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and RACING'S FUTURE  A staff artist's vision of BIG BROWN winning The Preakness. |
An Ominous Note Amidst
Big Brown’s Preakness Win
of TheColumnists.com
All hail Big Brown for his smashing Preakness victory on top of a glittering Kentucky Derby triumph. He is the toast of the nation as we anticipate his winning the Belmont Stakes on June 7 and becoming the first Triple Crown winner in 30 years.
Step aside Citation, Secretariat Affirmed and the other members of the elite eleven, a new guy is ready to join the club.
Still, there was a haunting note for me
in all the hullabaloo at the Preakness. Some background:
.
Ellen Parker is a thoroughbred breeding consultant and analyst
in Kentucky. I became aware of her in a remarkable story written
for the ESPN website by Bill Nack, who once was a colleague at
Newsday and is probably the best writer about horse racing in
the country.
The point of the piece was that breeding practices emphasizing speed at the expense of soundness is the root cause of the breakdown of race horses. In the wake of the tragic death of Eight Belles at the Kentucky Derby, industry figures have breastbeat about the use of drugs and race surfaces as well as breeding. But drugs and surfaces pale in the face of the breeding that is producing unsound race horse.
Nack’s piece notes that before the start of the Derby, Parker said to her husband, “I just hope this filly doesn’t break down.” She said this because she had seen in Eight Belles’ pedigree the same kind of dangerous crosses--lines of known unsoundness triply crossed behind an unsound sire line--that she believed contributed to the racetrack breakdowns and deaths of such prominent horses as Ruffian and Go For Wand.
Nack wrote, “She saw a clear and present danger: a family tree that bore three branches of the extremely brilliant but unsound racehorse Raise a Native ...who had won all four of his starts before he broke down in front and limped to stud.”
Raise a Native was sired by Native Dancer, the great horse whose blood dominates the breeding industry. “The thoroughbred breed is now so suffused with the precious blood of Native Dancer,” Nack wrote, “so filled with his great-grandsons and great-granddaughters…who carry the markers of his tribe--extraordinary speed with limited durability and soundness--that today it threatens the viability of the entire breed.”
All 20 horses in the Derby carried the blood of Native Dancer. Native Dancer appeared four times in Eight Belles’ pedigree, evidence of the dangerous cross-breeding that cannot be escaped now because of the dominance of the Native Dancer strain.
Parker, 61, has spent most of her adult life analyzing bloodhorse pedigrees. For years she has been arguing vociferously in her newsletter, “Pedlines” on the need for thoroughbred breeders to aim for soundness, for durability in plotting their matings”
Animal rights groups picketed horse racing venues after the Derby. Off that fact is this remarkable comment from Parker. “What Ellen Parker wanted to know when I spoke to her after the Derby,” Nack wrote, “was why no one was picketing Robert Clay’s Three Chimneys Farm in Midway, Ky., one of the pillars of Blue Grass breeding and the place where Eight Belles was bred and from where she was sold as a yearling for $375,000.” She said, “They’re the ones who created the tragedy.”
Amidst all the acclaim about Big Brown after the Derby and at the Preakness, there was this item: Before the Preakness it was announced that Big Brown’s breeding rights had been sold for a reported $50 million. And who were they sold to? To Robert Clay’s Three Chimneys Farm.”
Mike Jensen’s post Preakness story in The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that before the race Robert Clay chatted with Michael Iavarone, managing partner of Big Brown’s ownership, and wished him good luck “aware that their investment would go up or down drastically based on the Preakness result.”
The Big Brown people have announced that the horse, who has suffered from quarter-cracks of his foot, will not run as a four-year-old. It will be another case of racing eating its own, taking away from the sport a star just when the public has warmed to him. It would be like golf’s Tiger Woods retiring right now.
Parker feels that because of the inbreeding there will be a gene pool grown narrow and dry, one in which it will be impossible to find a sound, viable cross unless the Jockey Club opens the American Stud Book, which has been closed to anything but thoroughbreds for more than 100 years.
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This was too good to let pass.
President Bush was asked this by the website, Politico.:
“You haven’t been golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq?”
And President Bush answered, “It really is. I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong message.”
No golf because of the war in Iraq. What a sensitive man!
But it turned out that an Associated Press story reported him playing golf almost a month after he alleged he had been pulled off a golf course and decided to give up the game.
©2008 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted May 19, 2008.
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