Solis All Set to Get Back on the Horses

Alex Solis was leading the country’s jockeys in purses last summer, but his juices weren’t flowing.

“I felt tired,” he recalled. “I had been doing a lot of traveling. I had been to Japan, I had ridden in Dubai, I was going around the U.S. to ride some pretty good horses. I was saying to myself that it might be nice if I could get a little bit of a vacation. Then came the spill. It gets back to what they say about watching out for what you wish for, doesn’t it?”

Solis, who started riding in his native Panama in 1981, has had some serious injuries over the years, but none like the cracked vertebra that he suffered at Del Mar on July 23. He hasn’t ridden in a race since, but he’ll begin a comeback, after a 6 1/2 -month absence, Saturday at Santa Anita.

“I was going to take a little more time,” said Solis, who has been exercising horses for the last couple of weeks. “But when the chance came along to ride a nice horse in the Strub, [agent Scotty McClellan] and I got together and decided that this would be a good time to get started.”

Solis’ mount in the $300,000 Strub, a race he won with Dare And Go in 1995, will be Imperialism, third in last year’s Kentucky Derby but trying to end a seven-race losing streak. Solis, 40, has two mounts Saturday, the other in an earlier race on the card.

“It never entered my mind that I wouldn’t make it back,” Solis said. “I miss being out there. You have to do what makes you happy, and riding horses is my passion.”

The Santa Anita riding colony can use Solis, who has won 4,158 races and ridden horses that have earned more than $182 million.

As trainer Jeff Mullins said recently, in explaining why he was happy to be able to use Pat Valenzuela, back from a drug-related suspension, “The [jockeys’] room had gotten pretty light around here.”

Of the top 10 riders in purses last year, only three -- Victor Espinoza, who ranked third; Corey Nakatani, seventh, and Solis, ninth -- were based in California. It is phenomenal that Solis was still among the leaders after all the time he missed.

“He was having an Eclipse Award-winning year when he went down,” trainer Bobby Frankel said.

Solis, whose horses earned $11.5 million in 2004, still finished fifth nationally in graded stakes wins. He won six Grade I races, seven Grade II events and eight Grade III races. He also rode eight winners in stakes that were ungraded.

He won a $6-million race and a $2-million race on the same day in Dubai, with Pleasantly Perfect and Our New Recruit, and he won two Grade I races in New York with Pico Central, who finished second to Speightstown in the Eclipse voting for best sprinter.

Frankel, who won nine stakes last year with Solis riding, has been frequently using the jockey on recent mornings and has no doubt that Solis will soon be booting home winners in the afternoon.

“He’s a good athlete, and takes care of himself,” Frankel said. “He’s got a solid work ethic, and he’s a great guy to go with it.”

Last year’s spill occurred in the twilight at Del Mar, on the track’s first Friday night card of the meet. Solis was riding Golden K K, a 4-year-old filly trained by Dean Greenman. Javier Santiago, riding Vegas Folly, crowded Solis’ mount toward the rail at the three-sixteenths pole.

“My horse ducked out, clipped the heels of the other horse and we went down,” Solis said.

He landed on his back.

“There was a lot of pain, and I knew right away that I had broken something,” Solis said. “I told the ambulance driver that it was bad. Besides the back injury, I also cracked five ribs.”

Solis underwent back surgery a few days after the Del Mar spill. During the down time, he said, he went through periods of depression, visited the track only occasionally and seldom watched racing on TV. He didn’t even watch the Breeders’ Cup, from Lone Star Park in Texas.

“It would have hurt too much,” Solis said. “It would have been too painful, to watch those races when you knew you should have been there.”

During an interview one morning at Santa Anita’s Clockers’ Corner, Solis recalled two other horrifying spills, both at Hollywood Park.

“One of them,” he said, “I was flipped 25 feet in the air, over the head of the horse. Another time, on the first turn, I went down and broke my leg and had to have screws put in my wrist. I was out for 3 1/2 months. But this is part of the business, and you accept it. I’ve been doing this for 23 years now, and I know the risks. But this is what I love, and this is the talent that God’s given me, so I have to keep at it.”

Solis came away from his most spectacular spill with no injuries. In 1986, a year after he’d moved from Florida to California, Solis had to bail out when his mount, Momentus, making only his second start, ducked inward and jumped the fence while leading in the stretch of the Hawthorne Juvenile in suburban Chicago.

Momentus shattered the wooden eighth pole, broke four ribs and needed 178 stitches to repair his wounds. Solis scrambled under the rail to avoid being trampled by the rest of the field.

Not long after last year’s surgery, Solis began taking daily walks at Del Mar. One of his companions was Fernando Toro, a retired jockey who has been Solis’ mentor. Recently, he has been hiking foothills with Laffit Pincay, a fellow Panamanian, longtime idol and Hall of Fame jockey who retired after breaking his neck at Santa Anita in 2003. For the last five weeks, Solis has been regularly riding a mechanical horse, while wearing a 25-pound vest, at his home in Glendora.

Late last year, Solis began attending monthly classes in tai chi and qi gong, centuries-old, yoga-like Chinese exercises.

“A friend of mine suggested I try it, and it’s working out,” Solis said. “It’s a restful thing, a kind of meditation that puts you more in touch with your mind. I do it for two or three hours every time I go. It’s something that helped me overcome the depression. When you’re on top, and then your career comes to a dead stop, you’re bound to get depressed.”