Re: The Criple Crown needs Restructuring (532 Views)
Posted by:
imallin (IP Logged)
Date: May 23, 2006 03:09PM
Miff,
In a perfect world, sure, every horse would have this type of exam. Its just not economically feasable. The 4k claimers at Penn National have to run to put on the show, the show must go on. If you did an mri on every horse on a particular card at a low rung track, you'd see a lot of christmas tree lights on those exams.
My point about the Derby is that this is a race, and the impending preakness 2 weeks away, where all sense and logic go out the window. This Derby is a race where not one trainer is going to care if his horse is lame, he's going to enter the race for his own training career. Look at that 20 horse with mike smith, that bull horse, (forget his name). Anyway, he was owned by a syndicate, west point i think...they just want to get in the gate so their syndicate can say, "we get owners to the Ky Derby". If that horse had the earnings and was broken down, he's STILL going to be entered and run. He'll be covered up with heavy meds and put out there.
Personally, any trainer (hendricks, etc) who run a LOSING ky derby horse back in the preakness are insane. Its stupid. Bro Derek had a hard derby race, wide, losing a shoe and all out to the wire AND had a suspect workout at Santa Anita before the race....that horse had no reason to be at pimlico. He was supposed to be sent back to SA to rest. Hendricks put his own selfish personal interest before that horse and you see what happened. BD washed out and ran like crap.
I think when you are dealing with millions of dollars in purses and tremendous exposure for these trainers (career making exposure) there's tremendous incentive to run a horse who doesn't belong.
IN a perfect world, every horse would have an exam, even the platers at the smaller tracks. But at this high of a level with the national exposure, we can't have horses breaking down on national tv like barbaro did. a stringent exam AFTER the derby would eliminate any horse with a problem.