Scratch takes shine off race
ELMONT, N.Y. — Talk about killing the Belmont buzz.
Trainer Doug O’Neill and owner Paul J. Reddam popped a hole in the ballooning hype for today’s 144th Belmont Stakes when they announced Friday morning that I’ll Have Another had suffered a tendon injury and would not run, extending horse racing’s string without a Triple Crown winner to 34 years.
I’ll Have Another, the first horse to win the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes since 2008, was scratched from today’s race and retired from racing in a double-pronged blow to the sport.
No horse has won the Triple Crown since Affirmed became the 11th horse to do so in 1978.
Eleven horses have won the first two legs and failed in the third since Affirmed.
“History is going to have to wait for another day,” Reddam said.
So will the New York Racing Association and NBC. They had been hoping for a Triple Crown bonanza today, with a crowd of more than 100,000 fans and a substantial bump in ratings was expected.
Instead, it was announced late Friday that I’ll Have Another and jockey Mario Gutierrez will lead the Belmont Stakes post parade, as if it were some kind of consolation prize for unconsolable fans.
I’ll Have Another joins Burgoo King (1932) and Bold Venture (1936) as the only horses to have won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, but not compete in the Belmont.
“He’ll be my hero forever,” jockey Mario Gutierrez said. “What I’ll Have Another did for me is so amazing. He brought happiness to my life.”
Dullahan is now the morning-line race favorite (at odds of 9-5), but his trainer Dale Romans was far from relishing the new status.
“It’s devastating. I really wanted to compete. This was going to be a special race,” Romans said. “... I think we could have competed with him and it would have been a great race. And great for the sport. It could have been something special.”
When asked if the news was good for him but bad for racing, Romans said, “It’s not even good for me because I am racing. It’d be better for me to go out there and beat him. I don’t want to win it with an asterisk by our name; I wanted to compete with him.”
All of the Belmont Stakes contenders were required to move into one security barn by Wednesday. What role that shift in environment may have played in I’ll Have Another’s injury will never be known, but Romans expressed dismay over the fact the racing world now has to ponder it at all.
“This detention barn is bad. I don’t know if it played a role or not, but we’re always going to wonder,” he said. “We’ll always wonder. Whoever came up with this idea should resign.”
Dr. Larry Bramlage, the oncall veterinarian for the American Association of Equine Practitioners, compared I’ll Have Another’s tendon injury to turning one’s ankle.
“The ultrasound exam showed that there were some fibers that were swollen,” Bramlage said. “Flexor tendon is a biologic cable and it has fibers and then bundles and then it’s organized into a tendon. They had a few of those bundles that had swelling. You won’t know exactly how bad it is for a few days.
“Outwardly looking you can’t tell anything. but they knew what he should look like. And there was a little swelling they checked with the ultrasound, and it was the ultrasound exam that showed the damage.”
Reddam was a philosophy professor in southern California before making his fortune in the mortgage business. In the Derby winner’s circle, he caught NBC’s Bob Costas off guard with a reference to the 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The morning after the Preakness, Reddam was asked what he thought Wittgenstein’s take would be on going for the Triple Crown.
“Well,” Reddam said, “I don’t know if Wittgenstein ever saw a horse race, but he once said, ‘What is our task in philosophy? It’s to let the fly out of the bottle.’ So I guess that’s what we have to do to win the Triple Crown.”
The fly, for the 34th year, remains trapped.
Information for this article was contributed by Ed McNamara of Newsday, and Beth Harris and Richard Rosenblatt of the Associated Press