ping
Duct tape.
The most depressing part of it is that he’ll probably heal just enough to run in the Belmont, win, and then be promptly retired, to pass on cracking hoofs to all his offspring.
I’m tellin’ you guys, Big Brown is going to come up short just like Funnycide, Sunday Silence, and Smarty Jones did.
His feet have consistently been his weakness. And they are a main reason he will, at most, race 3 more times before retiring to stud.
Darn.... sorry to hear about the quater crack. Big Brown is one great colt.
I doubt it was the crack that made him choose not to run. He wanted to after he was jostled. He just did not want to when the jockey asked. It may be the heat or he got tired of being held when he wanted to run. Horse sometimes decide not to put forth the effort. Especially smart ones that are easily handled. His notorious calmness is not always an asset. Smart horses sometimes decide I’ve had enough.
Big Brown missed three days of training last week after the quarter crack was discovered. McKinlay inserted steel sutures to pull the crack together a week ago, allowing Big Brown to resume training.
LAST PLACE. 38 TO 1 WON!
This Belmont turned out to be possibly the most disappointing horse race I have ever seen, maybe because expectations were so high, maybe also because in a way it
fulfilled the eternal truth about the races, that there are just too many quirky and unpredictable factors that can come into play, even with an apparent superhorse-in-the-making like Big Brown. Here we have this next potential Secretariat hoping to break a three decade jinx, here we have the next overconfident trainer with a somewhat checkered past,just asking to be shot down, and it all gets resolved in the worst way possible: the superhorse finishing LAST, and the trainer, drenched in sweat, his back to everybody, unable to speak.
I knew something was up with this horse very early on:
a kind of physical affect I’ve never seen before from him: standard issue RANKNESS. He had the rail but the “cheap speed” Da’Tara goes and takes it from him and it’s as though Big Brown was immediately boxed in and necessarily restrained by Desormeaux. Then he gets taken around, wide, and still looks rank and almost like he’s start to “wheel”,
while the speed, as so often happens in the Belmont, dominates the pace and confounds everyone, and wins wire to wire , pretty much going away. With Casino Drive out of the race, it might have been a different pace scenario, a different result. Nothing broke well for BB today, not the heat, not the quarter crack, not the trip, but everything broke well for a lesser horse who got a dream trip and a dream ride and obviously , once he got the lead, ran the race of his life.