Hovdey: Prat deals with view from the sidelines

Being a jockey’s agent and therefore unable to resist, Derek Lawson spent the last few days of the Los Alamitos September meet and the first weekend of Santa Anita counting the winners he should have been riding. He stopped counting after seven or eight, which was probably best for his peace of mind, and then headed for Las Vegas to decompress and mentally prepare for the next several months while his banged-up rider heals.

There was some consolation in the fact that the rider in question, Flavien Prat, was up and about just nine days after the Los Alamitos accident and in attendance for Santa Anita’s opening weekend, wearing a back brace and a brave smile. When you’re a 23-year-old athlete, a little thing like five broken vertebrae and a punctured lung won’t keep you down for long.

Prat’s fall was one of those lightning strikes that make his profession seem downright suicidal. His 2-year-old mount was vying for the lead when she went straight down and took a trailing filly – by chance her stablemate trained by Mark Glatt – along for the ride. Santiago Gonzalez, the other jockey involved, suffered only minor injuries, and both horses walked away.

“In the hospital, Flavien was adamant the filly broke down,” Lawson said. “I had to assure him she was all right and back at the barn with the other filly. It looked like she got her legs tangled or was bumped off stride and basically dropped herself.”

Prat’s injuries have left a hole near the top of the West Coast jockey colony that other riders have rushed to fill. One of them is Rafael Bejarano, who hardly needs the work. Prat finished second to Bejarano, 39-30, at the Del Mar meet in what was the young Frenchman’s coming-out party as a talent on the rise.

Prat’s most significant win of the summer came in the Grade 1 Bing Crosby Stakes aboard Wild Dude, which will make it tough if the jockey visits Santa Anita again on Saturday. Three races back, trainer Jerry Hollendorfer replaced Bejarano with Prat aboard Wild Dude, but now it will be Rafael back in the saddle for the $300,000 Santa Anita Sprint Championship against a field that includes 2015 stakes winners Masochistic, Kobe’s Back, Distinctiv Passion, and the 3-year-old Gimme Da Lute.

Something from the Santa Anita Sprint Championship undoubtedly will go on to the Breeders’ Cup Sprint at Keeneland on Oct. 31, where the division’s Eclipse Award once again will be on the line.

To this point, the season for sprinters has been a tossed salad of results, with only Private Zone accumulating three significant victories along the way. Last weekend, Rock Fall added the Vosburgh to the Vanderbilt at Saratoga, but he was hardly overwhelming in his narrow win over Tom Fool and Toboggan winner Salutos Amigos. Wild Dude won the San Carlos in addition to the Crosby, while the only other two-timer among the notables is Alsvid, the winner of the Count Fleet and Aristides, who was trying for a third in the Phoenix on Friday at Keeneland.

Appealing Tale beat Wild Dude and Prat by half a length in the Pat O’Brien Stakes on Aug. 22, but he opted out of the Santa Anita race to face Honor Code in the Kelso. In the meantime, Work All Week, the winner of the 2014 Breeders’ Cup Sprint and the reigning Eclipse champ, was also set to run in Keeneland’s opening-day Phoenix on Friday after two second-place finishes and a batting-practice romp in a minor stakes at Mountaineer. If nothing else, he will have the benefit of a race over the Breeders’ Cup course and distance, although it should be noted that he didn’t need it at Santa Anita last year.

Florent Geroux, Work All Week’s rider, has taken a commanding lead among North America’s French riding colony with a late-summer onslaught of major scores. The idea of Geroux and Prat squaring off with their sprinters at Keeneland for all the marbles was intriguing, but such is life. Now, Prat has been reduced to delivering updates on his condition and entertaining a French television crew dispatched from Paris, where he rode under contract for the Wertheimer stable.

“There’s a lot of interest in his well-being back in France,” Lawson noted. “This is Flavien’s first serious injury. Before a race in France, he got knocked off his horse by another horse who hit them from behind after dropping his rider. There’s even video of that one.”

Lawson gives credit to Prat’s girlfriend, Manou Lemaire, for helping the rider through the crucial early days of dealing with recovery. Lemaire, also from France, works for trainer Tom Proctor at his Southern California stable.

“These are young people a long way from home who have never been in a situation like this before,” Lawson said. “Manou has been incredible in handling what has to be a difficult situation. And just like a racetracker, after spending that first night in the hospital with Flavien, she was back to work the next morning.

“The injury is not good,” the agent added, “but it was not tragic.”