Big Brown wins. Eight Bells takes second, breaks down and then is put down right on the track. We will hear endless talk of this.
I love horseracing; HATE the Kentucky Derby for what it has become. You've heard about Eight Belles and Barbaro two years ago at the Preakness. What you don't hear a lot about is how many three year old racehorses (teenagers) get injured just trying to GET to the Derby. The leading stakes winner in January couldn't even make the Derby because he was hard-training for the Santa Anita Derby and suffered a stress fracture. Same thing as Eight Belles, but not nearly as bad. By the end of the summer before the Derby, these horses are still two year-olds, and many of them barely out of gate training. They're pressed to rack up enough stakes money to qualify for the Derby, and there is only a limited window in which to do that. Plus, Churchill Downs just HAS to run a 20 horse field, which doesn't help any. This upsets me. As Barbaro did. But, we will see more of this, sad to say. Not like it's never happened in the past, but I'll bet 1000 vbucks that Big Brown doesn't make it through the Triple Crown races and into the Travers (or whatever other summer race he'd do) without injury. That's not a bet that I'd be happy to win. [/rant]
It extremely upsets me too. I was raised around horses. I need to know why in the hell they insist on a 20 horse race? It's obviously too crowded. I knew when the race started it wasn't going to be good. The Derby has a real bad rep when it comes to a wet track. Remember Ruffian? When she broke her leg, she still wanted to run on it. One of the greatest fillies of all time. :sad:
The problem is in the inbreeding also. I know they don't consider it inbreeding but every horse running yesterday could trace their lineage back to the same one horse. The horse, whose name escapes me, also had leg and hoof problems but was nearly unbeatable. Ran 20 stakes races and the only one the horse lost was the derby. Barbaro also had the same lineage and we know what happened to him. I love betting the horses but hate to see what happened yesterday and in other races.
No, actually quite a bit more recent I believe. I will try and look it up. They did do a study though and found that 95% of all thoroughbreds could be traced back to 10 horses.
I just read this, very interesting. Is Horse Racing Breeding Itself to Death? By Sally Jenkins Sunday, May 4, 2008; Page D01 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...R2008050301707.html?hpid=topnews&hpid=topnews The camera cut away from her, but it should have stayed on her. Eight Belles had run herself half to death yesterday, and now the vets were finishing the job as she lay on her side, her beautiful figure a black hump on the track. Horses don't just fall down like that, you thought as NBC flitted away, cowardlike, from the sickening picture to the more appealing image of the Kentucky Derby victor, Big Brown. This Story There is no turning away from this fact: Eight Belles killed herself finishing second. She ran with the heart of a locomotive, on champagne-glass ankles for the pleasure of the crowd, the sheiks, oilmen, entrepreneurs, old money from the thousand-acre farms, the handicappers, men in bad sport coats with crumpled sheets full of betting hieroglyphics, the julep-swillers and the ladies in hats the size of boats, and the rest of the people who make up thoroughbred racing. There was no mistaking this fact, too, as she made her stretch run, and the apologists will use it to defend the sport in the coming days: She ran to please herself. But thoroughbred racing is in a moral crisis, and everyone now knows it. Twice since 2006, magnificent animals have suffered catastrophic injuries on live television in Triple Crown races, and there is no explaining that away. Horses are being over-bred and over-raced, until their bodies cannot support their own ambitions, or those of the humans who race them. Barbaro and Eight Belles merely are the most famous horses who have fatally injured themselves. On Friday, a colt named Chelokee, trained by Barbaro's trainer Michael Matz, dislocated an ankle during an undercard for the Kentucky Oaks and was given a 50 percent chance of survival. According to several estimates, there are 1.5 career-ending breakdowns for every 1,000 racing starts in the United States. That's an average of two per day. Eight Belles collapsed after crossing the finish line, her front ankles broken so severely she could not be taken from the track. "She didn't have a front leg to stand on to be splinted and hauled off in the ambulance, so she was euthanized," said Larry Bramlage, the Derby's veterinarian. Make no mistake, most of the people in thoroughbred racing love the animals and want them to be healthy. The Keeneland Association hosted a summit on the "Welfare and Safety of the Racehorse" after Barbaro's breakdown, to urgently consider how to better protect the horses. Synthetic surfaces are one result of the soul-searching. But the problem is more complex than just surface; it's pervasive in the sport. Modern thoroughbreds are bred for extreme speed, maybe to the point of endangerment. Thoroughbreds are muscularly more powerful than ever, but their bone skeletons seem to be getting lighter and frail. A Kentucky Derby horse has to run a mile and a quarter on a dirt track around two turns by the age of 3. It is the horse equivalent of asking a college kid to play in the Super Bowl. A racehorse therefore has to be bred for many things at once: strength, speed, size and stamina, and it has to be fast maturing, as well. Thoroughbred breeding is like trying to make four dials all stop on the same number. How to mate the right stallion to the right mare so as to produce a perfectly weighted, formed, balanced animal? Too often, the makeup of a horse isn't right. If it's fast, it's not strong enough, or if it's strong, it lacks stamina. Its chest is too big, or its legs are crooked. Maybe the trouble starts when people try to take the gambling out of gambling. Breeders try to eliminate the unpredictable from the bloodlines -- the weak or the ordinary or the unknown. Maybe they are trying to breed too perfectly, down to the smallest technicality in pedigree. Pedigree is just another way to reduce the dauntingly long odds. As if you can beat luck with a checkbook. "See, here's the deal," Nick Zito said once. "The horse don't know what it costs. He doesn't know. Owners put the price on horses, okay?" Part of the trouble is the makeup of thoroughbreds themselves: They are creatures physically at war with their own nature. The heart and lungs are oversize knots of tissue placed in a massive chest, and huge amounts of blood course through legs that are dainty. Anyone who has spent time around a barn understands that horses love to run. They do it for fun. A few years ago, I stood in a field of yearlings in Ocala, Fla., and watched them tear around in circles like children in a playground. They need to be given the bodies to accommodate their hearts. "It's not always the horse with the most class you remember," trainer Allen Jerkens once said. "It's the ones who tried hardest all the time even though they weren't great horses." It's unfortunate that NBC chose to shy away from the breakdown of Eight Belles, because we need a hard look at the real cost to the horses, no matter how upsetting and painful it is to see.
Native Dancer. Not the same injury. Native Dancer's injury was chronic bruising, if I remember right. More like what put Smarty Jones into retirement. But your point is still spot on. Racehorses are described as freight trains running on champagne stems (or some such analogy EDIT #3 - Heh, I should have read the article above first.), and that's pretty well true. I don't have as much a problem with the breeding as I do the racing. That's more controllable. That said, with Eight Belles, it HAD to be breeding. She broke both ankles. Must have broken one, shifted all her weight to the other, and immediately broken that one. Must have been horrible, and I'm glad they had the good sense to put her down immediately. EDIT: Also, a point on Native Dancer and inbreeding. I think you'll find nearly all of the horses in yesterday's race with some connection to Native Dancer. Eight Belles and Big Brown both (I just checked). One of the most successful sires ever, so his bloodline is only too common. EDIT #2: This from Wikipedia (surprisingly): "All twenty enrties of the 2008 Kentucky Derby are decendants of Native Dancer.[1]"
Eight Belles' dam was Away, herself a descendant of Northern Dancer, and her sire was Unbridled's Song. Unbridled's Song's dam is a daughter of Caro. Caro is the sire of Winning Colors, one of the three fillies to win the Kentucky Derby. Mr. Prospector is in her bloodlines on both her sire and dam's sides. Source: Wikipedia
Native Dancer is the horse I was thinking of. And the record was 21-1 with the one loss coming in the Derby. Here is an excerpt from a WSJ article. "Like hemophilia in the Russian royal family, Native Dancer's line has a tragic flaw. Thanks in part to heavily muscled legs and a violent, herky-jerky running style, Native Dancer and his descendants have had trouble with their feet. Injuries have cut short the careers of several of his most famous kin, most notably Barbaro, a great-great-great-grandson who was injured during the Preakness Stakes and was later put to death."
Hmm... score one for The Waterboy. I'd never read that about Native Dancer, although I knew the story of the horse, generally.
