Bejarano out at least three weeks

It was a frightening sight. A horse that moments earlier was leading a race lay dead on the track, the victim of a heart attack, and his jockey, 25-year-old Rafael Bejarano, was crumpled in a heap next to the rail as medical personnel rushed to the scene.

“The first thing you worry about is the health of the jockey,” Kathy Walsh said Friday. “There’s always another race.”

The day before, Walsh was more than a casual observer as the medical staff tended to Bejarano for nearly 15 minutes after the eighth race before putting him on a stretcher and transporting him to nearby Arcadia Methodist Hospital. He was released around midnight.

Bejarano was scheduled to ride Georgie Boy, the 9-5 morning-line favorite in today’s Grade II, $200,000 San Felipe Stakes, and Georgie Boy is trained by Walsh.

Walsh, who turns 68 Tuesday, has been training racehorses for most of her life and knows about the highs and lows that come with the territory. Maybe that’s why she was more concerned about Bejarano than how his injuries affected her.

“He’s such a wonderful person, a marvelous young man,” she said. “And he had been going so great.”

Bejarano, a native of Peru, came to Southern California from Kentucky in late November to ride at Hollywood Park and won over the horse racing community here with his fearless and tenacious style. He is Santa Anita’s leading rider with 60 wins this meet, and 12 of those came in four racing days, including two on Thursday before the eighth-race mishap that sent him to the hospital.

Bejarano is expected to be out at least three weeks with two cracked vertebra in his lower neck. Walsh has tabbed Michael Baze as the fill-in.

“He’s been on Georgie Boy before and has worked him,” Walsh said. “He’s a talented young man.”

Baze rode the son of Tribal Rule in his first race to a third-place finish at Hollywood Park last June 16.

Voted the 2007 California-bred champion 2-year-old male, Georgie Boy has finished no worse than second in his five races since then. He won the Del Mar Futurity on Sept. 5 with Garrett Gomez aboard, then got an extended vacation before coming back to win the San Vicente Stakes at Santa Anita on Feb. 10, when Bejarano was the rider.

Walsh said she knew the horse needed a rest after the Del Mar Futurity and credits owner George Schway, a 75-year-old retired appliance dealer from Northridge, for going along with her plan.

“You’ve got to realize these horses can’t dance every dance,” she said.

Now it is up to Baze to keep Georgie Boy’s two-race win streak intact. The next race after today’s figures to be the Santa Anita Derby on April 5 and then maybe the Kentucky Derby, although Walsh is hesitant to talk about future plans.

“First, we just have to see how he comes out of this race,” she said.

But she acknowledged that, if all goes well, the Kentucky Derby “is something we’ll have to look at.”

Ten horses that have won or placed second in the San Felipe have gone on to win the Kentucky Derby. The most recent is Giacomo, the San Felipe runner-up in 2005.

Walsh has had one Kentucky Derby horse, Hanuman Highway, who finished seventh in 1998. A woman trainer has never won the Kentucky Derby -- or a Triple Crown race.

Walsh grew up in Northern California on a ranch near Willows before moving with her family to another ranch in Eastern Washington in 1961. She made her mark as a trainer at Seattle’s Longacres Racecourse, which closed in 1992. She was the leading trainer there four times during the 1970s.

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larry.stewart@latimes.com