Stand Tall with Racing

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We will all remember where we were on the morning of Sept. 11 when the world as we know it changed for all Americans. I was returning home from Belmont Park after doing what I do most mornings of my life -- working horses. A friend called, telling me a plane had just hit one of the World Trade Center towers.

I ran in the house and turned on the television. Watching the first tower hit, burning, I believed it to all be just a terrible accident. When the second tower was hit, however, I knew immediately it was a deliberate terrorist attack.

The shock, disbelief, and outrage were soon overtaken by worry, and then sadness. I am a native New Yorker, born in Babylon, raised in Brooklyn and Bay Shore, and now a resident of Floral Park. My wife and I have many friends and family who work in the financial district of Manhattan.

After many frantic phone calls, we learned that like so many others, we were not spared personal loss in this devastation. My wife lost a cousin who was working in the World Trade Center at the time of the attacks. Sadly, she also had lost a cousin on the evening of Dec. 21, 1988, when Pan Am flight 103 exploded over the city of Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 people on board and 11 others on the ground.

Pan Am flight 103 was called the "air disaster of the century." Now my family has been affected by the two worst air tragedies in my lifetime.

I am personally scarred, but every American citizen -- as well as every moral, caring, thoughtful, law abiding member of the human race -- has been touched and affected to some degree by the outrageous atrocities of Sept. 11.

On the morning of Sept. 12, I steered my car to Belmont, where everyone's mood would best be described as both somber and dazed. I went to the roof of the racetrack and gazed out toward where the towers used to stand just 12 miles away. I saw nothing but a massive cloud of smoke.

Officials of the New York Racing Association made the right move to cancel racing for the next week. It was a hard decision, but a respectful one. People in New York, and around the globe for that matter, needed time to heal, to contemplate, to love.

Since that awful day, living in New York has been different. People think differently. People act differently. People speak differently. Unless you live here, you just cannot completely understand.

When racing started again nine days after the attacks, the whole idea of racing horses seemed trivial compared to the devastating loss of life and monumental heroic efforts of firemen, policemen, and volunteers at ground zero where the World Trade Center once stood.

But as I started to ride, something became very clear to me. Race riding is one of the things that defines me as a person. Race riding in New York is what has made me, what drives me, what fuels my passion for the love of horses. It is how I support my wife and three sons. It is how I fulfill myself.

I am very privileged to be a citizen of this country -- to be free to choose and pursue the career path and goals that I have set. The Breeders' Cup, racing's world championship day, will be held in New York at Belmont Park this year. Like NYRA's decision to cancel racing, the decision by Breeders' Cup officials to not cancel or move the event was also a wise one. We are standing strong as a sport by having the World Thoroughbred Championships 12 miles from where the smoke plumed from ground zero.

The Breeders' Cup will bring people of different nationalities to Belmont Park. These people are kindred spirits who share the same hopes and dreams, hopes and dreams that revolve around horses.

Those of us who love the beloved Thoroughbred can cling to him to help us recover from our grief.

On Oct. 27, it is highly appropriate that we celebrate racing's greatest day in New York. I urge we all do it with the same indomitable spirit that has been guiding every New Yorker the past month. I urge we all do it with that same spirit, at one of the greatest racetracks, in the greatest city, in the greatest country.

God bless America, and everyone who shares her commitment to freedom.

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