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By BRANT JAMES
© St. Petersburg Times, published February 22, 2001
Telling words.
"You're racing in close quarters, and everybody wants to win, so nobody is looking to give anybody a break.
"Nobody wants to see anyone get hurt, but if you're in trouble, basically it's your own problem."
Richard Migliore is not ruthless. He just understands. With more than 700 career mounts and $4-million in purses, the 35-year-old has experienced a jockey's view from all angles. Including flat on his back as half-ton animals thunder down the track toward him.
The death of NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt on Sunday underscored the danger in a sport on the vanguard of safety innovation. In horse racing, contentious animals, ambition and speed imperil jockeys, with only guile, a helmet and a flak jacket as protection.
A study published in last March's Journal of the American Medical Association reported 6,545 jockey injuries occurred in official races between 1993-96. Three jockeys died in the survey period.
Migliore's worst spill came two years ago at Belmont Park, when he was thrown over the front of his horse after it broke its leg. Migliore's arm was stepped on by another horse and required two operations, eight screws and seven months of rehabilitation.
"Anything can happen at any time," he said. "You try to do everything you've learned, and everything instincts tell you to do. You ball up and give a smaller target to get hit by other horses and try to protect as many extremities as possible.
"I fell again at Gulfstream and as I'm going over her head and I'm thinking about three things in the time it took me to hit the ground, about two seconds: to protect my arm because I had just gotten over the other fall; I thought about my wife, because my wife is going to have to live through this stuff; and right before I hit the ground, "please no one run over me.' "
A jockey falling off a horse going about 35 mph hits the ground at roughly 37.5 mph. They would have to fall straight down from 47 feet to reach the same speed.
Jockeys accept that risk, in part, because most feel the sport is safer than ever.
"There'll always be the element of danger," veteran jockey Pat Day said. "We have worked to enhance the safety of the riders, with the safety rail and different measures we take.
"But you'll never eliminate the element of danger completely. I wonder if it's safer out here on the race track sometimes than driving on the interstate at rush hour."
Migliore said the main way to enhance safety would be to better train apprentice jockeys.
Migliore pays a high cost to be a jockey, physically and in the cost of life insurance. He used to pay $15,000 a year for a Lloyds of London policy, but now gets a better deal, he said, from a California-based group that specializes in insuring jockeys.
The cost may be less, but there still are problems.
"I broke my neck 13 years ago, so I've got basically a spinal cord exclusion," Migliore said. "Now my arm is excluded, so if I injure that again I'm not covered. I've had seven concussions now, so I have to go for MRIs and CAT scans twice a year. It gets kind of dicey whether they are going to renew me for the head injuries."
The JAMA study claimed 20 percent of jockey injuries involved the head and neck.
Despite all of the injuries, all of the evidence that his job jeopardizes his life every day, Migliore continues to race, currently at Gulfstream Park.
"I think it takes a special breed of person to do something like this," he said. "The potential for catastrophe at work is so strong. Still, I get to do something I love to do, and I get paid well for it. And I figure I can get hit by a bus crossing the street."