It was an exciting Kentucky Derby… and a tragic one as well… Big Brown won from the #20 spot whish was last done in 1915… and the filly Eight Belles was a sound second… however on the runout she fractured both front ankles and was instantly put down… there was no way to fix that kind of injury… How many Triple Crown races have been over shadowed by tragedy in the recent pass?
Congrats to Big Brown…
RIP Eight Belles…
Good job, Big Brown. I was pulling for a different horse, but he absolutely showed the talent necessary for this kind of race.
I’m so sad for Eight Belles’ trainer and the folks who handled her. She was a gorgeous filly and I always pull for the girls in the Derby. RIP.
I was rooting for Eight Belles. What can I say? I like the fillies. Was thrilled when I found out she was second.
And then…
Shit.
I wonder if something went wrong before the finish line, but she just kept on running and made it worse…
I better stop picking ponies…they have a bad habit of breaking down.
Congrats to Big Brown. Maybe we’ll have a crown winner this year. He had a really good trip.
They interviewed Dr. Bramlage who was shocked at how she broke down. She had slowed down considerably and then her ankles just collapsed. She is a daughter of Unbridled’s Song she had unsound written all over her pedigree. I really wish they hadn’t shown the footage of her going down, I could have done without that. I really feel for her connections. Larry Jones and Rick Porter are some of the nicest guys in the industry.
I will try to remember her galloping in the morning with Larry up talking to her: “Larry to Eight Belles. Pull up Eight Belles!”
As for Big Brown…WOW. If he stays sound this will be an interesting triple crown.
Yeah. Sad for Eight Belles. Her trainer did seem kinda heavy to be workin her out though, but i doubt thats what wore on her enough to break her down. You almost wish her heart would have exploded or she would have had an aneurysm instead of having to suffer lke that. At least those are are almost painless and fairly immediate. Theres a pick on yahoo of her in the race and Browns in the foreground and Belles’ in the background but her feet are placed funny. Both of her forefeet are on the ground…at the same time… and they are still galloping, it was after the finish but I thought it was a way weird pic. At least she ran the best race of her life before the end right?
I didn’t have a standout horse that I was rooting for…I liked a few, but there wasn’t any that I desperately wanted to win. I’m happy Big Brown won, he was very convincing and he looks like he really could be something special. Winning from the 20 post, that’s pretty darn good, although he did have an ideal trip. He sort of reminds me of Barbaro in a way…they both had commanding victories in the Derby (had very similar trips too). Hopefully Big Brown continues to improve.
As for Eight Belles, god that was awful. She ran such a good race too…although there was no way she was going to catch Big Brown, she still beat 18 other colts over 1 1/4 miles…And fracturing both ankles…that’s just awful. 
She had so much courage…I really feel for her connections as well, her trainer Larry Jones and her owner.
Bittersweet day indeed.
God I hate when stuff like this happens… Big Brown winning should have been super exciting and it was, until the jock came off and the announcers said that Big Brown’d spooked because of Eight Belles collapsing. As soon as I saw her on the track I knew she wasn’t going to make it. She was just laying too still and her front legs were stretched straight out. Such an awful thing to have happen to such an amazingly talented filly. Amazing run by a filly everyone said didn’t even belong in the race.
After this I’m sure everyone’s going to be thinking even more of Barbaro in two weeks. Here’s hoping Big Brown can be a stand out horse and make a run for the Triple Crown, but even more here’s hoping the rest of the races go off without another tragedy.
Did people see what happened to Chelokee? He’s trained by Michael Matz, won the inaugural Barbaro Stakes, and on the Oaks undercard he dislocated his ankle, same as Barbaro. As of yesterday he had a 50% chance of survival. I think he managed to not break any bones, so we’ll see if he can recover.
Yeah Chelokee is was initially said that he "fractured bones in his right front ankle at the start of the stretch run. " But now its that "did not suffer a condylar fracture in his right front leg as initially reported. The injury is a dislocated right ankle that will be fused this week. “He tore the ligaments in the bottom of his (right front) ankle,” said equine surgeon Larry Bramlage. “It’s those ligaments, the suspensory apparatus, that make a horse able to do what they do. The bones that went up the side of the leg that they thought was a fracture on the ambulance were actually sesamoid bones pulled five centimeters out of place. They’re dislocated.” “Amazingly, with such a good athlete, the (injury) didn’t go through the skin,” Bramlage said. “Everything else went when he dislocated the ankle because his leg was flopping out to the side. So almost all the support went, but he was able to stay up. We protected the leg. It’s incredible for what he did to not do more damage than he did. Because if it goes out through the skin and bones get exposed to the racetrack surface, that’s usually the last straw.”
He’s lively and they even had to put a traffic cone just so he had something to mess with cause he kept trying to get his IVs off of the ceiling. lol. So he looks good so far. And theres the hope that he’ll make it to stud.
Well here’s the most recent article I know of that gives good info. Its from tonight:
http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/more_sports/2008/05/04/2008-05-04_chelokee_improves.html
I was looking at Big Brown going to post and was thinking ‘That horse is going to win’.
He was truly impressive, but I have two questions for the TC.
Will he find the Preakness too short? He’s clearly a stayer.
Will he stay sound? He’s incredibly inbred, with a COI of just over 5%, and has had ‘foot problems’ in the past that may preclude him running all three races.
On Eight Belles. From what I and others saw, she actually injured herself in the stretch, when she checked, and then she just ran on with it. With it being both forelegs, it’s possible the jockey didn’t realize (a horse in pain on both sides doesn’t feel lame) to pull her up, it’s also possible he -couldn’t- (they’re big horses, trained to win and the best ones -want- to win). It looks to me as if she was injured, finished anyway, then collapsed when the adrenalin started to wear off, just as human athletes have been known to finish a football or rugby match and -then- realize they broke something in a tackle.
Highly unfortunate.
Big Brown was fantastic! Apparently my Nana had some money down on him, so I wonder how she made out…
As for Eight Belles, I’ve heard various things from her ankles had to be stressed before going in in order to break both, to she stumbled at one point where she broke one, and went down hard on the second to transfer weight and lost the second, to… being mercilessly wipped? Ah, PETA, you’re at it again: nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/24456917/
The one that makes most sense to me is she stumbled and had to throw the other foot down hard to shift her balance. My mom did say she heard the jockey say he noticed a change in her gait. Told my friend that who said that’s when he probably tried to pull her up fast, which did more damage. Either way, RIP Eight Belles and lets hope PETA loses this case.
They give there all doing what they were bred to do! 
Some pay the ultimate price! She now runs with Barbaro! Amen and amen!
I’ve replayed the NBC video from the link that Bam gave us a number of times, and, to me, she looks perfectly OK when she was crossing the line. It looks like when she was being eased up afterwards that she suddenly throws her right front leg out in a strange way and then collapses a couple of strides after that.
That woman from PETA is an idiot. Organizations like those use one-off incidents like this to publicize themselves, and outside of this type of incident, you never hear anything about/from them. I remember when, living in England, every year right after the Grand National is run, you get organizations like PETA running off at the mouth about cruelty to horses and then you don’t hear a peep (or, as they’d say in England, a dickie-bird) out of them for the other 364 days of the year. I hope that the KHRA ignore them.
I think PETA has a point, though. Yes, 99% of what they end up doing (putting orange vests on deer to “protect” them only to have all the local hunt shops offer bounties for each vest, etc.) is incredibly stupid. But the concepts behind it are valid (i.e. racing is fairly “cruel” compared to other equine disciplines).
The eventing world is convening next month to discuss more safety measures to prevent injuries/deaths in competition. Racing has even more injuries (apparently around 2 breakdowns/day, on average). I think RL racing is abusive in that the horses are still growing…potentially if all these horses had been 5 years old instead of 3, Barbaro and Eight Belles wouldn’t have broken down. The obsession with winning the next big race (which, IMO, start way too soon in a horse’s life) puts the horses at greater risk.
I do believe EB’s breakdown was an accident, though my trainer (who used to exercise ride/trained to be a jockey) thinks she got pulled up from a gallop too quickly, which led to a lot of force on her forelegs, breaking them.
Being a RL racehorse trainer, I watched the race at least 10 times. You can see the filly stumble slightly in the front stretch, recover, but you can tell she was “off”. It was slight but still there. She stumbled again, slightly, and recovered. The rider was spanking(I hate the word whipping) her and she was running on pure adrenaline.
After the finish when galloping out, the adrenaline starts to lessen and not far after the finish, you can see where she is really “off”. Then she goes down.
The rider was riding in his 1st KD and was in a euphoric state, that he just ran the only filly to a really nice 2nd place finish. All kinds of things are going through your head. The last thing on it is IF your horse is breaking down. He is a fairly “new” rider and might not have had much experience with horses breaking down. If both legs are bad, then the feeling is not as noticeable. I am not excusing him but he is going to watch the replays and re-live that moment for a long time.
It will be curious to see IF Larry Jones keeps using him as a jockey. He probably won’t drop him immediately but he will probably get less rides and not on the top horses. He will probably stay on Proud Spell since she will be going for the Triple Tiara.
The other thing is Unbridled Song’s are notorious for breaking down. There have been a lot of snapped legs for that bloodline. Not always in a race either. Quite a few have snapped while back tracking(jogging clockwise on the track) and just doing easy gallops to stretch out the legs.
There are some bloodlines that just seem to have more problems than others.
Except, if we support PETA on this…
PETA’s ultimate goal is the -genocide- of -all- domesticated animals.
I don’t care what points they may have on individual issues, I will not support them in any way, shape, or form. Ever.
I would have to disagree on the injury occurring in the stretch. I think that “bobble” (if we’re looking at the same thing) is her trying to drift towards the rail and the jock correcting her with the whip to come back out. There is no way that she could have run that far with the skeletal integrity disrupted in such a way that it was. Larry Bramlage (from Rood and Riddle) and Dwayne Rodgerson (from Hagyard) are two of the best and most respected lameness experts and orthopedic surgeons in the world (I can vouch for that, I’ve worked with both of them), and they both agreed that the filly was sound across the finish line and broke down in her cannons/sesamoids/suspensory apparatus about two strides before she went down. If that injury occurred in the stretch, she would have been galloping across the finish on her fetlocks with fragments of cannon bone in the dirt (graphic as that sounds).
On a brighter note, looks like Big Brown will face a pretty light field in the Preakness. Maybe we’ll end our TC drought.
A horse can’t run in the way you discribed, Yes…but a horse can run with hairline fractures or the start of an injury which is mostly likely what Brenda is trying to say. I’m not saying i think the injury started in the stretch or it didn’t, but it is possible for her to developed stress fractures (or similar) during the race which would have weakened her frame, but enabled her to still run (on heart, adrenaline, or whatever.)
There are a lot of horses that run with hair line fractures. Rags to Riches had one, she retired, War Pass had one and it was discovered after a bad race. Lots of them have them and go unnoticed till they breakdown. I have seen quite a few break while just being jogged on the track a couple days after a race. Horses shouldn’t just “snap” while jogging. It is more than likely stress fractures from the race and IF trainers don’t go over the legs like they should, they won’t feel the heat difference.
I check mine every morning. I am on my hands and knees going from stall to stall feeling legs. You can ask Shannon of Shadowbrook Farm. She has helped me in the mornings and I have taught her how to feel legs and learn the differences in each horse"s leg and commit it to memory. When doing this every day, you know when there is a problem. I catch a lot of problems this way and can correct things when possible.
Also,I didn’t say she broke it in the stretch. That was where is it all started. Those “bobbles” going at their speed can be an early indication of a problem. Even her owner, Larry Jones, said he saw her “off” before the wire. He said that on Monday.
Those “bobbles” can lead to over stretching of the tendon and ligaments which hold the ankle joints together. That over stretching leads to less support of the joints and combined with the concussion of her weight, is where you get breaks. Study anatomy and form and function of the leg and you will see what I am talking about. I had a vet show me on the mare I lost. He showed me the ligaments and tendons of the leg that fractured. It was very hard to do and watch BUT I learned a lot from it. She was the only one who I have trained, that broke down in.
Usually when horses “drift out or in” it is because they are hurting and trying to tell us something. Horses can’t talk and tell us where it hurts. They act up or act different and IF you know your horse and know that is unusual behavior, start checking them over and you will more than likely find a tender spot somewhere.
Example: Your gelding always stands good when you saddle him and basically falls asleep. 3 days ago you took him on a longer than normal trail ride or worked him harder over jumps than normal. Now when you saddle him, he tries to take a chunk from your side or he is real figity(sp?). Won’t stand still to mount up and you have to correct him, which is unusual. Take the saddle off and go over his back and hips and I can almost guarantee he has a sore back or hips. All of his moving around when he is normally quiet is his way of say “I hurt, don’t do that”
Also, those vets didn’t have the replays to watch BEFORE giving their statements on live tv, right after it happened. Everyone was focused on Big Brown and hardly anyone(except those at the rail where it happened) knew the filly went down till Big Brown was coming back by. Gary Stevens was going on and on about him and how he is still fresh enough to dump the rider and then he saw the filly on the ground. The focus was on the winner. As it should be.
The vets in Kentucky and at Rood & Riddle are awesome and I would love to work with them and learn from their knowledge. What an experience that would be!!! I have a lot of respect for them and their vast amount of knowledge. If you get a chance, pick their brain about “Form and Function of the legs”. It will be very interesting if you are into that type of stuff. My state vet told me that in order to get my trainer’s license, I had to be able to demonstrate the workings of the horse’s leg. We used one of my race mares as the test “dummy”. You have to pass a vet test along with written questions before you get your trainer’s license. For those who are not familiar with the process.
Also, my mare that went down was because of a hole in the track. Another horse went down the next day in the same exact spot. Same exact injury. So it was not something I did or didn’t do. But you still “beat” yourself up over it.
Sorry so long Undecided. But it is easier to explain things in person than by typing. No more novels, I promise 
My problem with PETA is yea they may have their hearts in the right place but say in some crazy way all horses are released into the wild (it’ll never happen but just pretend for now lol) i just don;t think they realize how high maintenance horse are and how many don;t have the best wild instincts, so many would die. And also they don;t realize how dangerous the wild is for the horses. Predators, no food, etc. Not to mention they “leave the weak behind” so the herds will abandon old, young and in between if they can’t keep up. I have seen wild stallions pick up inhibited young foals by their crests and shake them until they died. So humans on the average PAMPER these horses to no end. I know i do. So next thing we know PETA would be saying “bring all the horses back to domesticity! Its too dangerous out there.” 
Well anywho. That was my rant on PETA.
Hehe, Im well up on my anat and phys, trust me. Im in vet school right now 
I agree with all you’ve said, I just didn’t see anything myself (granted its grainy on my computer). The filly also had a tendency to drift in towards the rail in the stretch anyways (not injury related). And Bramlage and Rodgerson made their comments on Monday after studying the films, not the post race interviews on Sat. My thinking was that if she fractured enough at the point of the bobbles to actually bobble, she should have broken down sooner due to the stress on and fatigue of the soft tissue support at that point in the race. We’ll never know, I guess.
A little side note - its great you check your horses so thoroughly, its a shame everyone doesn’t. But it is possible to have stress fractures that won’t show heat, swelling or lameness and won’t show up on films either. As careful as we can be, you just never know whats lurking in those legs.