Exercise rider Roddy Mackenzie healing after accident

Roddy MacKenzie, an exercise rider for trainer Neil Howard, had surgery last week to repair broken bones after a terrible training accident at Fair Grounds, and despite facing a long road to recovery is progressing as well as could be hoped.

MacKenzie, a former steeplechase jockey, fractured bones from his upper arm to his lower leg early on the morning of Jan. 7. MacKenzie was breezing a horse with a workmate when a loose horse that had dropped its rider and run off collided full speed and head-on with MacKenzie’s mount in upper stretch. Both horses were killed by the impact. MacKenzie, though badly injured, said he was fortunate to come away from the accident at all.

“I’m just so grateful I’m alive,” MacKenzie, a 39-year-old native of Ireland, said Wednesday, reached by phone in New Orleans.

MacKenzie underwent extensive surgery Jan. 17 to repair fractures in his humerus, ulna, radius, femur, tibia, and ankle. He also suffered a full tear of his anterior cruciate ligament and said that injury and an inability to properly move his hand are his “main concerns right now.”

“I might not get the ability back that I used to have, but bones will heal,” said MacKenzie, who came to the U.S. in 2005 to work for trainer Michael Dickinson. “All the surgeries went pretty well. I’ll have a follow up [Jan. 31] with X-rays and we’ll see how everything is from there.”

A gofundme web page collecting donations to help support MacKenzie can be found here.