Page 89 - September 2016

Good Day’s Work
Wrecks are part of the job on the track, as they are in any occupation involving high-strung horses doing high-energy work in high-stress conditions. Cue the racetrack outriders: It’s their job to prevent all the wrecks that they can and to minimize those that they can’t.
“I enjoy this job, I love riding a good horse and I love my horses – I call them ‘my boys,’” Mitch says. “They all won’t make outriding horses. But I get a new horse, I’ll play with him, and I’ll know within a week or 10 days, or even sooner, whether he’s going to be alright. They let me know. The ones that make it through that trial are in my barn right now, and I’m proud of all my boys.”
Mitch and his boys work together.
“I don’t ask them to do anything that I’m not going to do with them,” he says. “If there’s a terrible wreck, we’re getting in the middle
of it. If I can save one horse from running through the rail, if I can save one horse from running another guy over, I’ve had a good day. I’m out there to help those kids, and if a horse runs off or something, I go catch him.
If that horse won’t go on the track or won’t come off it, my job is just (to ensure) safety for everybody around. If I can save one horse or one kid, I’ve had a good year.”
Good year, good day, good moment.
It can all come down to a single shake, as
it did in the 2011 accident that ended the career of the jockey who, seven years earlier, had won the All American Futurity-G1 aboard Noblesse Six.
“This was a really, really bad wreck,” Mitch says. “They were going 870 (yards) and I always trail the horses going around. The horse that Chris Zamora was on
went down, and two horses fell on him. I thought, no, they just killed my friend! One horse got up and came running back in a panic, I got between him and Chris, and my horse took the hit and kept that horse from running over him again, which probably would have killed the rider. So, that made my whole day right there. They carried Chris out and got him to the hospital, and today Chris Zamora is a very, very good horse trainer and he’s doing really good now.
“I’d like to always think that I might have helped that.”
Mitch helped his horse that evening. “My horse just stood there and took it – just another day at the office. I took him back to the barn and he got a little bute in his feed that night.”
“Kindness is a wonderful thing,” says Mitch Mitchell, the head outrider at Ruidoso Downs, pictured above with a young fan in the saddling paddock.
Mitchell uses 2-time New Mexico-bred Horse of the Year The Zia Star, pictured on the right winning the 2000 Cimarron Handicap, once every six or eight days as his pony horse.
Mitch Mitchell grew up around horses in South Dakota, worked at various ranches in New Mexico and on the starting gates at Ruidoso before an injury that led to his becoming the lead outrider at Ruidoso Downs.
Robbie Edwards, shown aboard 1983 Champion Two-Year-Old Gelding Face In The Crowd, was an outrider at The Downs at Albuquerque and SunRay Park, and has done everything from breaking and training colts, to photographing horses, to riding as an extra in western movies.
SPEEDHORSE, September 2016 87
photo by Richard Chamberlain