Clean Run Magazine - March 2007 - 5

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Editorializing… What Can We Learn from Barbaro? By Bonnie Norris Tears
came to my eyes and I choked up as I watched the famous bay stallion
Barbaro break out of the starting gate at the Preakness, the second leg in
the famous Thoroughbred Triple Crown. Barbaro’s power was evident from
the start, a fire in his eye and a synchronicity of boiling blood, muscle,
and sinew. Even for the horse-racing uninitiated, there was no doubt that
this horse was very special. Then just seconds later, the unbelievable;
after only a few hundred heart-pounding yards Barbaro’s right leg flared
out grotesquely and he veered sharply to the side. For those of us who know
horses, we could see this was a horrendous injury, most likely a compound
fracture. But unfathomably, Barbaro didn’t drop in agony; instead, he
continued to gallop forward in a dramatic effort to maintain his lead.
Jockey Edgar Prado struggled to pull the horse back and later said that
Barbaro practically jogged back to his stall on only three legs. Along
with most of America, I was broken up, and at first moved to sobs. But
then, over the next few days, I began to reflect. Was the sadness I was
feeling for Barbaro a result of his freak accident or was it because his
accident might have been prevented? And was Barbaro just such a gutsy
individual that he had continued to drive down the racetrack with 22
broken bones and a shattered fetlock joint? Or did his behavior exemplify
something more unusual? I looked into Barbaro’s life to try to make
sense of his terrifying misfortune. Before the Preakness, Barbaro was
undefeated in six race starts. Winning the Kentucky Derby, he had the
widest margin of victory, a whopping 6.5 lengths, since Triple Crown
winner Assault in 1946. The day of his injury Barbaro came bucking to the
start gate and was so eager to race that he broke the gate early only to
be taken back to a second and successful start. March 07 | Clean Run At
first this seemed like the resume of a true champion, but I began to ask
myself, was Barbaro bred with such a desire to run, that all other
considerations, particularly his self-preservation instinct, took second
place to his burning desire for speed? My research led me to Barbaro’s
sire, Dynaformer. Kiaran McLaughlin, Dynaformer’s trainer, said that
Dynaformer was the most difficult horse she ever trained. “You
couldn’t pull him up after a workout,” she said and “You didn’t
turn your back on him.” It was common knowledge in the stable that
Dynaformer had once bitten off a groom’s finger. McLaughlin finished her
assessment of the stallion’s temperament by saying, “He was mean, he
would bite, he was a monster.” Barbaro’s half-brother, Holy Ground,
had a stakeswinning career but retired as a four year old because he
injured his suspensory ligament during his last race. Breeding plans for
Holy Ground are, as I write, undecided. But my guess is that if Barbaro
can mount a mare, breeders will be standing in line with their mares for
both Barbaro and his half-brother, Holy Ground, even though both retired
before four years of age due to injuries sustained on normal track
conditions. With my interest piqued, I looked into the breeding practices
of the horse racing industry. Over the last 40 years, three times as many
race horses have been produced as before but a decreasing proportion are
maintaining their soundness through their shortened careers. Huge
multinational breeding operations have dominated the Thoroughbred scene,
encouraging heavy inbreeding on a single Canadian stallion named Native
Dancer, producing Thoroughbreds that are swift, but physically weak.
Recent veterinarian research into the failing health of race horses has
uncovered widespread gastric ulcers and bleeding lungs. Shocking rates of
injury and 5   Warning : Unknown : The session id contains invalid characters, valid
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Clean Run Magazine - March 2007

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