The powers that be huddled with great urgency after 3-year-old colt New York Thunder snapped a leg Aug. 26 before a certain victory in the grade 1 H. Allen Jerkens Memorial Stakes in front of a massive crowd at Saratoga Race Course.
Racing fans—and opponents—had recoiled at nearly the exact same horror just 21 days earlier when Maple Leaf Mel perished even closer to the finish line in the historic grade 1 Test Stakes.
Now, here it was, happening again.
So the officials did what they had to do, went on a fruitless errand examining necropsy reports, vet records, surface maintenance logs, the training, the weather. Yet, there was no way anyone was going to burst through a door and cry, "Hey, everybody! We found the problem!"
It's time to take the inquiry focus back to where The Jockey Club had it in 2020—on bloodlines and breeding practices.
The commonalities in these two latest spotlight breakdowns are both horses were exceptionally fast 3-year-olds and both had prominent representation of Unbridled's Song in their pedigrees. New York Thunder's dam descended directly from this stallion well known for passing fragility down to his progeny while Maple Leaf Mel's sire is a son of Unbridled's Song. Those are his stamps—terrific speed and suspect legs in his youngsters.
Type "Unbridled's Song" and "unsound" into Google, and you'll see this isn't a new discovery. Watching Eight Belles, a daughter of Unbridled's Song, come apart while pulling up after finishing second in the 2008 Kentucky Derby (G1) was more than enough evidence for a lot of people.
In 2016 Horse Racing Nation did an analysis that found that, "Excluding those that never made it to the racetrack, the average American Thoroughbred this millennium has made approximately 16 starts in their career. Unbridled's Song has had over 1,000 offspring who raced in the U.S. and those horses have only averaged 11 starts in their career."
Many breeders, however, just see the speed—and the money. Unbridled's Song, who died in 2013, hasn't exactly been some grand sire of sires, but his influence can be found coursing through the pedigrees of many racehorses today.
The most powerful American breeding operations have carelessly and greedily abused and destroyed the vast and wondrous genetic diversity in the country's bloodlines to the great detriment of the horses we see on the track today and the fading reputation of the sport. They have solidified their power by concentrating operations around a handful of super stallions, growing their books of mares to the size of "War and Peace."
Most of the other stallions roaming around the farm are chalked up as unfashionable and either ride the bench or get shipped out to faraway lands. Inbreeding is positively rampant, and if the hot stallions start showing that they pass on infirmities or were raced on a lot of drugs, it doesn't matter as long as the babies run fast.
In 2020 The Jockey Club sounded the alarm about the American Thoroughbred breeding industry, announcing it would limit the number of mares a stallion could cover in a single year to 140, still a ridiculously high number, and the big breeding outfits blew a fit. Coolmore's Ashford Stud, Spendthrift Farm, and Three Chimneys Farm filed a joint lawsuit to stop the directive in February 2021.
At first, The Jockey Club looked like it might dig in and hold its ground.
"The Jockey Club stands by the rule and its purpose, which is to preserve the health of the Thoroughbred breed for the long term."
B. Wayne Hughes, the late owner of Spendthrift, vigorously opposed the 140-mare rule.
"If they can limit the number to 140, what's to stop them from limiting it to 100 or 80 or any other number down the road?" Hughes said. "What if your mare isn't one of the 140? We are really concerned about the small breeder's ability to survive this."
One year later, The Jockey Club raised the flag of surrender and a number of stallions continued to be bred to more than 200 mares.
There isn't a large margin for error in this breeding and racing business. In a 2007 interview for a BloodHorse podcast, Larry Bramlage, the renowned equine orthopedic surgeon, said, "We could race draft horses over most any surface, and their bones are strong enough it wouldn't matter. But, the Thoroughbred maintains only the minimum skeleton that is sufficient to carry them around the track. Excess skeleton is added weight and penalize the horse's speed. So, the light skeleton is a speed advantage, unless it gets too light to carry its owner, and then it fails. This is why we will never eliminate injuries totally. Success is predicated on the fact that our athletes carry the minimum skeleton necessary. They run right on the edge of their physiology."
Kent Barnes, the former stallion manager at Shadwell Farm, wrote about disappearing sire lines in 2019 in BloodHorse. Here is just a taste of his documenting the woeful lack of caretaking of bloodlines by modern commercial breeders:
"The Phalaris line of Eclipse has been the most prevalent in North American sire lines. In 1991, it accounted for 622 of the 852 stallions (73%). In 2018, this number jumps to 399 of the 422 stallions (95%). The Nearctic branch primarily through his son Northern Dancer has seen little change in numbers from 151 descendants in 1991 to 145 in 2018. The other Nearctic branches, however, through Explodent and Icecapade have seen their numbers drop from 18 to three.
"In 1991 the Bold Ruler line of Nasrullah was responsible for 123 stallions in the Register through 24 branches. Today, while 71 stallions still remain from this line, 22 branches have disappeared, and all 71 stallions are now descendants of Boldnesian's great grandson, A.P. Indy. These missing branches of Bold Ruler were responsible for siring six winners of the Kentucky Derby in the 1970s.
"Lines of Nasrullah other than Bold Ruler provided 65 stallions in 1991, but by 2018 that number is reduced to 18."
The big breeders consolidate the sire lines over and over and over and when one line goes extinct, it can never be retrieved. The Jockey Club should have stood up to the big breeders so we could have it out in public. It's pretty much too late.
The poor racehorses are at the mercy of their breeding. The time between their appearances in the starting gate grows longer and longer; in the old days, Triple Crown horses would squeeze races in between their races. Now, no one wants to subject even their best runners to the Triple Crown anymore. It's too hard on them. Everyone knows the horses aren't what they used to be, don't look the way they used to look, and way too many are dying unspeakably out there. The fans are aghast and the Horse Racing Wrongs wagons are circling.
So, everybody's sort of out there looking for answers, but it's not the condition of the tracks, even though they're catching the hell; it's the horses.
If all the racetrack owners dug up their dirt courses and replaced them with Tapeta, it's still only going to lead trainers with unstable runners to rationalize, "Well, the surface is safer, so maybe this one will get around all right."
The breeders have brought us to the point where everyone is soul searching except for them. They need to be held accountable, but how?
You can't put bad tires on a Ferrari and say the car runs like a dream.
Whenever this conversation comes up, I like to pull out my picture of Citation. None of them look like this Michelangelo anymore, not even Arcangelo.
John Scheinman
Baltimore, Md.
