It has been said that in the face of a near-death experience a person’s life flashes before their eyes. Maybe so, but Victor Espinoza didn’t have enough time to enjoy even a quick memory burst of his three Kentucky Derby victories and Hall of Fame induction last Thursday morning at Del Mar. Espinoza was on the inside of a three-horse spread gearing down on the clubhouse turn at the end of a half-mile work when a riderless horse suddenly appeared. “Coming straight at me, and no shot to get out of the way,” Espinoza said. “I didn’t even have a chance to close my eyes. I held my breath, and then about two jumps from me the horse ducked out and hit Asa’s horse next to me. I still have the sound of that in my head.” It was four in the afternoon, going on 10 hours after the collision that took the lives 3-year-old Carson Valley and 2-year-old Charge a Bunch and sent Asa Espinoza, Victor’s nephew, briefly to the hospital for pain in his lower back. Having installed Asa in his Del Mar home to lay low for a couple of days, Espinoza now was sitting in the lunchroom of the jockeys’ quarters between mounts, reflecting on what happened. “I’ve never seen an accident like that in my almost three decades in the horse business,” Espinoza said. “I always try to prepare for both the good things and the bad things that can happen when I get on a horse, because there are a lot of things that can go wrong. But something like that? No, it just doesn’t happen.” But it did. Two horses died, and four riders whistled past yet another graveyard. Geovanni Franco, thrown from the runaway horse, was uninjured, while the younger Espinoza was due to return to action on Saturday. Then again, the idea that Victor Espinoza is on horseback at all is borderline preposterous. Monday, July 22, marks the one-year anniversary of the workout accident at Del Mar in which the stakes-winning sprinter Bobby Abu Dhabi suffered a fatal injury and Espinoza sustained a fractured cervical vertebra. The spinal column damage should have cost the rider not only his career, but his quality of life for the foreseeable future. Instead, Espinoza was back in the saddle seven months after the Del Mar crash. The interruptions of racing due to track conditions last winter put the brakes to any momentum Espinoza hoped to build. But by the end of March he had won his first race – the San Carlos Stakes aboard St. Joe Bay – and as Del Mar dawned Espinoza was gradually regrouping his business, winning a race opening day and just missing in the featured Oceanside Stakes aboard the promising colt Nolde. Listening to the jockey describe his recovery, it was hard to reconcile this upbeat, dead-fit 47-year-old athlete with the memory of the worried, unshaven Espinoza in the early months of his recuperation, his neck severely braced, his arms weak as kittens from nerve damage, walking on eggshells around his house as his only form of exercise. “I was ready that my career would be over, but I was committed to doing everything for my health,” Espinoza said. “All I wanted was to see one little thing improve every day. Lift another pound, another rep. Walk a little farther. Stretch a little more. I would say to myself that things don’t happen overnight, they happen over time.” Just after Christmas, Espinoza returned from a breath of fresh air holiday in Cancun to be confronted by the recovering jockey’s best friend, the Equicizer, on which the perch and physical pressures of riding can be reasonably replicated. “I thought, ‘Hmm, I think I’ll get on him,’ ” Espinoza recalled. “And it felt great. So I did it the next day, and the next. My thighs were burning like I hadn’t felt forever. But it was a good pain. I could put my head up and turn – all the things you need to do when you ride. And my body felt more flexible. There was no fear, like I would hurt myself.” Six weeks later he returned. Even now, Espinoza takes nothing for granted. He checks in regularly with his team of orthopedic doctors and rehabilitation specialists. Occasionally, a fresh set of eyes will examine Espinoza’s X-rays. “Like last week, when I saw a different doctor,” Espinoza said. “He did some new X-rays of my neck, and looked at the old pictures, when I was hurt. He said, ‘Wait a minute. This is a different guy. You got hurt where?’ He couldn’t see anything in the C-3. It was perfectly healed.” Espinoza was pleased but hardly surprised. He had long ago come to terms with the challenge he faced. “I think back to when I couldn’t even walk, I just wanted to sleep,” Espinoza said. “I feel like I witnessed a nightmare, the kind you wake up shaking. “Now I’m lucky enough to say I’m one-hundred percent,” he added. “I know a jockey will sometimes say that even when they are not, just to be positive. But I never lied to myself about how I was doing. I mean, none of us is ever one-hundred percent of what we were, before we started getting hurt. But I could not feel any better than I do right now.”