After scary injury, jockey Conner announces retirement
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After suffering a severe spinal injury during a spill at Colonial Downs last month, jockey Tyler Conner announced his retirement from racing in a video posted to social media Tuesday. He said that he is slowly regaining feeling and recovering from the incident, but that it had a jarring impact and has led him to consider a life beyond the saddle.
“I have zero desire to ride a racehorse again,” Conner said. “I’ve been wanting to quit for years and this gives me a good reason now. I just have to focus on getting healthy and figuring out what I want to do.”
Conner was riding in the seventh race at Colonial on July 24 when his horse clipped heels with a rival and stumbled entering the stretch. Conner was unseated and complained about a loss of feeling while receiving medical attention on the track. In the video released Tuesday, Conner said that he was fully paralyzed for a short time.
After being transported by helicopter to the Virginia Commonwealth University Trauma Center in Richmond, Conner was diagnosed with a broken C1 vertebra, as well as a compression fracture to his T5 vertebra and a bruised spinal cord.
Injuries to his spine resulted in central cord syndrome, in which a person may experience prolonged weakness in their hands and arms. While Conner quickly regained feeling in his legs and was walking soon after the incident, he said in the video that his left hand is still “basically useless.” He also suffered a broken nose during the fall.
Following his injury, Conner received an outpouring of support from the racing community, for which he expressed gratitude. A GoFundMe page created by assistant trainer Hilary Pridham on July 25 has raised more than $65,000 for the jockey to assist in his recovery.
“The support has been unbelievable with that,” Conner said. “I never would have expected that, that amount of support and that amount of money to be raised for me in this kind of time.”
Before becoming a jockey, Conner was a fervent motocross competitor and aspired to become a professional in the sport. After several injuries, however, he turned to a career as a jockey. At Penn National, his father used to work as a trainer and his mother was a jockey. Conner got his start at the track in 2014 and quickly earned mounts in the surrounding area.
After a brief move to the West Coast in 2017 and 2018, Conner returned to his base at Penn National and found success at tracks around the Mid-Atlantic region.
Conner won 1,271 races from 8,000 career starts with purse earnings of nearly $23 million over the course of his career. In 2025, he won 54 races in 333 starts, including three stakes victories.
The weekend before his injury, Conner guided 5-year-old gelding Fierce and Strong to his second stakes victory of the year in the $100,000 Wolf Hill at Monmouth Park. It was a massive victory for the Pennsylvania-bred and trainer Michael Salvaggio Jr., who won in front of a big crowd on Haskell Day.
“We’re going to miss him as a rider,” Salvaggio said. “I sure do like the kid and I think he was a very good rider. He certainly rode Fierce and Strong very well.”
Conner won all over the country in a career spanning more than a decade, but one of his biggest victories was close to home. In the Grade 2 Penn Mile at Penn National in 2022, Conner accepted a mount on Wow Whata Summer from trainer Chuck Lawrence, who had known him since he was a child.
“He grew up right around Fair Hill,” Lawrence said. “His mom actually rode winners for my dad back in the 1980s, so I know the family well. He has always given me 100 percent rides and [had] just a wonderful personality.”
Facing down the likes of Annapolis, Fort Washington, and Witty that day, Conner and Lawrence defended their turf when Wow Whata Summer crossed the line first at 83-1 odds. Lawrence said that the hard-knocking gelding has always had a puncher’s chance on his best day and that Conner found the winning move, hustling him to the lead on the backstretch and holding on to win by 1 1/4 lengths.
“I had no qualms putting him up in a graded race or a $5,000 maiden,” Lawrence said. “You knew he was going to give it everything he had in both of them.”
In addition to the Penn Mile in 2022, Conner won three more graded stakes in his career: The Grade 3 Remington Oaks in 2023, the Grade 3 All American at Golden Gate Fields in 2018, and the Grade 2 Eddie D at Santa Anita in 2017.
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