Disaster strikes to mar Classic victory
Death toll rises to 37 in final Breeders’ Cup race Joseph O’brien saves Europe from whitewash
The 36th Breeders’ Cup will be remembered as a subdued one, not so much a joyous celebration of great racing but an exercise in breath-holding in case there was another fatality on American racing’s biggest stage.
With 36 equine deaths both in training and racing at Santa Anita since last Christmas, numerous rules had been introduced that have already had a significant effect on the number of fatalities.
It is a truism that racing horses round a field is never going to be totally risk free but, in a way, this is America’s lax medication rules and dirt surfaces coming back to bite it. Although that is a problem across the country, the fire has been burning most intensely at Santa Anita.
It has made a start in pushing back withdrawal times for medications and, last week, every third person in the stable area was a vet checking for soundness. That watching, which continued in the paddock and at the start, resulted in six horses including European runners Suedois and Fleeting being withdrawn on vets’ orders.
The meeting was within touching distance of being incident free when disaster struck 300 yards from the finish of the last of 14 races. As Vino Rosso galloped to victory in the Classic, in his wake the fouryear-old Mongolian Groom sustained a hind-leg fracture.
Behind the banks of photographers waiting for the victor’s triumphant return, something altogether more significant for US racing in its present state was being enacted; Mongolian Groom was being loaded into a hulking horse ambulance shortly to become death number 37.
How racing in liberal California, and in particular at Santa Anita, which yesterday hosted its last meeting until Boxing Day, reacts to this latest set of bad headlines will determine its future.
A European lockout was spared by Joseph O’brien, a trainer, who looks so fresh-faced that if you did not know you might be tempted to ask him what A-levels he is sitting. The 26-year-old became the youngest trainer to win at a Breeders’ Cup when Iridessa took the Fillies and Mares Turf.
It rescued an otherwise moderate, frustrating, meeting for European horses when the pattern was very much horses, hampered by a bad trip, flying up the stretch from impossible positions to grab a minor placing; too little, too late.
Indeed Anthony Van Dyck might have added some much-needed gloss to his Derby win had he not been stopped in his tracks a furlong and a half out in the Turf. He finished third.
O’brien’s career as a jockey was effectively launched at 18 when he won the Turf on St Nicholas Abbey to become the meeting’s youngest winning jockey. In an extraordinary stellar training career, which only began in 2016, he has already won a Melbourne Cup, Irish Derby and Irish Gold Cup.
On Saturday he saddled winners on three continents including Downdraft at Flemington, one of no less than four runners from his stable in tomorrow’s Melbourne Cup.