Sunday, May 07, 2000
Tragedy turns to roses for Desormeaux
By Neil Schmidt
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Kent Desormeaux
(Gary Landers photo)
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LOUISVILLE — It's one thing handling your own comebacks. Kent Desormeaux had his skull shattered in 16 places but returned to ride a Kentucky Derby winner. Cracking your son's head open, though, is altogether different.
Seventeen days before riding the favorite in the world's biggest horse race, Desor meaux learned his 14-month-old son, Jacob, was deaf. Planning an operation which might repair nerve endings in Jacob's ears, but which requires removing a piece of the skull, Desormeaux struggled for focus.
“I started to slow down and take a look around,” he said.
What he saw Saturday: 153,204 fans cheering at Churchill Downs, and the rest of the Kentucky Derby field in his rear-view mirror. Desor meaux used a patient plan to guide Fusaichi Pegasus to a comeback triumph, confirming the colt's caliber and his own measured maturation.
“As a parent, it's a fearful time for me,” Desormeaux said. “You certainly change some things in your life. You'd be surprised how you grow up.”
Desormeaux, 30, has grown into a Derby dandy. He first won this race two years ago aboard Real Quiet, the fifth betting choice that year, and Saturday booted home the first winning Derby favorite since Spectacular Bid in 1979.
He plotted his pace, dropping Fusaichi Pegasus into 15th place after the first quarter-mile and then letting him gradually change gears. When he blasted from sixth at the mile mark into the lead and finished 11/2 lengths ahead of Aptitude in 2:01.12, the sixth- fastest time in Derby history, a superhorse was made.
The world's biggest race had an international flair. Winning owner Fukao Sekiguchi is a Japanese businessman and winning trainer Neil Drysdale is English-born; this was the first Derby horse for each.
Drysdale's advice had been to get the colt comfortable, and Desormeaux hardly inconvenienced him. He used his whip only a couple of times at the top of the stretch — “love taps,” he called them — and the easy trip suggested a potential Triple Crown winner.
“He's got natural speed, and he's a very tactical horse,” Drysdale said. “Three times Kent was riding him with one hand, meaning he was very relaxed.”
So was his passenger. Desormeaux has spoken of the change winning his first Derby meant to his career, enabling him to relax.
He soaked it in Saturday. With Fusaichi Pegasus, named after a winged horse and nicknamed Superman, Desormeaux said, “I've got wings of my own. I feel like I can fly.”
The rider who has trouble hearing in his right ear, damaged in the fall which nearly took his life, half-heard the joyous noise and prayed his son could someday share it.
“The noise is one of the things that makes this the most prestigious race in the world,” Desormeaux said. “There's the roar of the crowd. The starting gate rattles when they close it after the last horse is in.
“Hopefully, he'll be able to feel those things, like I feel the ground shake when the horses are running. He'll have to go to his other senses.”
Desormeaux's career has come full circle. He had been a prodigy, topping the national earnings list with $14.1 million in 1992, capturing his third Eclipse Award as the nation's top jockey at the age of 22. But on Dec. 22 of that year, he was involved in a collision at Hollywood Park.
With the multiple skull fractures, doctors weren't sure he would live through the night.
The shock of the news sent his wife, Sonia, into labor. After giving birth nine weeks prematurely to son Joshua, she was shipped to the intensive care unit with toxemia, a type of blood poi soning.
Meanwhile, Desormeaux's heart stopped, and he also went to ICU.
Miraculously, all survived. Desormeaux got back into riding, becoming in 1995 the youngest rider ever to win 3,000 races, but he was stuck in a slump until his Derby win in 1998.
Learning last month about Jacob's handicap, Desormeaux marveled at the iro ny.
“We were devastated,” he said. “But I do have an understanding now. I sympathize for him, and have knowledge of the same situation — or half of it.”
He and Sonia plan a Cochlear implant, in which part of Jacob's skull would be removed and insert electrodes that act as nerve endings.
Desormeaux plans to teach himself sign language. But the world will more closely watch his next mission: The Triple Crown.
He said he was heartbroken when Real Quiet narrowly missed that elusive goal, beaten by a nose by Victory Gallop in the Belmont Stakes. Lately, though, perspective has been easy to come by.
After these hard-learned life lessons, Desormeaux knows not to get too caught up in any one race.
“I'd love to go make up those four inches from '98,” he said. “The Triple Crown, that's a goal every time you wake up in the morning.
“But for now, I'm going to enjoy this. This is the best horse I've ever been involved with at this stage of the game. Every time I ride Pegasus, he becomes easier to ride. We've become one.”
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