May 22, 2006
Barbaro Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:25 PM EST Horse racing is not a blood sport, but the “athletes” probably suffer more fatal and near-fatal injuries than in all other sports combined.
On Saturday, it happened again when Barbaro, the odds-on favorite to win the Preakness, second leg of the Triple Crown of American racing, shattered three bones in his rear right leg shortly after the start, his agony seen by millions of horrified spectators watching in person and on television. His jockey, Edgar Prado, brought him expertly to a halt—no easy task when a horse of such great heart is in full gallop—and leaned into him to help support him until help could arrive. He quite possibly saved Barbaro’s life.
Barbaro’s racing career—six races, six victories, including the Derby in the most impressive win there in years—is over, and doctors, after four hours of surgery, can offer no more than 50-50 odds that he can make it through the recovery process. Racehorses, born to run, do not deal easily with forced idleness. A lesser horse would have been put down right on the track.
In 1975 the greatest filly who ever lived, Ruffian, shattered a foreleg in a match race against Foolish Pleasure at Belmont Park in New York. Despite desperate efforts, she could not be saved, and she lies today at Belmont, her nose toward the finish line, the only horse ever buried at a New York track. Her story was lovingly told by Gene Smith in American Heritage in
1993.
There is something about great horses like Barbaro and Ruffian that sets them apart from lesser equines, something that moves the human heart by the way they stand, the look in their eye. When Augustus Saint-Gaudens was commissioned to create his heroic equestrian statue of General Sherman being led by the angel of Victory that stands in all its gilded majesty in New York’s Grand Army Plaza, he did not make a statue of a generic horse. Instead he carefully modeled his bronze horse on Ontario, one of the great jumpers of his or any day. By horse lovers the statue is still sometimes referred to as “Ontario, W. Sherman up.”
|
