Racing: To Be or Not to Be

The racing industry continues to trouble me. Little about it strikes me as good, and yet I fear the entire Thoroughbred breed will vanish if racing is outlawed, and that would be a loss for mankind. The elegance and speed of the Thoroughbred serves as a heritage and a reservoir, a DNA trust if you will.  

Unfortunately, racing provides us with too many examples of cruelty, greed, and duplicity. Balancing that, at least partially, are stories of good trainers and responsible owners. Here is a story showing both sides of racing:

"Horse Returned, but Entry Clerk out of a Job

A Sad End

This morning's headline was not one I wanted to see:

Irish Star St Nicholas Abbey Dies From Colic

Update: St. Nicholas Abbey

Had he been a gelding, even a good race gelding, St. Nicholas Abbey would likely have been euthanized minutes after fracturing a pastern during a workout in Ireland. However, St. Nicholas Abbey was not a gelding. Moreover, his sire Montjeu won nearly four million pounds and now ranks among the world's leading sires.

Better yet, St. Nicholas Abbey himself started 21 times--a most impressive number these days--and won just under five millions pounds. So this pastern fracture happened to a brilliant son of the successful Montjeu, son of the great Sadler's Wells, son of Northern Dancer, sometimes called The Kingmaker. In other words, while St. Nicholas Abbey's care is expensive and his survival still in doubt, his potential as a sire is incalculable. In other words, St. Nicholas Abbey's treatment  has been worthy of the Crown Prince he is.

Post by Coolmore Stud.

Fort Larned's "Winning" Run

Much controversy surrounds why Thoroughbreds run. Of late, I've seen considerable discussion of whip use and condemnation of horse racing in general. Fort Larned's riderless "win" in the Gulfstream Handicap ought to provide another aspect for discussion, but, considering the mentality of most people who comment on the Internet, I suspect it won't.

In fact, I should stop reading the comments under horse-related articles on the Web. The general level of romanticism and irrationality is bad enough, but the overall ignorance causes me to froth at the mouth.

What's infuriated me lately are a number of remarks complaining about whip use, saying that jockeys constantly beat their horses during a race and that race horses only run because they are beaten.

I complain about whip use too, but I do so because a growing body of research indicates whipping is basically pointless, futile, and hence cruel. Some countries are ahead of us in limiting whipping. For example, many years back, Sweden ruled that a jockey must hold onto the mane when using the whip and is limited to three whacks a race. Some US tracks already allow only padded bats with large, doubled, triangular slappers--literally slapsticks--which create more noise than pain.

Even without regulation, the races I've seen of late don't seem to have as much whipping as they did even a few years ago and certainly much less than occurred during some 18th and 19th Century races when horse beating was generally accepted as necessary. In comparison, today's best jockeys restrain their whip use. Of course, like the rest of us, not all jockeys have great talent or good sense, so stricter rules should pass.

However, I suspect that self-selection reduces whip use. For many trainers and owners it's become clearer that jockeys who use the whip too much lose many more races than they win and, worse yet, extensive whipping merely desensitizes the horses to the pain, making further whip use pointless.

As to whether race horses like to run, I know my off the track Thoroughbred sure did. (My avatar shows him wafting around my fields.) Upon being turned out for breakfast, he swept around our twenty acres, covering at least a mile before settling down to graze. Watching him was a thrill for me.

Watching the riderless Fort Larned sweep by his rivals in the 2013 Gulfstream Park Handicap (Grade II) was a comparable thrill. The favorite, he stumbled badly at the start, lost his jockey, then blew by the rest of the field and disappeared off screen. At 1:45 in the video, there's a glimpse of him after the finish line. He's clearly pulling himself up after "winning" by a distance comparable to that of Secretariat in the Belmont.

Bloodhorse put up this still photo of Fort Larned, close to the rail, ears swept back in concentration, doing his job despite the lack of human guidance. One thing's for sure. No jockey used a whip on him that day, and yet Fort Larned ran a fine race.

No one really knows why TBs run. Maybe this video shows a horse that loves to run. Maybe it shows a highly trained race horse that knows his usual and/or best distance. In either event--or both--it certainly showed a horse running without being flogged around the track.

Post script: The Bloodhorse website reports that the 5 year old caught a quarter coming out of the gate, causing the trip, but his trainer, while still observing him carefully, says the horse looks to be just fine otherwise.

UPDATE: Fort Larned's definitely OK. On June 15, 2013, The Blood Horse posted this: "Fort Larned Rolls to Easy Stephen Foster Win."

Man o' War at 22 at THE Stud

Man o' War at 22.  Still supple and powerful.

This short but valuable view of history also has another feature that interested me.  The narrator says Man o' War was "retired to the stud." Few people--except me and a few diehards--use the word this way anymore, but this use from a more animal-oriented era gives the hearer more information than the current use as a synonym for any intact male horse.  The word once meant a horse breeding farm, and on such a farm would be stud horses and stud mares.

Not only a superb runner, Man o' War went on to become a top sire, even though his book of mares was restricted by his owner. Had he been on the open market, his name might be even more prominent today.