The Beastly Life by Sally Eckhoff: My Front Legs

The Kentucky Derby ran itself out in a cloud of controversy and damage. I watched the race, and had to keep reminding my astounded companions that the horse who came in just behind Big Brown was indeed the filly, Eight Belles. But shortly thereafter, the camera strayed and showed, for a second, the unmistakable black body of that filly lying motionless on the track. "What's she doing over there?" one of my friends asked. "That couldn't have been her coming across the finish line." For a second we thought a horse had gone down around the first turn and the field had simply run away from it. But that turned out not to be true.

Big Brown pulled wide for an awe-inspiring win, and the seventeen-hand filly, Eight Belles, who came in second, continued her "gallop-out." All racehorses do this after a race; they can't simply be slowed to a walk after they cross the finish line. While Eight Belles was gradually throttling down her torrid pace, she started galloping funny, her jockey said. Then she went down. She had smashed both front fetlocks (ankles) and fallen to the track. She had compound fractures, if you can imagine it. The vet was on the track with a euthanizing shot even before the race crew had time to erect the barrier around her. She was dead as dead could be.

I just got home from buying a bottle of wine, and the guy behind the counter is a pedigree consultant. I had to ask them what that meant. He said, "I help people buy racehorses." His take was that the Derby is a tough race for fillies with such a big field. They bump each other around so much. He speculated that she might have had a heart attack and fractured her fetlocks after that. Who the hell knows. Anyway, he went on to say, "breeders are killing the sport." They're retiring horses too early—Bernardini and Hard Spun, for example—and starting horses way too early, too. He described how a two-year-old who can run really fast training fractions can bring a higher price than an untested horse, but that such a two-year-old might not really be ready to run that fast. The guy said that Eight Belles really shouldn't have been in the race in the first place. She was big—a seventeen-hand three-year-old. Jesus.

I don't think Polytrack will help. I don't think anything will help. The owners are too eager to make a profit off the price they pay to buy a horse, so they're not going to want to keep these young horses at home while they develop. But they should. I wouldn't race them until they were five if it were up to me, and I know some exercise riders who agree with me. I have never discussed this with a jockey, though. I'd like to.