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A superb athlete at or near his prime wears his greatness like an iron cowl.
Dale Earnhardt would crawl out of his No. 3 car after crashing at Daytona in 2001.
In the very same vein, it was widely assumed the great Avelino Gomez would survive a terrible spill at Woodbine in 1980 despite serious chest injuries.
The race was the prestigious Canadian Oaks and Gomez' mount, Swisskin, snapped her leg on the far turn. The leg broke from the back, an almost unheard of fracture point.
In the moment before Gomez and Swisskin hit the ground, a horse named Lacey went right over Gomez and then on top of him.
Still, this was Avelino Gomez.
"You've seen him in a whole lot of falls and you say, 'he'll get back up, it's Avelino. What the hell can happen to him?'" remembered Lou Cavalaris, a longtime trainer and friend.
"When I saw him in he ambulance he was in pain but he was talking," said Hall of Famer Sandy Hawley, another jockey in the race.
"I thought to myself, 'that's Avelino, he'll be fine.' His brother Mickey had been talking to the doctor. They said he'd be okay but he'd be out of action for a while."
Avelino Gomez was not unaware of the danger of his job. He wore a gaudy amulet around his neck. It was St. Lazarus. Gomez called it St. Lazaro. "He's the one who put away his bed and walked." Gomez once told reporters: "He is not for luck. All you ask of him is that you come back the same way you go into any race. That you can walk."
Hawley went with his wife and some friends to dinner. The call came to the restaurant. Avelino Gomez, 51, had died in hospital.
Hawley was stunned. Gomez was a cat on top of a horse. When he came off, he often landed on the run. Once he had been thrown under the rail of the first race of the day. He got up and won the second.
"Being the athlete he was, you thought he was invincible," Hawley said.
The only jockey killed as the result of an accident at Woodbine was its finest, a mercurial superstar who proclaimed: "I am the greatest" before the words had come to Muhammad Ali.
The game has never been the same since June 21, 1980, 25 years ago Tuesday, the day Avelino Gomez died.
It was a profoundly different Toronto. Lotteries had not yet taken hold and horseracing existed as the only real outlet for gambling.
"It was a time before little old ladies with 50 cents stopped going to bookmakers and started going to the convenience store," said Woodbine historian Lou Cauz.
The Blue Jays, just three years old, were still a novelty. The Argos were a staple and the Leafs were nicely into the hell that was the Harold Ballard era. Newspapers hungered for what the track has always offered: Colour and if it was local colour, so much the better.
Crowds often topped 10,000 during the week and 15,000 on the weekend was routine. It was the sport's headiest time in Canada and Gomez, escorted from a Cuban casino to his first horse by a cousin, was its champion.
He won more than 4,000 races and was the leading rider in Canada six times. His 318 wins in 1966 led all North American jockeys. Gomez is one of three jockeys to have won the Queens Plate four times, but the gaudy results were secondary. What you remembered about Avelino Gomez was the style.
When he won, he would fling himself from the horse in a flying dismount. He heckled fans right back, sometimes all the way down the homestretch and played to them like a ham reciting Shakespeare. He'd docartwheels after a stakes win and was eminently quotable. In explaining why we would never ride for a trainer whom he had felt betrayed him, Gomez said: "Even if I win the Plate, I no sleep with my conscience."
"He was fearless, he was strong and he had a talent that came about naturally," said Cavalaris. "He towered above the local riders at the time."
Gomez could get the extra few inches that decide horseraces. He was an expert at driving his knee into the horse's kidney near the finish line to make his horse a neck longer. He could throw his reins forward at the finish to lengthen his mount.
The showman was consumed with winning.
In his prime, when he was riding for titles and stakes races, he was a brooding figure around the house, said his son, Avelino Junior, now a money counter at Woodbine.
"When he was at home, he'd have his dinner, he'd watch his television and he did not want any other distractions," he said. "He was very intense that way."
In the jockey's room, the clownish Gomez returned.
"He would walk into the jockeys room and rub shoulders with the guys," said Aveleno Junior, who booked his father's rides when he was barely out of his teens.
"He would have a nap. It was all part of his bag of tricks. The other guys would see my dad and think his guard was down. It wasn't.
"He read other riders. He would read the racing form and he loved to say, 'you're going to the lead today.' He had a way of getting guys to ride the way he wanted them to ride, not the way that was best for them."
In her dotage, someone once remarked to the grand actress, Gloria Swanson, that she seemed smaller in real life.
"I'm still big," she said. "The pictures got smaller."
And so it is with horse racing. The sporting audience has fragmented. Jockeys, still among the most accessible of athletes, somehow don't bring the same colour. When Avelino Gomez died, the sport died a little, too.
Today, a statue of Gomez, two fingers extended in a victory sign, stands atop the jockey's room.
In the end, the eulogy written by the great columnist Jim Coleman is truer today than on the day he penned it.
"The rub," Coleman wrote, "is the certain knowledge we shall never see his like again."