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Here's where I need some help. If you love horse racing, maybe you can enlighten me. If you hate horse racing, maybe you can help me even more. Whoever you are, please make sense of this for me:
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| Rick Dutrow, Big Brown's trainer, is filled with emotion after the race, but it's not sadness. (Getty Images) |
And minutes later when Eight Belles was indeed put to sleep within feet of where she fell, why was Big Brown's trainer, Rick Dutrow, screaming in ecstasy and hugging people and crowing that his horse was invincible?
I guess what's bothering me, the question that I need answered, is this:
If the people who allegedly love horses and horse racing the most can't be bothered with the destruction of a 3-year-old filly right before their eyes, what kind of sport is this?
I'll tell you what it's not: It's not for me. Show me a spectacle where animals are bred beyond their physical limitations, then raced to the brink of destruction, all for the sake of one rich owner and thousands of gambling gawkers, and I'll show you a pathetic way to spend an afternoon.
Here's a homework assignment for you: Try to find the number of thoroughbreds who have had to be put down -- such a nice way of saying killed -- because of racing injuries suffered in the United States. I couldn't find that statistic, and I've been looking all day. Horse racing doesn't want us to know.
Eight Belles wasn't the first to die, but you knew that. Less than a year after winning the 2006 Kentucky Derby, Barbaro had to be killed -- I'm boycotting the word euthanized and the phrases put down and put to sleep -- because of injuries he had suffered in the 2006 Preakness.
Barbaro wasn't the first, either, but you probably also knew that. Prairie Bayou, the 1993 Preakness winner, broke down later that summer in the Belmont Stakes and had to be killed. One of the horses Prairie Bayou had beaten in the 1993 Preakness, Union City, had to be killed after breaking down during the race.
That came one year after Mr. Brooks was killed after breaking a leg during the 1992 Breeders' Cup. Which came two years after three horses had to be killed during the 1990 Breeders' Cup. Rest in peace, Mr. Nickerson .... and Shaker Knit ... and Go For Wand.
Ruffian, one of the best fillies in horseracing history, had to be killed in 1975 after a gruesome breakdown during a ridiculous "battle of the sexes" match race against Kentucky Derby winner Foolish Pleasure. Ruffian tried to keep running after breaking her right front leg, because that's what thoroughbreds do. On the short list of things they love even more than running fast is pleasing their superiors. Ruffian kept running, because that's what she was trained and bred to do, and soon she was galloping on the splintered bone that had broken through the skin. Sand from the track was later found in her bloodstream. If that description seems grotesquely unnecessary, deal with it. This is horse racing. Are we having fun yet?
Anyway, consider yourself fortunate that I didn't go into detail about that 1992 death of Go For Wand. She actually rose from her fall, then lurched several steps on three legs while the fourth leg flapped above its broken ankle. She was killed in front of the grandstand.
This is the sport of kings? Not any king I'm willing to serve. Horses are raced at an early age, weeding out the slow and the weak until 10 or 20 are presented for the Triple Crown races. They run on hard-packed dirt tracks that don't offer enough cushion for the unimaginable pounding a 2,000-pound horse puts on its skinny front legs.
A horse's body is the size of a car, but its ankles aren't much bigger than yours or mine. A veterinarian friend of mine tells me that the trigger for the kind of catastrophic injury that leads to the death of a horse like Eight Belles or Barbaro isn't as horrendous as you'd expect. In fact, the trigger can be cruelly insignificant. Put it this way: A torque that would sprain your ankle is enough to snap a horse's skinny little leg. And once a leg is broken ...
Horse racing people know all this. Presumably they know it better than any of us. Yet it was horse racing people who were cheering as Eight Belles was living out her final moments. On the telecast of the show, veterinarian Larry Bramlage broke the news that Eight Belles had just been killed even as the crowd was clapping and shouting for Big Brown. "They immediately euthanized her," Bramlage said over the happy sound that thousands of cheering people make.
More sickening was the next shot, of Big Brown's trainer, as he hugged various people. "They cannot beat this horse." Rick Dutrow boasted while standing on the same track where Eight Belles had just been killed.
I'm confused, but maybe the answer is as simple this: Horse racing people are becoming immune to a death at the race track. One day earlier, another horse had broken down at Churchill Downs. His name is Chelokee, and for now, is applies. He hasn't been killed, not yet, although he is said to have suffered the same ankle injury that ultimately killed Barbaro.
Ironic, considering Chelokee won the inaugural Barbaro Stakes.
That was May 19, 2007. In the late afternoon. At Pimlico. Where 45 minutes later, a horse named Mending Fences tried to win a race called the Dixie Stakes but broke down before the finish line. With more than 100,000 people watching, track officials dragged a giant green screen onto the track and used it to hide the killing of Mending Fences.
You didn't hide squat.
We know what your nasty little sport is all about.