It’s been a hard recovery from injury for Umberto Rispoli. “The toughest comeback of my life,” he says. But in three weeks he hopes to be race-riding again at Churchill Downs, back at it in the necessary pursuit of winners.
Rispoli has already tested his recovering ankle crouched on horseback. Last Sunday at Chantilly, he rode three horses for his father-in-law, jockey-turned-trainer Gerald Mosse. Thursday he passed the doctor in California, getting official clearance to resume.
“I was totally fine on the horses,” Rispoli tells Idol Horse. “Obviously, it’s normal that there is still some scar tissue around and it needs to be broken up. But when I went for full drive, I wasn’t feeling any issue or any pain. I was feeling good.”
Three more weeks will make it more than five months since the Preakness-winning jockey took a crashing fall at Gulfstream Park, Miami: an impact with the ground at high speed that snapped bone and wrenched ligaments, twisting his ankle, displacing it worryingly out of line.
Surgery left him with a rod pinned to his fibula to fix that break. The fractures to his tibia and the malleolus – ankle bone – have mended: the ankle with the help of screws. The syndesmosis, the fibrous joint where strong ligaments connect and keep the ankle and leg bones together and functioning, that’s been a difficult one to heal. The ligaments did not snap, but they were stretched and damaged.
Rispoli, like most jockeys, has had bad breaks before – knee, ribs, collarbone – but this time the damage and the pain were such that it had him at times doubting if he would be able to get his toes back in the irons.
“You doubt it because you don’t see your leg as it was before,” he says. “The ligament there, it’s probably one of the worst things that can happen to a jockey because you need to be on your ankles. That’s pretty much where all the bodyweight goes when you ride the horse, so you need that bending, you really need that.
“But you don’t see the movement. You’d see that you bend with both feet, and the one is going down, and the other one is off this way. That’s how it is in the beginning, after the injury.”
A mixture of his dogged Neapolitan determination, patience, expert treatment at the renowned TVA Clinic in Spain, support from family and friends, and the inspiration of one of his sporting idols have all helped spur him through his recovery and back to mobility and fitness. Gone is the fixator that once held his foot in place, as well as the protective boot, and the crutches, too.
“I said to myself, ‘I can’t accept this, no way,’” he continues, “I said to myself, “Okay, maybe you’re not gonna ride again, we’ll see, but the leg needs to get back to where it was before. But, yeah, there is a lot of doubt because it’s not common and you can easily get scared. And when you break your leg when you’re 20, it’s different to when you break your leg and you are 37.”
Rispoli is not long back in southern California – home for the past six years – when he speaks to Idol Horse. He has been up since 3:30am: the jet-lag is brutal. He had flown from France with his wife and two sons after a short visit to Dubai where he received specialist physio “to kind of complete the circle”.
That followed six weeks in Madrid – alone for the most part – receiving treatment from renowned physiotherapist Dr. Joaquin Juan and his team. Dr. Juan treats and has treated NBA stars and mega stars of the soccer world, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi being chief among them. Treatment required an unwavering regimen.
“For six weeks, I left the house at nine o’clock in the morning,” Rispoli says. “I’d get to the clinic at 10 and I’d stay until one, then back to the house, quick lunch, back to the clinic. So, I was coming back home at eight at night. That was every day: every day taking Uber, with the rain, with the sun. When I didn’t want to go, I still went, I had to do it.”
Rispoli was the clinic’s first jockey patient, recommended by his friend, the former Paris Saint-Germain, A.S. Roma and Argentina midfielder Javier Pastore.
He had days and moments during his time at the clinic when the mental aspect was tougher than the physical rehab.
“Basically, you start back from zero,” he says, recalling that he arrived there with crutches and explaining not only the inability to move the swollen, stiff joint and ligaments at first, but also the muscle atrophy, especially in the quads, the front of the thigh.
“In the first two weeks, you don’t see any upgrade,” he continues. “It was really, really intense work, painful for the first couple of weeks. You work hard and at the beginning you don’t see any improvements, then you see just a couple of centimetres, inches, moving your knee forward, the bending of the ankle, working hard, feeling the pain. It’s really tough in a way, mentally,”
It was the story of a Spanish legend from another sporting sphere, the tennis champion Rafael Nadal, who gave him the extra drive he needed to get through the hardest days.
“Did you ever see his documentary?” Rispoli asks. “It’s on Netflix … If you complain about injury, just look at what that guy did. All his life. I saw that and I said, you know what? We don’t complain about the injury.”
Nadal, who won 22 Grand Slam singles titles, suffered through most of his career with a chronic foot injury, which caused constant pain, required an insole in his shoe, and in turn led to tendonitis in his knee. Because of the quantity of anti-inflammatories he took to keep playing, he also suffered perforations in his intestine. And in winning the 2022 French Open, he had his sensory nerve put to sleep by injection, meaning he could not feel his foot, but nor could he feel the pain.
“I saw that and I said to myself, ‘this is nothing, just put your head down and work to get back’. Seeing his story, that gives you motivation, a lot of motivation,” he says. “There’s always someone else who’s gone through something that can kind of inspire you and lift you up. It’s phenomenal. He’s my favourite tennis player ever because when I was growing up, he was the rising star. He’s an incredible man.”
Rispoli knuckled down, working with Dr. Juan’s team, who had studied videos of jockeys riding in races so as to understand the movements, shape and position of the body during a race.
He says the hardest part was attempting an exercise he had to do over and over to gradually regain some flexibility and strength in his ankle. He would bend his knees forward towards the wall, feet on the ground, as if he was going lower on the back of a horse, shifting the bodyweight through the forward knee and down into the painful ankle.
“That was the toughest part,” he says. “Every day, even when I was home, I would stand up every 10 or 15 minutes, going to the wall, and try to put my knee touching the wall with the arm over my knee, trying to reach the wall, putting on the pressure. It was really, really painful.
“I worked with a lot of therapies: with the needles, electricity, balance therapy, ice therapy. It was a full process. I don’t think I ever used so much ice in my life like I did in these last six weeks. My foot was always in the ice. And trust me, it was torture.”
But out of the torture, the recovery, and it’s not quite over yet. The next three weeks will be “intense” as he works to full race fitness.
“Fitness-wise, I need to get fit, so this three weeks, they’re gonna help me,” he says. “I’ll work more horses, I’m going to keep doing my exercises, I’m going to work at the gym, I’m going to work with a therapist. I’m going to keep doing exactly what I’ve been doing for the last three months. That’s going to be my life, day in and day out until I come back. I can’t miss a day.”
Rispoli enjoyed a high-profile 2025, winning the biggest race of his life, the G1 Preakness Stakes on Journalism, then losing the ride. He ended that year with 130 wins and US$13.4 million in prize money. His injury means 2026 is really only just about to start, other jockeys have long-since filled the gaps his absence brought: as well as recovery, Rispoli needs reconnection with owners and trainers.
Right from the time he lay in a bed at the HCA Florida Aventura Hospital, he has talked of patience, of making sure he is 100 per cent before he goes out for a race, mindful that he owes that to those who support him and have brought him through the hard rehabilitation.
“I walked out of the clinic in Madrid,” he says, but patience is still required. There’s to be no risk away from the saddle. “I could have jogged, but Joaquin has said to me he does not want me to jog yet, no chance.”
That means there’ll be no kicking a football around this summer for the soccer-loving Italian. Getting back fit to perform at the elite level he expects of himself for his return at Churchill Downs is paramount.
After that, he thinks he will stay in the east for a couple of weeks, perhaps riding Ellis Park and Saratoga. His agent, Matt Nakatani, is looking at rides for the Belmont Derby and Belmont Oaks, then back to southern California.
“Del Mar is around the corner,” Rispoli says. “It’s an intense meeting, you want to be absolutely ready for that, which I’m going to be.
“I’m not going to take any prisoners, I promise you,” he adds. “I’ve already lost the five months and it’s a lot. I can’t wait to get back in the competition. I need to look forward now.” ∎
