Jody Jamieson is convinced he was spared serious injury or even death by the selfless act of his fellow harness driver Mark MacDonald.
“Mark missed me totally or he would have broke my back or killed me or who knows what would have happened?” Jamieson said June 1.
Instead, MacDonald took the brunt of accident May 26 in the final race of the night at Mohawk Racetrack in Campbellville. Given the split-section decision to veer around Jamieson’s fallen horse and possibly hit Jamieson who had been thrown from his sulky, MacDonald opted to plow straight into Jamieson’s horse.
“He catapulted himself in the air,” Jamieson said of MacDonald. “I said to him in the hospital, ‘If you would have just run me over, you would have been better off.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I know, but how could I do that?’ There’s nothing in our moral fibre as drivers and professionals that will let you run over a human being. You’ll hit a post, you’ll hit a horse before you run over a human being.”
MacDonald landed on his face, breaking his jaw, his nose and knocking out most of his teeth. He lay on the track, unconscious, for more than five minutes before being rushed to hospital.
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