Category: Updates from the yard

Cot Campbell runs a group of racing partnerships in the United States called Dogwood Stables. I met him two years ago at the Breeders’ Cup in Santa Anita when Aikenite was running in the Juvenile. He is playing in a completely different league than me, and I’m sure he won’t remember we ever met. We didn’t have a long conversation, but if we did we wouldn’t have seen eye to eye on a number of racing issues. But there are some things in this sport that bind us all, and Cot summed it all up perfectly in his most recent commentary. I urge all of you to give it a quick read. It is quite a day brightener on the shortest day of the year.

Le Post gave up three days ago; the jockeys threw in the towel on Saturday. I, finally, gave in today. Mother Nature wins. Maisons-Laffitte has been buried under a good coating of snow since Saturday night. We were shoveling and salting the yard until midday Sunday, when it was clear the snow was falling faster than we could remove it. The mail hasn’t shown up since last Friday. Racing was canceled on Saturday, but not before Turfani spent more than four hours in a truck getting to Deauville. Then she spent another three and a half hours getting home, and has been stuck in her box since. George (Email Exit), Timelord and Shinko at least got to race on Friday. In Shinko’s case, the trip was worthwhile. He finished fourth, beaten just two lengths by a horse carrying two kilos less than he was. Without the weight, he would have won. He’ll now run the Tierce handicap on Jan. 3, where he will, for once, not be top weight and should have a good chance. That’s if we can get him out of his box. The snow is supposed to stop later today, and should be melted by tomorrow. That should mean we can finally get out. All the horses, after three days of confinement, will be very, very fresh. Shinko will be possibly lethal. We will do our best.

I’m not sure when we’re racing next. Turfani and Belle should have had entries next Monday, but in all the confusion about whether or not we would race this week, I’ve missed the entries. Belle was eliminated for this Wednesday and will hold a priority for her next entry, which is likely to be Dec. 31. I may end up supplementing Turfani for next Monday, but I have to see how the week works out first.

As it is, we were lucky to get home Saturday. The jockeys decided they weren’t interested in racing after cantering the horses down to the gate for the second race. After that, chaos ensued. Is it canceled or just delayed? Will they reschedule? When? And what’s the transport situation for getting out of here? It took an hour for stewards to figure out how racing would be rescheduled, with the meeting split between Monday and Tuesday. We were given the option of staying in Deauville, but that didn’t make much practical sense to most of us, since we didn’t come packed with provisions for three days. Then there was the question of whether the heavy transports could leave, because the autoroutes were being closed off to truck traffic. And on top of it, the woman who was in charge of dispatching the STH trucks was at lunch. Do remember, this is France. Mealtimes are to be respected no matter what the crisis. Meanwhile, though, the snow was falling faster. The dispatcher was finally convinced to skip dessert, and a list of those wanting to leave was compiled. But the French ability to snatch chaos from the jaws of organization prevailed again, and the loading of horses turned into a typical mess. First come, first served. I could see this coming, and had Turfani packed up and headed to the parking lot within five minutes. No time for two trips, I dragged our trunk full of equipment in one hand and let Turfani pull me along with the other. We were an hour out of Deauville when the gendarmes started waiving trucks off to the side. Luckily, they let us and another horse transport behind us through. We survived a second roadblock a half-hour later, and made it back to Maisons-Laffitte in decent time, considering the circumstances.

Shinko, Timelord and George didn’t have it much easier on Friday night, with both trucks delayed for more than an hour by an accident further along the route.

All I can say is that in five weeks we head south to Cagnes sur Mer. That promises to be quite an expedition, too, but I’m definitely ready.

Turfani runs in the 1,900-meter handicap on Saturday, unfortunately in the top half, rather than the second division, of the race. She would have been perfectly placed in the second division, but after the cut she ended up bottom weight in the first. This is bad for a few reasons: I’ve had to change jockeys to accommodate the light weight of 52 kilos and the competition is much tougher here. In the second division, all the horses who were already eliminated and hold a priority entry got in, so the competition is much easier. I can’t do anything about it now, so we’ll have to make the best of it. Now we just need the snow to hold off so we can get there.

George, Timelord and Shinko will all hit the road Friday for Deauville. Timelord and George are in the same 1,900-meter claimer – we’re hoping for a dead heat for victory. That will be a bit of a stretch for George – it’s not the best entry for him, but as usual, there are way too many horses looking for a race and we have to take what comes. I’d have preferred him in the handicap on Saturday, but he was No. 110 on the list, so obviously would get eliminated. He is in great form at the moment and needs the run, so off we go. He is rated 26 and is up against horses in the 30s (including Timelord, who is rated 33 at the moment), but he is working well so you never know. Shinko, meanwhile, is top weight in his handicap, carrying a whopping 62 kilos. That said, bottom weight is 57.5 kilos, so it’s definitely a race for heavyweights. He has a good draw – No. 10 of 16, which will let him go to the lead on the outside. Greg Benoist is up, and he hasn’t won a race for me yet this year, so it’s time. I’m putting sheepskin cheek pieces on (the French call them “Australian blinkers”) just to remind him to get down to work. He’s had three very easy races with me to try to get a decent handicap mark (unsuccessfully) and now he needs to know it’s time to move.

Weather-wise, we’re in the deep freeze (like much of the rest of the Northern Hemisphere, from what I gather). We’ve been gritting our teeth and trudging down to the fibersand every day. This morning, it was minus 16 Centigrade down there, with the usual north wind whipping across the plain. It was not fun, but now we’ll get to see if it was all worth it.

Central France got a Chicago-style snowstorm yesterday afternoon, which started heavy and wet and then froze solid. The resulting chaos will be talked about for years to come. Drivers faced with even the slightest hill simply abandoned their cars and walked to…who knows where? High school gyms were turned into overnight refugee camps. My friend Louise was stuck for nine hours only about a dozen kilometers from home – so close and yet so far.

On the horse front, nothing was moving this morning, but the all-weather track finally opened for business at 11 a.m. The problem, of course, was getting there. Leaving the horses in their boxes was really not an option, so I did a quick triage of which horse absolutely had to work. Strictly Rhythm colicked last week, so she has to move. Priority. If Timelord doesn’t get out of his box, he will start spinning fast enough to dig a hole to China. Priority. Turfani gets a stiff if left standing around, but she can wait. George tied up the last time he had a day off – he has to go. Blessing Belle and Shinko have no health concerns, so they could have a day off, except that to leave them in for a day would be lethal for whoever had to ride them the next day. So I fired up the truck, and two by two, like Noah’s arc, we saddled them up and trucked them down to the fibersand. The solution is far from ideal – you can warm them up alright, but they never cool down properly because the don’t relax while they’re next to the gallop. But the alternative is worse, so off they go.

The next problem to solve is who goes with who. I decided to put Belle with Timelord for first lot. They both tried to dig a hole in the truck on the way, but beyond that things went pretty well. Next up were Turfani and Strictly Rhythm. Too perfectly behaved ladies compared with the first set. By that time, things were thawing enough to park the truck and ride out normally. Unfortunately, Philippe, my standby rider for Shinko, came limping into the yard to announce that he had blown a rib (or something like that) trying to set up a mash cooker at the yard across the street. His face had turned from its customary pink to a whiter shade of pale, so I knew he was hurting. That left me alone with Shinko and George to contend with. Since taking Shinko (aka the Equine Catapult) out alone would probably be suicidal, I opted for George. He’s not the most courageous of fellows on his own, but he is manageable. He was none too pleased, though, about the huge chunks of snow that were by that time falling off the trees. Nonetheless, we got the work done and came home together, which was the essential thing. That left Shinko with a day off. Tomorrow a thaw is predicted. I hope it’s true, because whoever rides Shinko tomorrow will appreciate a soft landing.

We’ve been dropped into a flash-freezer this week, and if the training center in Maisons-Laffitte wants to plug the whole in its budget deficit, it should start selling tickets to the spectacle down on the all-weather track rather than raise our gallop fees. With most of the tracks and trails impassable, every horse in town has no choice but to head down to the oval. It is 1,450 meters around, which is long enough to get some serious work done, but it is only about 2 meters wide, so at best you can gallop two abreast. There is no room for passing and no room for error. It is prefaced by two all-weather trotting rings. These days, the whole thing resembles a cross between the Barnum & Bailey Circus and O’hare Airport on the day before Thanksgiving without the benefit of an air-traffic controller.

If you hit it during a calm period, things work OK. People watch out for each other. You can warm up on the trotting ring and there’s sort of a cue to get onto to the main gallop. But as anyone who has lived in France knows, the French appetite for cues quickly turns into a mob mentality when there are more than a few people involved. Sort of like at the grocery store, when the woman of a certain age behind you edges ahead with a “oh, I’m just looking at the chewing gum” look, then she drops her shoulder, does the half-turn and miraculously is now in front of you like she’s been there the whole time. With riders busy trying to cut in line and a cold wind sweeping through from the north, the horses are all on their worst behavior. Yesterday, Belle was warming up calmly enough, but decided to get vertical just as we turned to head to the main track. I came off the side, fearful that she was going to turn over again (she has a bit of a history), and luckily there were a couple of people around to help. Today, we had just turned into the trotting ring when I heard a thump behind me; the next thing I knew, a riderless Hi Shinko was next to George, who thought he might take that moment to show how high he could jump, too. Shinko was quickly caught and Philippe remounted, once he got his breath back – he had the misfortune of landing on the frozen sand rather than the all-weather bit. Shinko continued to put on quite a rodeo even with the benefit of Phillippe, who stuck this time, so by the time we had him headed back toward the main track, a load of horses had cut in front of us and went on to hack canter. I yelled at Phillippe to go anyway; I didn’t want to be around to see what would happen if we didn’t get that horse galloped. I was behind him on George, and neither one of us were able to pull up our irons to ride a proper canter – both horses were jumping around too much to even consider it. So off we went, cowboy-style. Phillippe took off like a bullet and I knew I wouldn’t catch him for a decent head-to-head, plus there were too many other horses out on the track anyway. Shinko cleared the way like a bulldozer, and George and Timelord followed in the slipstream.

Turfani and Belle galloped the second lot, which was slightly calmer but not by much. After yesterday’s rearing, I had Seb meet me at the track with a lead rope. Once we trotted a warmup, he picked us up and made sure her front feet stayed on the ground getting onto the main track. Another string of horses had cut in front, but this time they were all over the track instead of in a line. Belle was rolling in her canter with Turfani behind. The problem with the all-weather surface is that you can’t hear the hoofbeats of anyone coming up behind you, so as we rolled up the backside, I just had to scream at the others and hope they would move. Belle’s gallop is straight as an arrow, but she is a huge orange filly who is not particularly maneuverable – think Airbus A380. Once she’s rolling, it’s best just to get out of her way. Eventually, people did, and we managed to get a decent canter, even if it wasn’t exactly what I wanted because there was never room for Turfani to get beside me.

We’re in for four more days of this, and it has now started to snow. At least the canters are out of the way for a few days, so now we can just keep everybody ticking over until the thaw comes, which is promised for Sunday. Until then, it’s fasten your seatbelts, because we’ve definitely entered a zone of turbulence.

Despite my best efforts, Hi Shinko got absolutely clobbered by the handicappers, who gave him a rating of 36 (about 80 on the British system). This means there is no race for him before Dec. 18, which means we have to manage to keep him down to a dull roar until then. Since his race last Sunday, he hasn’t left a grain of oats uneaten and can’t get enough work. Today, he chucked off his rider and lapped the training track a couple of times before we could catch him. The saddle had slipped onto his side (he’s such a round thing it’s almost impossible to get tack to stay put), so we re-saddled, threw the rider back up and off he went to do the work we planned. You’d think he’d have been a little tired, but there was no sign of that. I’ve already taken his feed down a liter and may have to take it down a little more, since we’re going into a deep freeze and I don’t know how much work we’re going to get done over the next week. Once the sand tracks freeze over, I’ll truck him down to the all-weather so he can let off steam there. For the moment, he reminds me of the old Meatloaf song: All revved up and no place to go.

Hi Shinko ran his third race in France on Sunday so can now enter handicaps, which is good news. He finished 5th of 14, again beaten only a couple of lengths and this time only nosed out of third place as two horses caught him just on the wire. The 5th is good, though, because hopefully it won’t draw too much attention from the handicappers and it still gave us a little check to pay the travel expenses down to Le Mans. It’s a nice little track down there, but the recent rain left the ground in horrible shape. We know Shinko doesn’t travel on that sort of ground, but needed the race and all things considered he did very well. He couldn’t blow out a candle after, even though they actually went quite fast. He’s come back fine and still kicking down the door for food. He could race tomorrow if there was something for him. As it is, he is entered in a handicap down in Marseilles just to get the rating – I don’t plan to actually run there but the best race for him coming up is for horses rated 29 and under in Deauville, and I’m afraid if I enter that race directly, we’ll get stuck with a rating of 30 or better and won’t get in. The waiting will be over when the weights are announced for Marseilles on Thursday morning.

The rest of the horses are gearing up for Deauville in December, too. Timelord seems back on track, and so does George, who is over his cough and just about ready to start cantering again. Actually, he decided he was ready to canter yesterday, when he popped me off in the training center and went for a few laps on his own before I could catch him. He seems no worse for wear. Blessing Belle is coming along nicely, and Turfani is all dressed up with nowhere to go, since there’s nothing for her before the 17th or so. Strictly Rhythm has settled in and will make her target race at the end of December.

We’ve also been busy in this off-season getting ready for the main flat season next year. Rendition is enjoying her break and will come back in mid-January, and word is she may be getting a little sister…deal in progress, so watch this space. The yearlings we already have, King Driver and Triple Tonic, are learning their lessons well up in Normandy; I plan to go have a check on them on Saturday. We’re also on the look-out for a good claimer, and with all that we should be pretty well-armed for next year.

Well, it looks like the Life at Ten incident is falling out of the news cycle, much to the relief, I’m sure, of Todd Pletcher, the Kentucky stewards and the Breeders’ Cup organization. The mare’s owner released a statement saying that no, the horse definitely should not have run, but no word on whether she stays with Pletcher. No word, either, on her current state of health and whether she will stay in training at all.

But on a brighter front, looks like my friends over at Betfair lost a court case in Australia that could cost them some money. Good on the Australians for having the balls to point out that running a racing industry carries an enormous cost, and that it is not OK for some parasitic betting exchange to leach off the spectacle for free. Actually, it is really too complimentary to refer to Betfair as a parasite, because an effective parasite won’t kill the host. Racing is in the death throes in England and Ireland, thanks in large part to Betfair and the bookies. (Are you listening, America? Betfair has its eye on you, too, and you’ve got too many problems of your own to solve without Betfair stepping in.) Bravo to France for keeping them out, thus ensuring that we are the only country in Europe where it makes economic sense to own a racehorse.

And last but not least, a little news from the yard. This being football season in America (as my husband reminds me every Sunday night), I will try to borrow a few terms from across the pond. Apologies if I’ve screwed it up somehow. On the active roster, we have  Hi Shinko, who will go to Le Mans on Sunday for his third race in France, which will qualify him for handicaps and then we can get serious. Email Exit (George) seems to have gotten over his cough and is on the comeback trail with an eye toward Deauville in early December. Tufani is working well and is just waiting for a decent race on the all-weather to stretch her legs, too, and Blessing Belle is coming back nicely after her time off to recover from her accident. Our new recruit, Strictly Rhythm, has a Deauville target at the end of December. Timelord has had a small setback but will also be ready for December.

On injured reserve we have Rendition, who is recovering from sore shins in Normandy and will be prepped for a debut in early spring, and Hard Way, who is recovering from his weird fractured vertebra and will have another scan in mid-January.

Recently drafted was King Driver, a very nice-looking Domedriver yearling who is now being backed in Normandy, and Triple Tonic, the full sister of the ill-fated Well Shuffled who is going for backing this week.

We’re still shopping for one or two new recruits, so watch this space. And I promise that’s the last time I try to borrow from football.

When a plane crashes, investigators often find that it is not a single error that brought the craft down, but rather a pyramid of mistakes that culminated in disaster. This model is often true for most big screw-ups, and certainly seemed in action in the case of the Life at Ten fiasco at the Breeders’ Cup.

For those of you who hadn’t been paying attention: Life at Ten, a mare trained by Todd Pletcher, turned out not to be fit to run the Ladies Classic (god, I cringe every time I write that name – sounds like a deodorant brand. Can’t we PLEASE change it back to the Distaff??). Apparently Pletcher knew – or at least strongly suspected – that something was wrong with the horse. He told the jockey. The jockey told ESPN, the network covering the races in the United States, that the horse didn’t feel right. Nobody told the vets or stewards and the horse ran the race – or didn’t. She broke from the gate and then immediately trailed off to lope around at little more than a hack canter. The jockey was praised for “doing the right thing” by not insisting on more when clearly his horse was having a problem.

There is plenty wrong here, but let’s work backwards. Johnny Velazquez, the jockey, did not do the right thing. From most accounts, the mare had tied up, which means that any move she made was causing more damage. I haven’t heard or read anything since that tells us what was really wrong with Life at Ten, so I don’t know for sure whether or not she tied up. But when a jockey senses his horse is not galloping properly, the only right thing to do is stop. Immediately. But even before it got that far, he should have notified the stewards or vets on duty that something appeared to be wrong. He apparently did not do that. Now let’s back up another step. Apparently, the horse was moving extremely badly before entering the gate – so much so that even casual viewers who knew nothing about horses suspected something was wrong. In full disclosure, I have not been able to find any video of the warm-up, so I don’t know how bad it was. But there were at least three vets stationed at the starting gate, not one of them paying attention. Back up again. An ESPN commentator who is a former jockey asked Velazquez about the horse, and Velazquez said she wasn’t moving right. This prompted an ESPN producer to phone the stewards and notify them that something may be amiss. The stewards decided to ignore the potential problem. And then back up one final, and most important, step. In the saddling enclosure, Pletcher told Velazquez the horse didn’t seem right.

Rules governing horse racing around the world vary somewhat (with the most glaring example being the panoply of medication allowed to be used on horses running in the United States) but there is one rule that is universal:  The buck stops with the trainer. No matter what happens to a horse, for better or worse, the trainer must take the ultimate responsibility. It is not permissible to blame the vets, the jockey, the stewards, the weather, the anything. That is why most of us have gray hair (those of us that still have hair) and a high alcohol tolerance.

After the race, Pletcher said his mare must have had a reaction to her Lasix shot. This is lame and wrong on so many levels it makes my stomach turn over. First of all, it points up Problem No. 1 in American racing: That this excuse can even exist. The Breeders’ Cup should take a first, bold step and ban all race-day medication in its races. The organization wants to call the Breeders’ Cup event the “World Championship” of thoroughbred racing. There is no way it will ever live up to that title as long as the usual race-day meds permitted across America are allowed in Breeders’ Cup races. If the Breeders’ Cup would take this step, it might encourage further change, like eliminating race-day medication in two-year-olds. American racing has to get itself on a serious methadone program and it has to start somewhere.

But back to Pletcher’s excuse.  Life at Ten ran 16 races before she was loaded in the gate at the Breeders’ Cup. Lasix was certainly not new to her. Pletcher hinted in some of his remarks that she had problems with Lasix before, but “not before a race,” meaning she was probably shot up with it for workouts, a common practice in American racing.  The injection of Lasix is usually administered about four hours before post time (during which time the horse’s kidneys are thrown into overdrive as it pees out about 20 kilos in body weight).  Although Todd Pletcher has more than 200 horses in training, he apparently had enough personal knowledge of this particular animal to realize she was not acting like a healthy horse when he saddled her. He chose to send her out to the track anyway.

Life at Ten was sent off second-favorite in the betting, meaning this whole affair costs punters millions. Those who were lucky enough to pick up on the ESPN feed could change their bets, but anyone out of range could not.

Various racing authorities in America are ducking this like a hot potato, which is their usual reaction to this sort of thing. The solution proposed by the chief steward in Kentucky is not to question the judgment of the jockey, trainer or vets involved but rather to ban comments by jockeys to broadcasters once the jockey is in the saddle. I’m not making this up. This harkens back to a similar event in France a few years back when Equidia, the horse racing channel, decided it would be fun to put microphones on a few trotting drivers during a race. Not long into the experiment, the mikes picked up what amounted to race-fixing as one leading driver exhorted another to close a hole and not let a horse through. “Don’t be an asshole,” the driver yelled, “close it up, close it up!” Rather than investigate the situation, stewards promptly banned the microphones.

It’s very frustrating to see the sport I love, and one that I completely changed my life to be a part of, continue to shoot itself in the foot. Every time an event like this happens, I keep thinking OK, now is finally the chance to make a change for the better. And every time I am wrong. I still score the French authorities WAY ahead of their American counterparts in terms of how to run the sport. Viva la France. At least Pletcher couldn’t get away with it over here.

Oh, and by the way: Goldikova and Zenyatta were stars. Jane Smiley was right on Mike Smith’s ride – the nose Zenyatta lost by equaled just a fraction of a second’s hesitation on the part of the jockey. My friend Jean-Paul Gallorini had a different take on the ride, though, and it bears mentioning. Rather than moving too late, he maintains that Smith moved too soon. Zenyatta wasn’t balanced coming through the turn, and that was when he was asking her to move up. Gallorini said that if Smith had balanced the horse before asking for the move, he would have won. Interesting. In any case, clearly Zenyatta should stay in training, as Goldikova will. This fantasy about her going off to make super-babies is nonsense. This is a racehorse, and she should be racing. She is not old. She started her career late. Let her run – it’s clearly what she was born to do.