Photograph by Thomas Crone
It was only two, maybe three seasons ago that I started regularly attending races at Fairmount Park. Can’t say that the time elapsed has made me anything more than an enthusiastic novice, someone still prone to placing bets based on premonitions, omens, and numerical guesswork. Sometimes that kind of ignorance leads to bliss, when a number, horse, and rider all align, sending you back to the ticket window with a winning receipt, instead of the usual, crumpled, losing slip.
This past Friday evening, the venerable Fairmount opened for an extended season, granted some extra dates by the state, after a truncated, money-stricken track season last year. The Tuesday horse hookey crowd has already broken in the venue for the year, with the first races held under the lights last Friday. For seven races, everything was as normal.
The railbirds made their way to trackside. The old gent selling candy was still getting his $2 for a chocolate bar. The men’s rooms, if anything, were in mid-season form. You get used to certain things at Fairmount. The “relaxed” pace, the cratered parking lot, even the various broken... things. Really, at what other venue in St. Louis would you walk in and see the main video board all but disabled within the first week? The answer, of course, lies in Collinsville.
On Friday night, the track was hit by an even worse incident than a faulty video screen. It was the kind of moment that makes a casual, even enthusiastic fan wonder if those $2 bets, those afternoons and evenings along the rail, are all that they’re cracked up to be.
During race eight, the seven horse, Long Story Short, wound up writhing on the track, the victim of a particularly gruesome, end-over-end flip. Caught in the mid-pack on the home stretch, the horse went down hard, its rider, Oriel Chavez, flipped onto the track as well. Together, they were all alone for a good minute, as the Fairmount ambulance made its way around the track, while the other nine horses scrambled to the finish. No other horses were impacted, no other riders were downed.
Instead, you had Long Story Short and Chavez lying there together, the horse occasionally lurching as if to stand, then dropping back down on its side; Chavez was horizontal, next to his ride.
As the race finished, many fans, possibly unaware of the accident, headed straight for the exits. About 50, or so, headed down to the paddock side, where a large truck had driven up, no doubt, to cart away the stricken animal. First though, a sheet was handled by several track workers, keeping the sight covered; obviously, this horse wasn’t going to live but for a few more moments, and the assembled were quiet and respectful as they waited on the next act.
Instead, another track official sidled up and matter-of-factly said, “The owners of the horse asked that you please all move along,” and as simply as that, the audience dissipated.
For the second year in a row, I’d decided to write a track blog, not just about the races, but about the culture that immediately surrounds the track: the Mexican diners and pawn shops and unmarked bars and hourly motels and Indian mounds. Considering the media unfriendliness shown by the track’s brain trust to date, I assumed that the blog (aseasonatthetrack.wordpress.com) would be one of those unread, writing-for-writing’s sake project.
After seeing last week’s on-track death, though, I’m left wondering. My usual, glib, rationalizations for why racing’s not one of our great moral issues seems stretched. Today, I’m just not sure.
