If a horse died on a dark day, most officials would only learn about it a day or two later, in the form of a Dead Horse Report. To Calder’s head of security, who signed these single-page reports, racetrack breakdowns were simply the “nature of the game,” he would later testify.Since Fly Fly’s last race, however, there had been five fatalities in 11 days. None of these incidents were looked into further, according to court testimony and records, and none were on Jimmy Rivera’s mind as he led the young filly into the November sunshine.The senior track veterinarian said under oath that she considered training deaths to be a “private matter” between the racehorse owners and their trainers.
At 8:05, two paramedics pulled up beside Rivera. Bystanders offered some details, and realizing that Rivera might have suffered a spinal injury, they called 911. They decided to move him into the ambulance immediately, away from the commotion; they secured his neck with a brace and rolled him onto a backboard, making sure his torso and neck stayed aligned.Rivera was in shock, and his pulse was weak. Inside the ambulance, they gave him oxygen and encouraged him to focus on his breathing. “I don’t feel my fingers and legs,” he said calmly. They struggled to hear him. Rivera could recall his name but little else, such as the date or particulars of his fall. His pain was a 10 out of 10, he said, and he could feel only his neck.Outside, another ambulance arrived for Flyfly Fly Delilah. Its attendants raised a screen and pulled her body inside using a mechanical winch. One of the outriders asked them to hurry up so training could resume. Back at White’s barn, Pedro Cabezudo got ready to gallop another horse while his mind replayed that sickening sound.At 8:30, the paramedics drove their ambulance to the main stable gate to meet Metro-Dade Fire Rescue. Once there, the decision was made to airlift Rivera to the trauma center at nearby Jackson Memorial Hospital. Meanwhile, the ambulance carrying Flyfly Fly Delilah left the course and unloaded her body at a tucked-away area known as the kill pit.“I can’t feel my body.”
With the 1980s came Reagan-led deregulation on a national scale, and Florida politicians were eager to follow, including in horse racing, where the legislature decided to let the three South Florida racetracks—Calder, Gulfstream Park, and Hialeah Park—fight for the best dates on the calendar. Hialeah eventually lost, and Calder began carrying two-thirds of the year-round schedule, opening for racing from late April through the first few days of January. Gulfstream then hosted the prime dates. Calder kept its backstretch open to trainers who preferred to stick around and van their horses to Gulfstream on race day.In Florida, where many industries have long been given extreme discretion to police themselves, racetracks are no different.
“The division veterinarian or any other Florida licensed veterinarian hired or retained by the Division shall collect urine, blood, or other bodily fluids or samples of tissue from any animal which died in a permitted race or while training at a pari-mutuel facility or from any animal found dead at a permitted track.”
Elsewhere at the track, Tony Otero, its director of security since 1990, was forced to staff two positions himself, according to his sworn testimony. He had fired the supervisor of the backstretch security force and offered to step in during the search for a replacement. This put him in charge of the barn area and the spectator area. In addition to his day job, Otero and his wife Gail also owned a private agency called Top-Notch Investigations.Otero was an experienced investigator who had previously worked in federal and state law enforcement, according to his testimony and the Top-Notch website. He was now working six or sometimes seven days a week, attending regular planning meetings for the new casino. Part of this included restructuring his department and training new hires. On the racing side, he and his guards were still responsible for enforcing the state and house rules, according to Calder’s president and Otero himself.Despite that, Otero later testified that he thought the state rules that had sunsetted in 1992 were never readopted.For all these reasons, dark clouds of uncertainty hung over Calder as it reopened for live racing on April 21, 2008. The locals, among them Bill White, bedded in for the eight-month meet.Before each season, White and every other trainer had to sign an agreement acknowledging knowing and abiding by the state and house rules. As he testified in one of his depositions, White had a record that included seven small-time medication overages and two suspensions, of 15 and 30 days, years apart. Beginning in 1997, he had captured eight consecutive Calder training titles, and by the start of the 2008 season, he was a couple of years away from 2,000 career wins.(Asked by the judge why he did it, Cross replied, “The money.”)
O’Neil said under oath in 2014 that he saw between 50 and 100 horses every day, sometimes arriving as early as three in the morning and departing at six in the evening.
The rest of White’s team claimed in their depositions to be unaware of this routine. His assistant trainer, Leonardo Tunon, swore that none of their horses were given anabolic steroids, although he acknowledged that it was not his place to check medication logs. This applied to White’s loyal exercise riders for whom riding horses was like an addiction—“a fever one gets,” said 61-year-old Manuel Macias.They weren’t there for the pay. White’s team included ex-jockeys like Macias, Pedro Cabezudo, Luis Castanada, and Jimmy Rivera. Unlike those three, Rivera wasn’t salaried. He was paid $8 or $10 per horse, and his weekly earnings ranged between $300 and $400. He also moonlighted as a waiter at a Hilton on I-95.Rivera had ridden off and on for White for more than 20 years. He was quieter than the others, but his love of the job burned just as brightly. For him it had started out as a family affair. He met June, four years his junior, at New York’s Belmont Park in 1982, and they got married there the same year. Jimmy was a lowly hotwalker and June was a hopeful jockey. She had grown up in Puerto Rico, where her uncle owned a few racehorses, and graduated from its riding school. Before they met Jimmy had married and divorced, and spent his early twenties waiting tables at the Yale Club in Manhattan.Anabolic steroids were “standard operating procedure.”
A state steward testified that he was not familiar with the rule, and said he never ordered a necropsy nor was aware of any state employee who had.
The rampant use of anabolic steroids loomed large over proceedings. Big Brown, the Derby and Preakness winner, had run on them in those races and in Florida. His trainer, Richard Dutrow, admitted to monthly injections of Winstrol (“I don’t know what it does,” he claimed, “I just like using it.”), but the big bay colt finished last in the Belmont Stakes after it had been taken away. Dutrow did not turn up, apparently too ill to travel to D.C., but members of the committee said he never notified them.The tendency to use them to push horses beyond their physical limits or to mask their injuries was increasing their risk of breaking down—or to put it plainly, the risk of killing them.
A few hours later, she entered the gate as the 5-2 third choice against a half-dozen two-year-old fillies. The distance was six furlongs and the track was fast, and she broke out of the gate cleanly, dueling for the lead with the favorite. She put her away, then held off another challenger, but in the final strides, out in the middle of the track, a deep closer surged in front.For Flyfly Fly Delilah’s first start, it was a big performance that promised a bright future. She was led to the test barn along with the winner, where urine and blood was collected to send to the University of Florida lab. Her post-race samples ultimately came back clean for illicit substances. She had been given permissible amounts of a couple drugs within the previous 24 hours, but none of them targeted any specific illness or pain, White testified. The stanozolol that was in her system did not appear on her test results, according to court records—proof of the limited technology that Florida was using.Two days after the race, Flyfly Fly Delilah received a fourth injection of steroids, only it was now Equipoise, according to her medication billing report. O’Neil attributed the change to seeing if she would respond “appetite-wise” to a different drug. Asked in his testimony about the risks of this biweekly regimen to a young filly, he said, “I don’t think there are any risks myself.”If in fact Fly Fly was not exercised outside her stall for a complete examination prior to the race, then Calder would have been running afoul of state regulations.
Rivera’s lawsuit almost certainly had an impact on Florida racing—though not the kind you might expect.In May 2013, the Division of Pari-Mutuel Wagering introduced a rule that trainers must notify it of a racehorse death within 18 hours. The initial fine for not complying is $100. The division was also eager to get rid of the rule requiring its veterinarian to take samples of dead racehorses. It was gone by June 2015. That same month, the governor signed legislation that ended the use of that obsolete testing method in its racing lab—by then, almost four decades past due. The corticosteroid Solu-Delta-Cortef would also no longer be allowed on race day.Churchill Downs Inc. also began speeding up the elimination of racing at Calder. In 2014, it cut a deal with the Stronach Group to hand over the running of Calder’s dates through this year. The Stronach Group renamed the meet “Gulfstream Park West” and has run it for around 40 days each year, the minimum required by law.Churchill Downs continued to own and operate the casino. In 2015, it began kicking out trainers to make way for the demolition of most of the barns, and later that year it tore down the seven-story grandstand, which had gone up in 1971.First of all, the accident with Jimmy Rivera was and remains a life altering tragedy. Jimmy worked on and off for me for years and I considered him a friend. The weight of this accident is still carried by all that know him.
My involvement in the suit was that my stable was a named defendant. It is important to note that Jimmy did not name me personally as a defendant in the suit. The suit was filed three and a half years after the accident.
The main thrust of the case as it pertained to me was the accusation of spoilage of the evidence. The suit charged that there was a requirement to report the death of a horse to the State to allow for a postmortem examination. The testimony from the depositions clearly showed that in 2008, there was not a requirement to report a death to the State….by anyone.
The testimony from the depositions showed that there was not a state program in place for postmortem examinations. There was no program or funding in place. There was not an entity to call. The State had not addressed this.
In your correspondence with me you state that the lack of enforced regulations, “lead up to the accident.” These are the plaintiffs’ accusations and as such are accusations. I would be hopeful that you would remain mindful of that and to not accept them as facts.
From the moment Jimmy returned home, June began watching everything the nurses did, as intensely focused as if it were a military exercise. She became like an auxiliary nurse and now oversees her husband’s rehabilitation and treatment. Yet she also suffers from chronic physical pain as a result of her time in the Army.“She’s strong,” Jimmy said, “and she’s strong for me.”After breakfast, he usually goes into the backyard and studies their flower garden. June helps him choose what to grow. He watches a lot of sports on TV. Because of his cognitive damage, he finds it hard to focus on reading and he easily loses concentration. Once or twice a month they go to the movies or a restaurant for dinner, and a couple years ago the family went to Disney World. June wanted to see how they would manage the travel; it was tiring but successful.And in August 2019, right before their lawsuit was about to go to trial, they reached an undisclosed settlement agreement with Calder. (It included a denial of wrongdoing.) The trial had been delayed a number of months after Calder’s expert witness, Dr. Jennifer Durenberger, who was then the chief examining veterinarian of the New York Racing Association, withdrew from the case.The official reason given to the court was that Durenberger was “permanently unavailable to testify,” although according to her Twitter account she was traveling to industry conferences. Rivera’s attorneys had secretly planned to call her to testify, certain that her perspective supported their picture of racetrack lawlessness. The deaths at Santa Anita were still fresh in the news, and their strategy was to put the sport itself on trial.“Generally, ask anyone on the track whether a licensee has an obligation to report soundness issues to the track veterinarian, and they will tell you it is exactly the opposite,” Durenberger had said in a 2018 deposition, reading from subpoenaed notes of hers on the case. “The expectation is that the exercise riders, trainers, and private vets are expected to hide soundness issues from the regulator.”She added, “The fear is that they will not be able to participate.”A prohibition on anabolic steroids didn’t make a dent as regulators hoped, not in terms of fatal injuries or public relations. Roughly a thousand racehorses die annually at American racetracks, or an average of 20 per week. Taking into account the hundreds of training centers and farms where deaths go unreported, the true figure is certainly much higher. And records in Florida show that deaths are on the rise: from 2014 through 2018, an average of 91 horses died in the state annually, while in 2019 there were at least 102, including 66 at Gulfstream Park or Gulfstream Park West.Last March, two of the most successful trainers in the sport, Jason Servis and Jorge Navarro, were arrested at their South Florida barns and indicted, along with 25 others, many of them veterinarians, for allegedly orchestrating a widespread doping scheme in Florida, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Kentucky and overseas. (Servis and Navarro pleaded not guilty. Recently, two defendants pleaded guilty to charges relating to the manufacturing, selling, and transporting of performance-enhancing drugs.)There’s now growing support in Congress for federal legislation that would standardize medication rules and let the industry create an “independent” regulatory board, but the future of horse racing still appears more uncertain than ever. The Washington Post’s editorial board, not exactly a loud voice for animal rights, wrote earlier this year: “It is long past time to stop viewing horse racing through the prism of its past glories and answer the question of whether a sport that gambles with the lives of horses—animals we profess to love—has a place in the modern world.”But Jimmy Rivera sometimes misses it. As June says, “That’s in his blood.”Two weeks after their lawsuit settled, I visited them at home. They were living in the same three-bedroom house as they had purchased with the help of worker’s compensation nine years earlier. It seemed large when they bought it, but now it was cluttered and crowded. The narrow hallways made it hard for Jimmy to motor around, and there were rooms he could not reach. They had added a ramp to the garage so he could use it as a gym, but when Christopher moved in they made it his bedroom.Before I arrived, Jimmy had finished his physical therapy in the living room, which he does every other day. A nurse and therapist helped him stand and with their help he took a few steps. The walls held old racetrack photos and religious maxims, and hanging in front of him was a framed picture that read: When you can no longer stand … kneel.We spoke briefly about the morning of November 25, 2008, but it felt like a very long time ago. Calder is all but finished. A number of the people deposed in his lawsuit have died. Yet what happened to him and Flyfly Fly Delilah remain a familiar story.About four years earlier, he told me, he asked his nurse to drive him to Calder. He wanted to see the spot where he went down. He expected to get emotional, he said, but that didn’t happen. It turned out he had made his peace.Jimmy Rivera requires around-the-clock care from a rotating pair of six highly-skilled nurses working 12-hour shifts.
June lightly ribbed him, saying the nurse had told her otherwise. “I think if he had two wishes of God,” she said, “one would be to ride horses again and the other to walk with his grandchildren.”A third was on the way, June said. Then she paused, not sure she should continue.“I think Jimmy would use his first wish to ride horses again,” she said. “That’s how much he loved it.”Jimmy shook his head. “No, I’ve pushed those thoughts out of my mind. I would love to walk.”He was silent for a moment, then realized something. “But if I could ride,” he said quietly, as if talking only to himself, “then that means I could walk, too.”He wanted to see the spot where he went down. He expected to get emotional, he said, but that didn’t happen.