On a cold, quiet morning at the eastern edge of Belmont Park, the ground is encrusted in ice and the sky is the color of cement, and inside Barn 18, the greatest survivor in horse racing is wearing a red parka and a ski hat, bemoaning neither the weather nor anything else.

It’s a few minutes after 11 o’clock. Andrew Lakeman wheels into a stall, over a mat of hay, and pulls up alongside Thisskysabeauty, the one and only horse he trains, a 3-year-old colt with a striking mahogany coat. On the barn wall is a lacquered blue sign with the initials “AL” written in yellow script. Lakeman rubs the horse’s right foreleg, and the horse gives him a playful nuzzle, just furlongs away from the site of the accident that ended Lakeman’s jockey career, his body crushed as if it were a potato chip.

“I really do believe this horse was a gift from God,” Lakeman says. “I am so blessed to have him.” He maneuvers to the other side of the stall and looks at his colt again. He pulls up the zipper of his parka. “I’m so happy to be doing what I’m doing now. I really wouldn’t change anything. This is what I love,” he says.

Andrew Lakeman is a 36-year-old horseman from Sunderland, England, a man with fair skin and a soft voice, thick with the accent of his native land – where he fell in love with ponies as young boy on his grandfather’s farm. The world of sport regularly serves us with stories of comeback and redemption and personal transformation. It’s almost impossible to imagine anyone overcoming more than Andrew Lakeman, who knows little of what the future will bring beyond this: he will spend every day of it in a motorized wheelchair, paralyzed from the chest down.

“We all have a choice whether to sit in the dirt or try to rise above it,” Lakeman says. “Just because I’m in this wheelchair life doesn’t end.”

Allen Jerkens is a Hall of Fame trainer for whom Lakeman used to ride.

“Anyone who can survive what he has and keep going – that’s takes a lot of guts,” Jerkens says.

* * *

Forty-four months ago, Andrew Lakeman was a scuffling jockey/exercise rider who was battling demons and trying to carve out a living on the hyper-competitive New York racing circuit. An unusually tall jockey at 5-8, Lakeman had chronic struggles to keep his weight at 115, going on long runs in a rubber suit on sweltering summer days, and much worse, forcing himself to throw up after virtually every meal. Lakeman had even longer-running issues with drug and alcohol addiction and the wild behavior that accompanied it, twice getting his license yanked by the New York State Racing and Wagering Board.

With the help of the Backstretch Employee Service Team (B.E.S.T.), Lakeman started going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, finding a life without mood-altering drugs. The fight with bulimia continued, but Lakeman, who won a stakes race for Jerkens in 2005, hoped that sobriety would improve his results and help ramp up his career.

On the afternoon of May 25, 2007, Lakeman got a mount on a horse named Our Montana Dream, a 78-1 shot. It was the fourth race on the card, a one-mile turf race at Belmont. Lakeman was so excited that he told the pony girl who led him to the paddock, “I love this job. I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t ride.” In the race, Lakeman leaned through the far turn and came up hard on a horse named Irish Senorita, clipping her heels, Our Montana Dream losing her footing, Lakeman crashing to the turf, then getting trampled by the trailing horse.

The horses got up.

Andrew Lakeman did not.

His neck was broken in three places, his spinal cord severed. He also had five broken ribs, two punctured lungs and sternum cracked in two places. Since 1940, 751 jockeys have died in race-track accidents, according to Terry Meyocks, national manager of the Jockeys’ Guild. The miracle was that Lakeman didn’t make it 752.

He spent five weeks in North Shore University in Manhasset, L.I., and five more in Mt. Sinai. Lakeman was angry at God, angry at A.A., angry at life. Sober for more than nine months at the time of the accident, he started drinking again. He was consumed with self-pity.

He saw no reason to live.

Kristina Dupps is a former trainer who has been good friends with Lakeman since he came to New York almost 15 years ago.

“Immediately after the accident, I said, ‘He’s either going to shoot himself or make something good out of this for his life,’” Dupps says.

Lakeman says he thought of suicide, but never got close to doing it. He kept drinking, and kept eating, too, now without the purging. Lakeman’s weight soared to 255, and his bitterness and depression spiraled, too, even as B.E.S.T. and fellow jockeys and trainers were having fund-raisers and rallying behind him, enabling him to buy a customized Toyota Sienna minivan, while the Permanently Disabled Jockeys Fund awarded him $1,000 per month for life.

Lakeman was never the most popular jockey on the circuit; he could be acerbic and hot-tempered and opinionated, a bluster that Dupps saw as a cover for the doubts and insecurities Lakeman held inside.

Says Dupps, “There was just a tremendous outpouring for Andrew, and I think it helped Andrew see that people didn’t hate him … that he had all this support.”

Still, Lakeman’s spirits continued to plummet. “Mentally sour” is how he described himself. He wondered what the point was, right up until Sept. 7, 2009. A friend at Belmont track offered Lakeman a can of Budweiser. Lakeman opened it and started drinking it, and then a remarkable event occurred: his obsession lifted. He didn’t want to drink anymore. He went back to A.A. and worked closely with B.E.S.T. counselor Ray Maldonado, who helped him with A.A.’s 12 steps and focusing on what he could change, instead of what he couldn’t change.

“Ray Maldonado saved my life,” Lakeman says. His attitude slowly started to shift. He knew he wanted to be independent – he rejected the idea of returning to England because he didn’t want his parents to take care of him – and yearned to be involved in racing again. He made up his mind to be a trainer, and quite suddenly, a fresh motivation was born. Lakeman looked at himself and asked a question:

“Am I going to sit here in misery and be angry at every person who walks in front of me, or am I going to go out and try to life life to the fullest?”

Eighteen months later, Andrew Lakeman says he is still clean and sober. Dupps, for her part, sees an entirely different person, the angry, truculent Lakeman fading, a gentler and more nurturing person coming to the fore.

“Before it used to be Andrew, Andrew, Andrew,” Dupps says. “He’d try hard with horses, and he had a great way with horses, but with people he’d always think of himself first. Now he isn’t like that at all. Now he’s a really understanding, compassionate person.”

Says Lakeman, “I’m starting to love the real Andrew Lakeman and (learning to accept) the love of other people.”

* * *

Lakeman purchased Thisskysabeauty last August for $40,000, a deal he negotiated with a former trainer and friend, Carlos Morales, who works for Off the Hoof, a breeding farm and stable in Ocala, Fla. Lakeman’s ardent hope is that he will have more horses to train before long. He has big plans all around. He’s already lost 30 pounds and wants to lose 55 more, get down to 165. He wants to prove to owners that you can be a good trainer out of a wheelchair.

“Without a doubt he’s going to make it, because he has the passion and he has the knowledge,” Dupps says. “He’s always been a good horseman. Now he’s determined to prove it to people.”

When Lakeman was in the throes of his drug and alcohol abuse, Dupps would regularly confront him. She’d accuse of being a weakling, of not standing up to his problems. Lakeman would go right back at her and tell her she didn’t know what she was talking about, and didn’t understand his problems. Now Dupps sees a wholly different human being, a man completely committed to forging ahead, no matter that it takes him two hours to get out of his Floral Park apartment in the morning, that he needs a home health aide morning and night.

“Now I tell him, you are so much stronger than I thought . . . so much stronger than I know I’d be,” Dupps says.

A week ago Saturday, Thisskysabeauty ran his first race for Lakeman, in the second at Aqueduct. As he sat in his chair in the center of the paddock, Lakeman looked at his majestic horse, with his gleaming coat and handsome bearing, and was overcome. He felt a new found purpose. He was a trainer and his very own horse was about to run a race at Aqueduct. He started to cry.

With Ramon Dominguez aboard, Thisskysabeauty, who went off at 7-1, settled into fifth before he surged over the final furlong to finish third. Lakeman was thrilled with the way the race went, and is eager to get his colt back out there, at a distance longer than six furlongs.

In the meantime, there is a lot of work to do in Barn 18. Amid the sheets of ice and the leaden sky, Alfonso Camacho, Lakeman’s groom, finishes bathing the colt and puts a blue plaid blanket over him, with the name Andrew Lakeman stitched on the side. Lakeman gives Thisskysabeauty a tender rub on the head and turns and wheels away from the stall, out of the barn. He pushes a button and his minivan opens and a platform descends, waiting for Lakeman and his chair. The van’s license plate is Win 7. On the back window is an image of Lakeman aboard a horse called Blond Dancer, a famously difficult filly he used to ride for Dupps.

Andrew Lakeman doesn’t ride horses anymore. He trains them. He moves his chair onto the platform and is hoisted up, and rolls forward and turns on the ignition. For Andrew Lakeman, everything is new, his life free of alcohol and bulimia and free of limitations, too, no matter what the wheelchair suggests.

He shakes your hand and drives off, his destination clearer than it has ever been before.

“Right now my life couldn’t be better, because I’m back at the track doing something I love,” Andrew Lakeman says.

Posted by: www.nydailynews.com