On Saturday, January 19, Ramon Dominguez won his third consecutive Outstanding Jockey Eclipse Award.

He didn’t know it at the time, but the day before, he had ridden in his last race.

While his friends and colleagues John Velazquez and Javier Castellano accepted the award on his behalf, Dominguez was in a New York hospital room with a fractured skull, the result of a fall when his horse clipped heels with another and threw him during the seventh race at Aqueduct Racetrack on January 18.

The incident might have been the equine equivalent of a fender bender: two horses got too close together in traffic on the track, and one bumped into the other. Dominguez’s mount, a seven-year-old gelding named Convocation took a bad fall but was unhurt, as were the other horse and jockey involved.

Dominguez was not so lucky.

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