Day Twenty-Two: Final Night

My final Tuesday at Colonial was somewhat eventful compared to the usual nights.
The first race went off as planned, but a heavy storm soon took over and flooded the track. We even had lightning strike an office next to mine, causing all the betting to go down momentarily. The races were delayed an hour while the storm passed and were all moved to the sloppy dirt track. That meant a lot of work for me, since I had to constantly update the website with changes to the races (off the turf and scratches).
I also had to write a newsletter to send out for the week as well as a closing release on the end of the meet titles. I had to wait to write the final one since two of the titles were so close -- leading trainer and leading apprentice rider were both won by only one win.
I was fortunate enough for the meet to not see any breakdowns. Molly saw some pretty awful ones, but the worst I saw was a horse flipping over a railing after he got loose. However, one of the last races saw Luis Garcia accidently come over on his younger brother's horse and cause that horse to stumble, dropping Geovany Garcia. Geovany got trampled, and had to be loaded up on the ambulance. It was pretty heartwrenching watching Luis jump right off his horse after galloping out and running the whole way down the track to where his brother lay. It turned out that he was fine, however. His agent even called up to me seconds after it happened to see if I knew anything, but all I had heard was that he was up and in the truck.
Entries and results were sent, and I left my key in the office before saying my goodbyes. I worked over 200 hours at Colonial and it feels good to be done. Now if I can just catch up on my summer reading...