New York Times editorial RE: Barbaro

[Thehoarsehorseplayer]

A Broken Horse

A thoroughbred like Barbaro does not look, at first, like a fragile creature.  But the muscled frame of his sleek body, the power of his shoulders and hindquarters--all that superstructure connects to the ground through a suprisingly delicate set of bones, three of which fractured on Saturday at the Preakness Stakes.  No one will forget the injury who witnessed it, or who saw a photograph of Barbaro holding his right hind leg up in the air while his jockey, Edgar Prado, leaned against him.  The very being of a horse is in his legs, and part of the horror was knowing that such a seemingly trivial injury--trivial to a human, that is-- would have meant death on the track to most horses.

This is the cruel logic of horse racing.  One wrong step was all it took to undo this horse after his triumphant Kentucky Derby victory.  Barbaro\'s owners are doing all they can to save his life--and his career as a stud.  Edgar Prado gave Barbaro that chance by pulling up the instant he knew something was wrong.  But the fact is that a 3-year old horse--no matter how massive it may look--is still settling into its bones, and its joints are still closing.

The very nature of the track is to treat these animals, especially a winner like Barbaro, as if they were infinitely precious while at the same time testing them not only against one another, but against the very chance of survival.  No one wants a tragedy like this to happen, but it is endemic in the sport.

The power of the emotions we have all felt at seeing this great animal in pain are paradoxical.  The feeeling are powerful because it was Barbaro, the favorite.  But they would have been powerful had this happened to any other horse on the track that day.  When the race goes as planned, it all seems like beauty, like grace and athleticism. But in the instant that Barbaro pulled up, suddenly alien to himself in his inability to find his footing, we saw the horror inherent in racing 3-year olds.  We do such a good job of hiding these things from ourselves until the moment when they can no longer be hdden.

[imallin]

Anytime a publication who doesn\'t give a crap about horseracing comes rushing in to write a negative story about breakdowns, or something negative about this industry they can shove that up you know where. I\'m sick and tired of this geraldo rivera generation who never mention horseracing for any reason, never mention \'feel good\' stories but when negative stuff hits the fan, here they come to pile on.

If you want to cover horseracing as a real sport and report front page stuff in the good times and bad, i\'ll let you slide...but when you come running the minute something like this happens, i don\'t like it, i don\'t endorse it and i don\'t approve.

Ny times is writing, \"this is the cruel logic of horseracing\"

What do they actually KNOW about horse racing?

[devilinahorsesuit]

you have got to be joking. Joe Drape is one of the very best horse-racing writers on the planet, and Finley is their stringer. The Times spends more time on racing than most publications. You should try reading it at some point rather than posting ignorant comments.

[Kasept]

The Times\' coverage has been great with pieces on New Bolton\'s state of the art procedures/facility, the Jane Schwartz (Ruffian: Burning From the Start author) op-ed letter, etc..

While the paper doesn\'t run agate anymore, The Times\' heritage covering racing is second to none, (ever hear of Red Smith?), and your comment displays total lack of comprehension of the editorial.

[NoCarolinaTony]

Kasept

Thank you for posting. Perhaps you should inlude on this site what you wrote on your own. There are too many smoking gun \"theorists\" around here, people talking without \"REAL FACTS\". I would hate to be judged by a jury of \"theese Peers\".

NC Tony

[devilinahorsesuit]

hear hear, amen! And Drape\'s Black Maestro (bio of Jimmy Winkfield, last black jockey to win the Derby), just out, is pretty incredible.

[bellsbendboy]

I must admit Imallin that I find your posting the last few days, lacking.  You slam Dan Hendicks who has done a fabulous job with Brother Derek.  Then the NY Times gets your wrath and they have decades of terrific coverage, then you post that owners do not know anything about racing. And then, want to alter the Triple Crown schedule!  Anything else???  BBB

[imallin]

\"Hendricks has done a fabulous job with Brother Derek\"

Ok, so it was fabulous he ran the horse back in 2 weeks after a grueling race in Kentucky where he was bumped several times, checked, lost a shoe, was 15 wide and ran his heart out. That was fabulous entering?\"

Was it also \'fabulous\' that Hendricks didn\'t use Bend shoes on BD at Churchill when Steve Asmussen and Dale Romans did? Was that fabulous training? Was it? Was it fabulous the 2 best trainers at Churchill realized that bend shoes were necessary and a trainer from So Cal didn\'t know to put them on. Ok, i guess that was intelligent on Hendricks part.

Maybe i need to apologize to the NY times, maybe they aren\'t as bad as rags like the NY post and stuff like that. I just don\'t like non-racing people running to report negative racing stories when they NEVER even talk about horseracing when something good happens.

As far as owners being dumb, other than Robert Bone and maybe a few scattered others, there are plenty of owners who know absolutely nothing about horseracing. Do you think that most owners are razor sharp and know what they doing? Tell me more.

And yeah, there\'s plenty i\'d do for racing if given the chance.

[richiebee]

Well aren\'t we Mr Lightning Rod!

By the way the NY Times had a fellow writing about 20 years ago name of Steven Crist. And of course the story goes that its not like the editors at the Times recognized his talent... I think they wanted him to cover the Wash DC beat, and we are not talking Laurel and Pimlico.

If you dont care for Crist, there was that Red Smith guy. I know this is a long time ago but when you get old your memory gets like an accordion (25 days 25 years= no difference). So you got 3 writers  (Smith,  Joe Hirsch and Crist) who are probably the most widely read in the last half century. Two of them wrote for the NY Times. Two of them (Hirsch and Smith) have graded stakes run in their name. When are they running the Imallin Handicap this year?

You should never throw the Post\'s name in with the Times. The Post has IMO top notch racing and sports coverage. Fountaine has been solid ever since his Bloodhorse days. You can\'t help but admire a man who puts into print what every journalist covering NYRA had on their minds-- anger at the fact that NYRA cut their free lunch. A few times a year they drag Kerrison out of a nightspot to cover a big race. I really don\'t follow their selections because I can be totally wrong about 6 out of 9 races a day without any help.

Post sports IMO superior to the NY Times unless you really are interested in that feature on kayaking or college rodeo.

If anything the Post at $1.75 newstand per week is sheer entertainment. You never know when you will be treated to a classic piece of Post journalism such as the picture they ran of Dolly Parton, dressed in a low cut blouse, with Phil McConkey and Sean Landeta on either side of her. Messrs Phil and Sean are like Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo, trying very hard to look at the camera, not to look down. The headline over the photo \"Check out These Giants\".

The Times can be equally disturbing. I hate that everybody gets called \"Mr\" as in \"Mr Gacey, who assualted and killed 32 juveniles...\"

[asfufh]

NY Times hardly bothers with horse racing compared to the past:

http://webserv.als.edu/www/media/user/glc/aqueduct_2006.pdf

[NoCarolinaTony]

The Imallin Handicap......hmmm is that a condition or a race?

NC Tony

[Bally Ache]

Okay, this string has definitely become too one-sided.  Let\'s even it up a bit.  The NYT, as it exists (not as you may want to fondly remember it), is in big trouble.  That\'s not opinion, that\'s fact.  And it will continue slouching toward Bethlehem until the Sulzburgers realize that their financial well-being precludes allowing Pinch S. to march to the drummers of political correctness until he runs it into the ground. (Take a breath)

The conclusion drawn by the editorial is that three yr. old thoroughbreds are immature.  Yes, we all know they don\'t mature until five.  Not racing them until five is economically untenable.  Anyone who has more than a kindergarten level of knowledge about this game knows that.  It seems to me that the purpose of imallin\'s post was to call attention to this.  And he\'s not wrong.


Since this is a horseracing board I\'ll cut this diatribe short by simply saying the NYT is a mirror image of the New York Post.  That is, The Post is a right-wing rag and the Times has become a left-wing rag.

[devilinahorsesuit]

okay, this is getting way way off-topic, but that Times-is-a-liberal-rag bit is a balloon that really needs to be popped. When you\'ve got David Brooks and John Tierney lording over the op-ed page, you\'re hardly a lefty rag. You can look at any journalism study published by any source other than the Heritage Foundation to find that the Times editorial and front-section coverage is far less \"liberal\" than any number of other papers.

[TGJB]

Leaving that up to be \"fair and balanced\", but let\'s keep the board on track.
Anybody who stays on this topic and doesn\'t want to be deleted better be pretty funny.

[flushedstraight]

Len Friedman makes Judith Miller look like Mother Teresa