More info on Eight Belles's "Rare and baffling" injury

[Ruffian]

This is just more info (with interesting statistics on overall rates of thoroughbred racehorse breakdowns) from the racing community. We are all still reacting with a chorus of “WTF?!”

From an article on the Daily Racing Form Online:

“You’ll see things like condylar fractures or sesamoid fractures in one leg, and as they start slowing down and their mind gets off of the competition, they’ll become aware of the discomfort,” [Kentucky Derby attending track vet] Bramlage added when asked what injuries are most likely after the finish line. “An injury as they’re pulling up is not terribly unheard of. The vast majority of injuries, however, don’t manifest until they’re cooling out, unless the horse becomes structurally unstable in some fashion. Then they start slowing down in the race. None of those scenarios fit here.”

Another equine surgeon named Dwayne Rodgerson reports,

Rodgerson said he knows of no statistics showing how many injuries occur after the finish line. But studies have shown the catastrophic injury rate in Thoroughbred races typically hovers between 1.6 and 2.03 per 1,000 races.

(emphasis mine)

And this is the quote that really just sums it up our WTF?!:

Eight Belles’s injury, and particularly the failure of both front fetlocks, provides a highly unusual and baffling case study for the country’s top equine orthopedic surgeons.

“I’ve never seen it in a horse that galloped out that far after the race,” Bramlage said. “I actually have only ever seen it firsthand on videotape and never in a race where I actually have been. Even in that situation and in situations where a horse injures one leg, they’re not performing like she was performing. She was closing the gap at the end of the race, so it’s not as if she were protecting something or aware, even, that anything was going on. Her level of performance couldn’t have been higher. So there was no outward sign that any of this was impending.”

I’ve only seen one double-legged injury in 25 years of racewatching (and that includes the nightly race recaps of the day’s races of multiple tracks), and that was a two-year-old who broke both knees rounding the final turn about 20 years ago in a cheap maiden claimer.

I’m not posting this as an argument (there’s a BBQ Pit thread for that), but just sharing information and insight into the collective :eek: reaction the racing community is having.