by Karen Briggs, WEG Media

Toronto, ON — Trainer Ben Wallace this morning offered an update on the condition of Warp Speed, the 4-year-old Mach Three gelding whose fall in the final of the Ontario Boys series at Woodbine on Monday night (March 2) set off a chain-reaction accident involving eight of the 10 horses in the field, and sending three drivers to hospital with injuries.

“He’s gone home to Kemptville,” said Wallace. “His owner is a veterinarian, so he thought it best that he take charge of his recuperation.

“It’s going to be a while before he races again. He lost a lot of skin, and a lot of blood. I wouldn’t say his injuries are career-ending, but he took the skin off both knees, his back, his hocks. He’s going to be on the shelf for at least three or four months.”

Wallace says he can’t be sure, but he thinks that his pupil’s collapse just before the half-mile marker was the result of him grabbing a shoe.

“He was missing his right front shoe, but of course we can’t be certain whether he pulled it in that instant, or sometime while he was heading back (driverless) to the paddock barn,” he says. “But the way he fell, he just kind of crumpled, and usually when that happens it’s either a broken bone, something really catastrophic, or a grabbed shoe. That was Mario’s (Baillargeon, who was driving Warp Speed and suffered a broken ankle in the mishap) interpretation as well.

“All I can tell you is he was 100 percent going into that race, really straight. It wasn’t a lameness issue so much as maybe a gait issue.”

Windsun Twister, driven by Luc Ouellette, and Dinner Guest, driven by Randy Waples, were the only pairs to escape injury in the Ontario Boys final; they finished one-two. Though drivers Roger Mayotte and Robert Shepherd suffered multiple broken bones and will likely be out of the race-bike for some time to come, and the rest of the drivers involved are battered to various degrees, most agree it was a miracle that no one was killed, and that the horses involved all escaped serious injury as well.