Jockey who finished second in Kentucky Derby is found dead at racetrack

Dettori in the Lockinge

I'd bet there is some conspiracy behind this one.

Seems dodgy to me.

Suicided

Those guys are infamously underweight and anorexic. Maybe his heart just stopped.

O.P. can't read. The guy only rode the second place horse for its first race....not the derby.

Yep.

a leading U.S. jockey who rode this year's Kentucky Derby runner-up Nehro to its maiden win earlier this year



Read more: [link to www.dailymail.co.uk]

Isn't organized crime involved in horseracing? Maybe he was told to lose a race or something and someone found out and slipped him some drug as revenge.

Even if you are thin like a jockey, that doesn't mean you are sickly and about to die. These guys are in great shape and all wiry muscle. You have to be very strong to balance yourself on a bouncing jittery horse.

Well he did come in Second!

Ahh, its my girlfriends ultimate dream to say that...

Seriously, these guys are under insane pressure to be underweight, and at very specific weights.

A lot of extreme weight loss methods also flush the mineral salts out of your body, causing you to die with no warning.

Anyway, it is a possibility. Not as much fun as a conspiracy involving organized crime, eh.

Oh I doubt it is the weight. They are little to begin with. You can't accuse jockeys of dropping dead of anorexia. You don't just drop dead from that.

First you are very weak and have fainting spells. Something suddenly happened to a young healthy championship level athlete. Anorexia is comepletely different.

You don't see bones sticking out in his face. That is just silly.

he was told to win,,,,,or else.

No you are mistaken, I read a whole book about this, written by one of the top American jockeys, Shane Sellers. The book is called Freedom's Rein, here is the web site for the book:
[link to www.freedomsrein.com]
He rode at the top tracks and was in it for a couple of decades. He wrote the book to try to expose what goes on, it is not that uncommon for a jockey to die from starving themselves to keep their weight down. They are all bulemic and the people they work for encourage it, they don't do anything to help them stay healthy.

From that web site for the book:

"Shane Sellers spent 26 years as one of the country’s greatest jockeys, both on the track and behind the scenes. He battled his way through the powers to increase jockey weight limits and reduce the growing amount of eating disorders, fought for endorsements so that his fellow jockeys would not risk their lives for a mere $50 per mount, and pushed for better insurance for the men and women who risk their lives for every race.

In return, Sellers was banished from the sport in hopes that he would keep his secrets and his goals to himself.

Now Sellers is back and he has an amazing story to tell. Welcome to the secret world of horse racing; a place where heaving bowls and sweat boxes cover every jock’s room, horses run numbly towards their final destinations, and one man continues to battle for what he knows is right.

Co-written by Shane Sellers and Tricia Psarreas, Freedom’s Rein is more than a tale of horse racing; it is the ultimate fight for justice."

For a dedicated bulimic, one good purge is all it takes to lose enough potassium that your heart gives out. Simple as that.

I waitressed across the street from a race track and became good friends with several jockeys. Trust me, they almost all purge after a meal. Their weight is everything and the lifestyle isn't healthy.

Well that book by Shane Sellers sounds sensationalistic. I am sure there is a lot more involved than just someone's weight as to whether or not you are a good rider.

The thing is, if you want to be a good racer, you need to be a good athlete first. You have to be able to move with the animal and guide it. If you are just sick and weak, you are more like dead weight than anything. That will slow down the horse.

I really don't think that a few pounds here and there make much difference. If you are going to be sick just to lose some pounds, you are defeating the whole purpose of being an athlete.

I have seen anorexics and bulemics and this guy did not look like one. His face was full and round and his cheeks had color in them.

Don't you think that the jockeys have coaches who watch what they eat to make sure that it is healthy anyway?

It seems that there is speculation that he committed suicide over not being allowed to ride Nehro in the Derby. Maybe he was upset about it and was going to make trouble so someone thought to kill him even.

I think it does stink when a rider gets attached to a horse and then gets taken away from it due to some corporate decision on how to make money.

A horse and rider are like a team. When you break up a team, it hurts, not to mention all the work the rider puts in on a particular horse just to be able to work well with him.

Yah, way to go Sheldon Cooper. You must have a background as an "investigative reporter" for mainstream media. You're good! GLP is lucky to have you right on top of things!

John Velasquez replaced Robbie Alvarado on the Derby winning mount, because Robbie had been kicked in the face by a horse and the owner felt he wanted a jockey that was 100% on his horse.

Shit happens in racing like this all the time.

If the kid committed suicide for the reason he lost the mount... well, he wouldn't have gotten very far in the industry.

He came from a family of jockeys. I do not believe he killed himself over a lost mount. No how, no way...

Someone call Nick Charles -the thin man ,he will crack the case.

Cocain OD? He was arrested for cocain possession last year.

Report: Jockey Found Dead At Churchill Was Facing Cocaine Charges
[link to www.wlky.com]

Yeah coccaine I might beleive killed him. That stuff does stop your heart all of a sudden.

Heart attack or hemmorage from while watching Seabiscuit on his Iphone.

Did you ride as a professional jockey or are you friends with any? The thing is, what you say in your first line, that the weight isn't the most important thing, well, you can be the best rider in the world but if you can't make the weight you aren't going to get any rides, period. You say, you have to be a good athlete first, no, you have to make the weight first.

They don't have coaches who watch what they eat to make sure it is healthy. Not sure where you would get such an idea. Jockeys are free agents, they aren't riding on any team, they don't have backing, one thing Shane Sellers was fighting for was to have any kind of proper accident insurance for the jockeys.

An electroylyte imbalance can kill pretty quickly, even someone young. If you vomit enough, you can become dehydrated and die of heart failure.

[link to i.cdn.turner.com]

Except from an article that addresses the pressure on jockeys to keep absurdly light weight, less than 50% cited for purposes of discussion:

"Eating and purging, a dangerous eating disorder called bulimia, "is in every jockeys' room," said former top jockey "Hollywood" Herb McCauley, who suffered from it for 20 years.



"It's said, it's something you try to hide, but it's there. A lot of riders who do it eat like it's their last meal. You're famished, so you eat and throw up," he said.



Dr. Arthur Heller, a nutritionist and digestive disease expert at New York Presbyterian Hospital, said the starvation practices could have terrible consequences.



Jockeys can suffer the brittle and thinning bones of osteoporosis, blood disorders kidney and nerve damage abnormal heart rhythms, fainting spells, and muscle weakness and cramps.



They can "tear a hole in their oesophagus and throw up blood," Heller said.



Jockeys say extreme weight-loss measures are widespread - and unnecessary - the result of the racing industry's refusal to change century-old weight limits.



They say it's time for change - a few pounds. That's all. It won't make much difference to a 1,000-pound horse, but it will make a big difference to the 100-pound jockey who rides him.



Still, many horse owners and trainers are against any increase in weight limits. So are some racing officials, who fear that if they assign higher weights, the horsemen will send their runners to tracks that don't.



"It's a subject that needs to be addressed," said Giovanni, who is spearheading the guild's efforts to convince state racing commissioners and their umbrella groups - the Racing Commissioners International and the North American Parimutuel Regulators Association - that the limits should be raised and standardised.



The weight in question, called the tack (the total poundage of the jockey in full gear, plus saddle and saddlecloth) varies from race to race. In the Triple Crown, for instance, the horses carry 126 pounds.



But in other races, the tack can drop to 112 pounds - sometimes less."

[link to www.nalis.gov.tt]

More from Part Two of the article I quoted above:

"Retired Hall of Fame jockey Angel Cordero Jr., winner of more than 7,000 races and three Kentucky Derby features, subsisted on a starvation diet.



"I only ate one meal a day for 34 years," he said. "It's very uncomfortable when you make all that money and can't eat like a person. Sometimes you let yourself go and have a pizza, but I had to pay the price the next day and I'd hate everybody who was with me."



Cordero was so thin, when his spleen was removed after a riding accident that ended his career; the stitches couldn't hold the wound together.



"I didn't have any fat," he said. "They kept coming out of my skin."



One practical reason for raising the scale of weights, advocates argue, is that without going to extremes to reduce, jockeys could ride to their best ability.



"Anything you do to put yourself in a weakened condition has to affect your performance," Giovanni said. "I don't know of anybody who's ever passed out on a horse, but I've seen guys come back and pass out after they rode."



"The scale of weights is killing a lot of kids," Cordero said. "You sacrifice so much it makes you weak. First you work in the morning, exercising horses. Then you have to pull weight without eating. Then you ride all day. Then you come home and can only eat a little bit. Then the next morning you do the same routine. It wears you out, mentally and physically."