When the field took the turn in the Youthful Stakes, run at Jamaica fortnight ago, Psychic Bid, of Mrs. Isabel Dodge Sloane's Brookmeade Stable, went wide. Swart little Jockey Dominick Bellizzi tugged desperately at his 2-year-old's left rein. The bit slipped through Psychic Bid's angry mouth. Jockey Bellizzi went flying from his perch, hurtled into the dust. Hoofs struck and crushed his crumpled body and when the field thundered off Jockey Bellizzi lay in his dirty royal-blue-&-white silks, unconscious.
The 22-year-old rider lay on his deathbed in a Long Island hospital, but neither Mrs. Sloane nor the physicians she sent to tend him realized it when the Spring meeting of the Westchester Racing Association opened at flowery Belmont Park four days later.* Flecked by tragedy, Mrs. Sloane's colors continued their phenomenal gallop from prize to prize. In the 41st running of the Toboggan Handicap, Belmont's opener, Mrs. Sloane's favorite horse, Okapi, was entered. Mack Garner was up —"Colonel" Mack Garner since he had won the Kentucky Derby on Cavalcade two weeks before. Riding high on Brookmeade's luck, Garner, a comparative dodderer among jockeys, at 34 was having the best season of his 20 years in racing. Nothing could stop him, and nothing did. He booted Okapi down the Widener chute with 15,000 people yelling in the sunshine, bettered the time by which the little brown horse won the race last year as a 3-year-old.
Joseph E. Widener, president of Belmont, made his way through the crowd of delighted socialites around Mrs. Sloane's box. "I'm getting tired of congratulating you," he said, pressing the lady's glove. "I'm getting tired of holding your hand."
As soon as she could, Mrs. Sloane dashed to the paddock where steaming Okapi was being cooled out by Garner and her trainer Robert A. ("Whistling Bob") Smith, also a Kentucky colonel since the Derby. "You made a work horse out of him last year," accused Mrs. Sloane, stroking little Okapi, her "pet." "You made a pacemaker out of him."