Barbaro Is Euthanized After Struggle With Injury
By JOE DRAPE
Published: January 29, 2007
Barbaro, who rocketed to a six-and-a-half-length victory in the Kentucky Derby last May but sustained a catastrophic injury two weeks later in the Preakness Stakes, was euthanized early this morning in Pennsylvania.
Jeff Haynes/AFP -- Getty Images
Jockey Edgar Prado led Barbaro to the finish line at the 132nd Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs on May 6, 2006.
“We just reached a point where it was going to be difficult for him to go on without pain,” Barbaro’s co-owner, Roy Jackson, told The Associated Press. “It was the right decision. It was the right thing to do. We said all along, if there was a situation where it would become more difficult for him, then it would be time.”
Mr. Jackson and his wife, Gretchen Jackson, apparently made the decision after Barbaro experienced a setback over the weekend that required a risky surgical procedure on the horse’s right hind leg, the one he originally injured in the opening yards of the Preakness.
The veterinarians treating Barbaro said their only option was to try to build a framework of metal pins, bars and a plate around the horse’s right hind leg, to take all the weight off the fragile bone structure, which was already being held together with a matrix of screws. The surgery was performed Saturday at the George D. Widener Hospital for Large Animals in Kennett Square, Pa., by Dr. Dean Richardson. Barbaro has been in intensive care since he originally shattered the leg.
Dr. Richardson acknowledged that allowing the pins across a leg bone known as the cannon bone to bear weight carried “significant risk.”
More than 118,000 people at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore and a national television audience watched on May 20, 2006, as Barbaro pulled up in mid-race, his fractured right hind leg dangling awkwardly, while his jockey, Edgar Prado, tried to soothe him.
The eight-month effort to nurse the horse back to health riveted enthusiasts around the world, and reminded casual fans about the beauty, mystery and heartbreak that is part of thoroughbred racing.
The original fracture healed well, but Barbaro developed laminitis in his left rear hoof last July. The condition is frequently caused by uneven weight distribution among the horse’s legs, and it is often fatal. Veterinarians at the New Bolton Center at the University of Pennsylvania recently had to remove damaged tissue from the affected hoof.
Before the Preakness, horsemen and horseplayers saw Barbaro, a son of Dynaformer, as an exceptional colt.
He had dispatched 19 opponents in the Kentucky Derby in dominating fashion, and his résumé summoned memories of Affirmed, Seattle Slew and Secretariat, the last three winners of the Triple Crown.
Like Slew, Barbaro left Churchill Downs undefeated in six races, winning victories that were as remarkable for the versatility Barbaro had shown as for their outcomes.
His first three victories were won handily on grass — not on dirt, the surface of the Triple Crown — at distances of a mile, a mile and a sixteenth, and a mile and an eighth. When Barbaro’s trainer, Michael Matz, tried him on dirt last spring in traditional Derby prep races at Gulfstream Park in Florida, Barbaro glided to victory on a sloppy track in the Holy Bull Stakes, then showed fierce grit to prevail in a stretch duel in the Florida Derby.
A former equestrian who had won a silver medal in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Mr. Matz decided as soon as Barbaro arrived at his training center in Maryland as a 2-year-old that the colt was preternaturally talented. Mr. Matz aimed to make him the 12th Triple Crown champion, the first in 28 years.
In six of the previous nine years, horses had captured the Derby and the Preakness, only to fall short of the Triple Crown and immortality in the Belmont Stakes, the longest and most gruelling of the three. Mr. Matz opted for a lighter-than-usual racing schedule for Barbaro, resting the horse for five to eight weeks between starts, and raced him only once in the 13 weeks before the Derby.
“We were training for the Triple Crown,” Mr. Matz said before the Preakness. “It has been so long since anyone has won it, why not try something different?”
Mr. Matz’s assistant trainer, Peter Brette, said that the strategy was brilliant. Mr. Brette, who was also Barbaro’s exercise rider, was struck by the colt’s balance from the first time he sat on him.
“He was like a Porsche, and I kept finding more gears,” said Mr. Brette, a former champion jockey in Dubai.
Mr. Brette was even looking beyond the Triple Crown. He, Mr. Matz and the Jacksons had discussed returning Barbaro to the turf for a European campaign, perhaps culminating in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, the most famous race in Europe.
Beyond Barbaro’s burgeoning talent, all of his human connections were beguiled by his personality, which blended intelligence with, as Mr. Brette said, an old soul’s temperament. Gretchen Jackson, who with her husband had been breeding and racing thoroughbreds for more than 30 years, broke the golden rule of horse ownership: She fell in love with Barbaro.
That ardor was tested in horrific fashion at the Preakness, when Prado felt Barbaro struggling with his stride during the first eighth of a mile, and brought him to halt before a stunned grandstand.
Amid the tears of the jockey, Mr. Matz, Mr. Brette and the Jacksons, Barbaro was taken off the track in an equine ambulance, and soon escorted by the Baltimore police north on 1-95 to the Widener Hospital, a renowned facility at the University of Pennsylvania’s New Bolton Center.
The news from the doctors was dire: Barbaro had sustained a broken cannon bone above the ankle, a broken sesamoid bone behind the ankle and a broken long pastern bone below the ankle, and a dislocation of the fetlock joint. Dr. Richardson initially put Barbaro’s chances of survival at 50-50.
Horses are often euthanized on the racetrack after sustaining severe injuries. But Barbaro was no ordinary horse; he was the Derby winner, with a value as a commercial stallion estimated at $30 million.
The Jacksons were also not ordinary owners. Roy Jackson’s grandfather was William Rockefeller, once the president of Standard Oil. For decades Mr. Jackson and his family had been substantial donors to Penn’s veterinary school. The Jacksons vowed to spare no expense in the hope that Barbaro could someday return to a normal, pain-free life.
When Dr. Richardson told them that Barbaro had emerged from more than five hours of surgery with a reassembled right leg, the relief was palpable but the long-term prognosis remained the same.
Photographs of Barbaro being hoisted from a raft in a recovery pool lifted spirits everywhere, and the colt had the resolve to dance on all four legs — including the one in a cast — into his stall in the hospital’s intensive care unit.
Almost immediately, fruit baskets filled with green apples and carrots, elaborate flower arrangements and get-well cards arrived by the truckload at the veterinary hospital. Online message boards were swamped with Barbaro news, and became a virtual waiting room.
One Web site, timwoolleyracing9.com, was maintained by an exercise rider at Fair Hill Training Center in Elkton, Md., where Mr. Matz and Mr. Barbaro were based. It offered daily reports on Barbaro’s convalescence, which seemed to start smoothly.
Then in July came fever and infection, a series of four cast changes, a three-hour operation to change the plate and hardware in the right hind leg, and then the acute, severe case of laminitis in his left hind leg.
Eighty percent of Barbaro’s left hoof wall was removed on July 12, and the next day Dr. Richardson said his chances for survival were poor. But Barbaro’s vital signs remained normal, and the Jacksons and Dr. Richardson pressed ahead, treating the laminitis aggressively and manage pain.
“We are only going to go on in this horse as long as everyone involved is convinced that they can come in every day, look at this horse and be convinced that on that day, and the next day, that he is going to be acceptably comfortable,” Dr. Richardson said at the time.
Even in a short seven-race career, Barbaro’s statistics are impressive, with six-victories and earnings of more than $1.5 million. But they do not tell the whole story of the colt, who dazzled the racing world when healthy and then garnered its compassion in his fight to recover from injury and what was ultimately an insurmountable disease. |
