By Dick Jerardi
Mychel Sanchez and Abner Adorno had ridden in a combined 14,000 races as they waited in the starting gate for a 1-mile maiden special weight race at Parx on Sept. 24. Neither jockey could possibly have imagined what was about to take place in the next few minutes. In all those races, neither had ever faced anything like the situation they were about to confront. In fact, nobody could remember seeing anything quite like it at Parx or any other North American race track.
Adorno was riding odds-on favorite Sole Lute for trainer John Servis. Sanchez was on Dark Devil for Silvino Ramirez. They were at opposite ends of the starting gate in the seven-horse field, with Adorno starting from the rail.
Perhaps 10 seconds into the race, just as the field was bending into the first turn, the rein broke on Sole Lute. Adorno was now like the driver of a car with no steering wheel and no brakes. But, unlike a driver, he could not take his foot off the accelerator and slow the vehicle down. Horses come out of the gate, they run fast, and keep running fast.
“When it happened, the first thing I tried to do was to take care of my co-workers, my fellow riders,” Adorno said Monday after riding in the first race. “I said, ‘Guys, I’ve got no inside rein, I’m going out.’ Thankfully, nothing happened at that point. I cleared everybody, and I was by the outside rail.”
Sanchez was ahead of Adorno at the start and did not really know what was happening behind him.
“Everything happened so fast,” Sanchez said before Monday’s first race. “We came out of the gate. I wanted to be in a forward position, first or second.”
He was a close-up third, with Sole Lute behind him and out of his view.
“I heard all the jockeys behind me making noise and screaming,” Sanchez. “At that point, I wasn’t putting pressure on anybody inside me. I felt like something behind me moved fast to the outside.”
That was, of course, Sole Lute heading to the outside rail. Sanchez saw it and realized immediately that Adorno had no reins to control his mount.
By then, the field was around the turn, and Sanchez motioned and yelled to the outrider stationed at the head of the backstretch that Adorno had no reins. But by the time the outrider could react, Sole Lute had run away from him, and Sanchez realized the horse was going way too fast for the outrider to catch up.
“The angle (the outrider) had, he didn’t know what was happening,” Sanchez said. “I don’t think he was seeing what we saw.”
Adorno was also yelling to the outrider that he had no reins, but when he cleared the outrider, he knew what Sanchez knew. The outrider was not going to be able to catch up.
So Sanchez had a split-second decision to make. A similar incident that happened in Venezuela flashed into Sanchez’s mind. Sadly, that jockey fell and died.
“I screamed to Abner: ‘I’m going over there,'” Sanchez said.
Sanchez then steered his mount toward the outside rail and Sole Lute. He was going to try to help slow Adorno’s mount down, even if it meant taking his horse out of the race and dealing with any potential consequences.
“I said I’ve got to go and do something because if I don’t do anything and something happened to him, I feel like I did that,'” Sanchez said. “If I don’t go out there and help him and he happened to crash through the rail…”
Adorno said: “It was an Angel of God… He helped me to stop the horse. You never expect that to happen. It did happen, and thank God I’m here, I’m alive, and I’m riding today, been riding all weekend, so we’re here.”
The video shows Sanchez and Dark Devil getting slightly in front of Adorno and Sole Lute around the half mile pole. Slowly but surely, they were able to slow the runaway horse down as they headed into the final turn while still next to the outside rail.
Before Sanchez arrived, Adorno said he was just holding onto his horse’s mane, letting the horse know he was still there, hoping the horse “didn’t do anything crazy.”
The two jockeys were imploring the horses to slow down. And the horses eventually responded, essentially jogging around the turn. They got to the quarter pole, where help arrived to end the harrowing journey.
“Now that we were safe, we were kind of laughing a little bit,” Sanchez said. “Abner was really thankful, telling me how I saved his life,” Adorno confirmed that remembering he said exactly that in Spanish.
When it was over, the Parx stewards were faced with a dilemma: what to do in an unprecedented situation. They made the absolute best of it by declaring Dark Devil a non-starter when they saw what Sanchez did to help his fellow rider. Sole Lute had to remain a starter because equipment failure does happen in races, and horses are considered starters in that circumstance. To declare it no race would not have been fair to the owners, trainers, and jockeys that got part of the purse and the bettors who had winning tickets.
The two jockeys? They did what they always do – ride. Sanchez rode the next race. Adorno rode two races later. Sanchez spent the weekend riding at Laurel Park. Adorno was at Penn National the next night and Delaware Park over the weekend. And they were both right back at Parx when the next week at their home track beckoned.
