Garrett Gomez: the very definition of tragedy

First Walter Swinburn, now Garrett Gomez. It really has been a horrible week, the loss of two such gifted individuals before their time leaving racing communities on both sides of the Atlantic in a state of numbness.

For make no mistake: Gomez was as big a name as a jockey in North America as Swinburn was in Europe, a dual champion with no fewer than 83 Grade 1 successes to his name and one of the most successful riders in the history of the Breeders’ Cup. Remember, this was the man who, riding the aptly-named Blame, engineered the downfall of the great Zenyatta in that never-to-be-forgotten Classic under the floodlights at Churchill Downs in 2010.

Poor Walter Swinburn has rightly been described as a troubled genius; so too Gomez, although his issues were different and more public in nature. The American jockey, gone at just 44, was just as comfortable dressed in a tuxedo sipping champagne with multi-millionaire thoroughbred racehorse owners as he was seated at a table in a crack house or snorting cocaine. Those are not the words of a muck-spreading journalist seeking to sensationalise a serious issue: they were borrowed from the flyleaf of Gomez’s painful memoir, written with a co-author and published under the title: The Garrett Gomez Story – A Jockey's Journey Through Addiction & Salvation.