I wrote the Cup of Coffee tepidly, unsure if it was the right thing to do or not. It was about George Weaver and his wife Cindy after a racetrack accident that rocked all of us last summer. Eleven months later, George and Cindy stood in the winner’s enclosure at Royal Ascot after Crimson Advocate provided the head-bob of all head-bobs to win the Queen Mary Stakes.
Published last summer in The Saratoga Special newspaper, the Cup of Coffee was called Life. It felt like an appropriate title then and even more so now.
Life
George Weaver leaned on the outside rail, near the gate of the Oklahoma Training Track late Wednesday morning. His golf cart under a tree, his son, Ben, on the pony. The trainer had a clipboard in one hand, a pen in the other, an eye on a set of horses galloping and another looking for one backing up. His eyes, his actions were all horse trainer. His heart, his head, well, they’re in another world.
Cindy Hutter, George’s wife, suffered a severe brain injury in a morning accident here July 3 when Vindatude, a 3-year-old filly collapsed and died from an apparent heart attack. Hutter was transported to Albany Medical Center and moved to Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital Tuesday. She hasn’t regained consciousness. A flutter, a squeeze, that’s about all so far.
Weaver, Ben and Hutter’s best friend Mary Jo Trotter were there for her transition to the renowned Boston hospital. Doctors don’t know what will happen next. Weaver shook his head at the thought Wednesday morning.
“She’s settled in, but her level of consciousness is low,” Weaver said. “We just got to see. They say you never really know how people respond. It’s a scary situation because you want her to respond to a life that she wants.”
Up to the morning of July 3, Hutter had the life she wanted.
I met her on Bruce Miller’s farm in Unionville, Pa. back in the ’80s. She was learning to gallop horses, rode a few races and then off she went to the big lights of racetrack city. I saw her again, a couple of summers later at Saratoga, she was on a D. Wayne Lukas thunderbolt. Knees to her ears, riding short, wrists folded, she was as tidy on a horse as department-store gift wrap. She left Lukas when Todd Pletcher left and did the same thing there, tuning up and toning down burners for the future Hall of Famer.
Cindy and George met when working for Lukas. From a small town in Pennsylvania, she was as good as any exercise rider anywhere, anytime. From Louisville, Ky., he was a hotwalker, a foreman and then an assistant looking to go out on his own someday. They went out on their own together in 2002, hanging a shingle, hoping for the best. And working to the bone. Like all trainers, like all husband/wife teams, the Weavers rode the ups and downs of an up and down business. Nearly 900 winners followed, Grade 1 winners Vekoma and Lighthouse Bay, Grade 2 winner Point Of Honor, turf star Daddy Is A Legend and a homebred winner of one.
Vindatude won her debut at Belmont Park June 26. The bay daughter of Mshawish is out of Vinda, a filly Weaver trained to five wins the hard way for Agnes Peace, lost in the claim box and claimed back in 2014. Vinda was retired on the spot and became the Weavers’ foray into breeding. Vindatude was her fourth foal, third winner and the score of scores for her breeder/owner/trainer. A New York-bred maiden claimer, sure. A gamechanger to put-your-money-on-the table lifers.
“Did you see what happened yesterday?” Hutter said to her former boss Monday morning, June 27, in Saratoga.
“No, I was driving here,” Pletcher said. “What happened…?”
“Our homebred won first time out,” Hutter said, smiling like only she could from the back of a horse. “That’s like the Breeders’ Cup to us.”
Six days later, Vindatude was dead, Hutter was fighting for her life and Weaver’s world was rocked.
He’s here every morning, filling out the set list, making entries, handling the job at hand – he was trying to figure out how to get an exercise rider’s license approved Wednesday morning while overseeing the last set. It’s business as usual. And then it isn’t.
“I’m still in shock. I’ll be going along and then say holy…this is what happened. This. Happened,” Weaver said. “It’s just so sudden. Boom. It’s a risk in this game that we don’t think about it. If you thought about it, you probably couldn’t do it. People get hurt in this game all the time, but most don’t get hurt so bad that they’re…”
Weaver drifted away, the fragility of racing, the fragility of life sparring and spinning, a cocktail of uncertainty, a concoction of pain.
“How did she get hurt that bad? That bad,” Weaver said. “I didn’t see it. I don’t know. I don’t know. Knowing her, she loves horses so much, she probably tried to keep the horse up. She’s riding longer, if you’re riding shorter, you get thrown away from the horse. All this stuff goes through your mind. It’s not going to change anything.”
Every summer of The Special, I’d see George and Cindy riding along the horse paths, across Union Avenue, down the hill, around Horse Haven, to the turf for Cindy’s signature middle-of-the-turf breezes. George on the pony. Cindy on the horse. I’d ask, “Hey, how are you two getting along this morning?” It was our inside joke. They would laugh, no matter if they were getting along or not getting along.
Today, they’ve never been closer. And never been further apart.
