Phoebe Kate

As if my post of yesterday wasn’t grim enough, there’s more to add.  This was a very bad weekend for horses.

Michael Matz, Barbaro’s trainer, had another disastrous accident occur with one of his horses.  Chelokee, a four-year-old colt, suffered what appeared to be a catastrophe  similiar to Barbaro’s in the Preakness while running in the Alysheba Stakes at Churchill on May 2nd.  Originally diagnosed as a condylar fracture to the ankle, it fortunately now appears to be a dislocated ankle and is hopefully treatable.  In a touch of bitter irony, Chelokee won the first stakes named after his predecessor Barbaro last year

But others in the so-called “sport of kings” did not fair so well this weekend.  Thanks to Jules, one of my faithful readers and a horsewoman par excellence, I learned that two horses died at the Rolex Kentucky cross-country race.  Quiet Man, an Irish gelding, had severe injuries to the scapula and shoulder joint.  He was euthanized.  A New Zealand black gelding named Frodo Baggins, who was featured in the Lord of the Rings movie as one of the Ring Wraiths’ steads, suffered a fractured skull and a severely damaged lung.  He was euthanized.  His rider, Laine Ashker, is in intensive care for multiple injuries.  Her condition is critical but stable. 

The death toll in this sport mounts by leaps and bounds day by day.  Great Britain keeps count of the death toll on their race courses and you can read the appalling statistics here .  You remember the famous and historic Grand National Steeplechase in the book and movie National Velvet?  Forget it, folks.  It’s carnage.  Horribly sprawled and contorted dead horses and injured riders, like broken toys all over the grueling course.  

Why doesn’t the U.S. keep such statistics on our races and make them public?  I’ve searched on the web and can’t find them.  Perhaps because the numbers are so high over here that the shame would be too great.  Perhaps because in the racing industry, both here and abroad, everyone and everything is seen as an expendable, albeit expensive but ultimately readily replaceable commodity.  “Easy come, easy go” as the old saying goes. 

Or perhaps we, as spectators with an ever-dwindling sense of our own personal power in society and an ever-increasing need for “extreme” forms of entertainment as diversion, are simply going the way of ancient Rome with their gory chariot races.  It doesn’t matter who lives or dies, only that you get your vicarious thrill du jour and win your bet.  

–phoebe kate