his mounts. Ferrer, 53, has won 4,183 races and is in the midst of his best season in more than a decade. Both riders are from Puerto Rico. The Delaware scene was bad, but not as bad as what happened at Woodbine in Canada on the morning of Sept. 8, when exercise rider Darren Fortune, 43, was killed when his horse bolted into an oncoming horse and rider. Fortune, from Barbados, also worked as one of Woodbine's afternoon outriders. Racing was canceled that day upon the news of his death. The following afternoon, some 1,400 miles away in the southeastern Colorado town of Eads (pop. 588), Jesus Munoz -- "Chuyito" to his family and friends -- hit the ground head first in a mixed-breed event when his horse veered into the inside rail before a packed grandstand at the Kiowa County Fair. After being attended by an emergency medical team, Munoz was transported by medivac helicopter to the Swedish Medical Center in the Denver suburb of Englewood, some 170 miles from the county fairgrounds. He spent the next four days in a coma and died on Wednesday. For licensing purposes in Colorado, the jockey was listed as Jesus Munoz Villalobos, appending his mother's maiden name in the traditional manner. The rider recorded his first victory at a parimutuel track in July of 2016 in a Quarter Horse maiden claimer at Arapahoe Park, near Denver. "I was the presiding steward when we licensed him in 2015," said Duke Mann, the commission's racing coordinator. "So he went through the process we require." Munoz won with six of his 26 Quarter Horse mounts during the Arapahoe Park meet that concluded Aug. 13. The racing season does not begin again until next May, creating a lack of opportunity that prompts jockeys to ply their trade at non parimutuel county fairs, unregulated by the state commission, if they want to try and make a living. "There was once a pretty extensive circuit of parimutuel county fairs," Mann noted. "Once those started dying out, county fairs started running their own meets." Kiowa County was one of those parimutuel fair meets, which means the standards of a regulated race meet are at least part of the local DNA. Bart Michael, a member of the Kiowa County Fair board of directors and point man for the fair's horse racing program, noted that safety precautions for racing participants is a priority. "We've got everything you'd want, right down to the flight of life landing right there at the fair if need be," Michael said. The race in which Munoz sustained his fatal injury was a 220-yard open (mixed breed) event for a purse of $1,000. "It was just a freak accident," said Michael, who was on the scene. "The horse hit the rail. To my knowledge, the horse is all right. "I'd known Mr. Munoz for about two years. He was in several of our races, and he was actually our top jockey on Friday." Chris Sorensen has been to more Kiowa County Fairs than he can count. His family goes back three generations in the region, and he has published the Kiowa County Press for 25 years. In his present "day job" as operations section chief at the Colorado Department of Public Safety, he's had to miss the last few fairs. But he knows how hard his community has taken the death of the jockey. "The fair is the biggest holiday of the year," Sorensen said. "The population of the county is between 1,400 and 1,500, and I was told there must have been 2,000 people in the grandstand the other day for the races. Former residents come back every year just for the fair." There is always the temptation to typecast all non-parimutuel racing endeavors as shoestring operations that turn a blind eye toward safety standards for both man and beast. "I've heard a lot of that in comments on social media," Sorensen said. "But unregulated by the state is not the same as unsafe. It stands to reason that it is not in the best interests of a county fair to be anything but prudent when it comes to safety." The family of Jesus Munoz has established a GoFundMe page in an effort to defray medical costs. Bart Michael confirmed that the fair is "working on what we can do" to help in the cause. The page is filled with photographs of Munoz, many of them posing with his infant son, many more with an array of horses. There is also, toward the end of the page, a picture of the belt buckle he won last Friday, bearing the inscription, "Kiowa County Fair 2017 Top Jockey."
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