What had happened arguably wasn’t his fault. It was the horse in second place, whose front hoof clipped the plank and caused it to fly in the air. Frou Frou misjudged the jump due to the flying plank and tumbled onto the fence, bringing the whole thing crashing down. Frou Frou’s fall caused a collision of the two horses behind him. Fortunately, Vronsky had been thrown off Frou Frou’s back before the horse landed on top of him and crushed every bone in his body. If he hadn’t been so lucky, he could have ended up like Frou Frou, thrashing on the ground with a broken back, shrieking and whinnying, his nostrils flaring, his eyes wild and black. The sight of that magnificent beast writhing in pain shook Vronsky to his core. He couldn’t shake the memory of the horse’s final minutes of life since it had happened, and he suspected the image would haunt him forever. He’d felt so helpless during the whole thing and refused to get himself checked out by the EMTs until he found out his horse’s fate. When Dr. Khurana, the large-animal vet on hand, arrived at the scene seconds after the fall, he took one look at the animal writhing on the ground and shook his head. It didn’t take a trained veterinarian to see that Frou Frou would never stand again.