After scary collision, starter Brinson got right back to work

A face-to-head collision with a loose horse prior to Sunday’s second race at Los Alamitos forced starter Gary Brinson to the sidelines – but only for several hours.

Brinson, 76, was briefly hospitalized on Sunday afternoon, needing stitches to close a wound under an eyebrow, and to undergo a precautionary CT scan.

Brinson missed the remainder of the Los Alamitos afternoon program, but was back at the track, and back on the job as a starter, after the second race of the evening meeting, which concluded with the $1.8 million Los Alamitos Two Million Futurity for Quarter Horses.

“We had a pretty good break in the big one,” he said of the start of the Two Million Futurity.

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Brinson was taken to a hospital approximately three miles west of the track. After three hours of care, he was ready to leave.

“I said, 'I’m going to sign myself out',” he recalled on Wednesday. “I felt all right.”

The incident in Sunday afternoon’s second race happened after Stormy Samurai broke through the gate. Brinson starts races while standing against the inside rail several yards ahead of the gate. When Stormy Samurai broke through the gate without his rider, the gelding took a few strides forward before veering directly toward Brinson.

“When he took that left-handed turn, I was going to catch him because he was on the left side of me,” Brinson said. “He moved and he hit me.

“The bit hit me right over my eye. His chest hit me and knocked me up against that rail.”

The collision left Brinson was a nasty wound on his brow.

“I looked like I’d been in a fight with Mike Tyson,” he said.

Brinson was on the ground momentarily while being attended to by ambulance personnel, and his team of assistant starters. After striking Brinson, Stormy Samurai hit the inside rail and slid on the top of the rail briefly before he was caught. Trainer Sergio Morfin told Los Alamitos publicity that Stormy Samurai had a few cuts that needed stitches but was otherwise fine.

Brinson’s next racing program is Saturday evening at Los Alamitos. He planned to oversee gate schooling at Los Alamitos on Thursday morning and said he had a doctor’s appointment later in the day.

He does not plan to change his method of starting races while standing near the gate.

“Half of the people start on the ground like me,” he said of his national colleagues. “It was one of those deals. It happens.”

Brinson was a starter at Hollywood Park from 1984 until 2013 when the track closed. He has been the Los Alamitos starter at the year-round evening races for Quarter Horses and lower-level Thoroughbreds since 2014 and later took on his current assignment as starter at the track’s three brief daytime Thoroughbred meetings.

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