Big Brown loses the Belmont Stakes and was eased to finish last - something we did not expect.

Did Big Brown bleed during this grueling mile and a half race on the hottest day in history of Elmont, New York?

Big Brown loses the Belmont Stakes to the surprise of many so much so that Nick’s win was rather overshadowed.

 

Was it the quarter crack that cost Big Brown his Triple Crown?  Was it the steroids or is it the practice of using so many drugs in the horse racing game.  In the old days horses were not given steroids, Bute, lasix and did not have their ankles injected with cortisone as a quick fix for soreness.

Big Brown, the fabulous horse that had the best chance for winning the Triple Crown since Pleasant Colony, lost his chance during the Belmont Stakes held at Belmont park race track in Elmont, New York today.

Was it the heat that prevented this horse from winning?  As I write this the Veterinarians are checking out what exactly happened to Big Brown, at the Belmont Stakes, a race for for 3 years old at a mile and a half.

It could easily have been a bleeding problem where the horse's blood pressure rises and then the horse will bleed in the nose.  In effect, a nose bleed.  This is not life threatening but it prevents the horse from running because with blood in his nose he cannot breath and get the oxygen he needs for a full out run.  Jockey's know this and if a horse has bled, they are usually eased.  Typically when this happens you will notice next time the horse races, he has been given the drug Lasix, a drug for high blood pressure.

Kent Desormeaux did the best thing for a horse in trouble and eased him when he knew he had no horse left and was out of the running.  Kent is a class act.  If the young jockey on Eight Belles had been paying attention, he would have eased his horse too.

Big Brown and Big Brown’s sire are know for getting quarter cracks in their hooves.  They can be so severe that they can run from the top of the hoof, where the hair of the leg meets the hoof all the way down to the sole of the foot.  These can be extremely painful if they are severe enough.  Big Brown's connections said that that the quarter crack was tiny, at only 5/8 of an inch and this kind of minor injury should not have hurt his chances in the Belmont Stakes.

Nick Zito's horse Da' Tara won the race by lengths in hand.  Congratulations to Nick.  He really knows what he's doing with horses.   Da' Tara had a 92 Beyer rating.  His lightly raced horse won the race and I believe the practice of running horses at two years old is stupid.  2 year old horses are not grown.  They are called "babies" on the backstretch.  Their bodies will not mature until they are four years old.  So it is silly to race a horse at two.  Usually any two year old champion cannot be found winning in their three year old campaigns.

Even at three years old, which is the age for the Triple Crown races, horses are not fully developed.  They knees have not stopped growing so it takes a spectacular animal to win the triple crown and I believe the use of drugs have diluted the gene pool so much that horses cannot compete without drugs and that is sad.  Horse Racing has got to stop the use of drugs so that the strong horse who can win without drugs can again stand at stud and produce colts and filly's that can win the Triple crown without the use of drugs.

"If you don't wait on them they'll make you wait" (Woody Stevens)
 

Big Brown wins the Haskell in pedestrian time.

When I first saw big brown come onto the track I noticed how there was not an once of fat on this horse.  He almost looked over trained. 

I was hoping he would redeem himself but I did see a little problem on the turn where he seems not to travel as well on his left lead.  I wonder if that foot/knee/whatever is bothering him?

As he turned into the stretch and changed leads he looked better and did go on to win but not convincingly and not handily.  He didn't beat top notch horses in this race and the time was not a record and not impressive.

I do not know what has gone wrong with this horse but something is off.

It also bothers me that this horse which has a propensity for quarter cracks, as did his sire, goes to stud to sire more horses with a tendency to get quarter cracks.  If I was breeding my mare to this horse I would certainly pick a bottom line with extremely tough feet and ankles.

In fact I would not breed to this horse.  The gene for quarter cracks in this horses top line is scary and who needs the extra aggravation anyway.

I was glad Big Brown won, mostly for the horse  and Kent Desormeaux.  It was never his fault that the horse did not win the Belmont.  In fact I applaud him for easing a horse who obviously had a problem and he felt it and pulled him up.  Sure it made Rick Dutrow Jr. look like a fool and the connections embarrassed but he saved the horse.

Jocks know when something is wrong and unlike that jockey on Eight Belles, he did not hesitate to pull up a horse with a problem even if it could have made him look bad.  In my eyes, Kent is the class act and I'm glad for him today with this win.

My advice to anyone thinking of breeding to this horse is to be very careful of which mare you choose.  Breeding back problems does not make them better.  It just keeps bad genes and bad hoof problems in the gene pool and that is not something horse racing needs now.
 

Horse racing needs to get the horses without class (those who must use drugs to run) out of the competition.  We need to clean up the gene pool and have only the strongest horses making the strongest babies for the future of horse racing.

Winning time for the 1 1/8 miles was 1:48 1/5.

Big Brown trainer pins blame on jockey.

NEW YORK (AP)—Trainer Rick Dutrow Jr. still blames Kent Desormeaux for Big Brown’s stunning last-place finish in the Belmont Stakes, but he wouldn’t object to the jockey riding the horse in his next race.

The decision of whether to change jockeys is up to co-owner Michael Iavarone, Dutrow said.

“I don’t want to hurt anyone, especially Kent,” Dutrow told The Associated Press on Tuesday morning in his barn at Aqueduct. “But I still don’t understand what happened. I don’t see the horse with a problem, so I have to direct my attention toward the ride. That’s all I can come up with.”

With Big Brown trying to become the first Triple Crown champion in 30 years after dominant wins in the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, Desormeaux eased up the unbeaten colt with a quarter-mile remaining in the Belmont on Saturday.

“I had no horse. He was empty,” Desormeaux said after the race.

Dutrow insisted Tuesday he had found nothing wrong with Big Brown.

“Maybe next week if something starts going wrong with the horse, then I’ll understand everything,” he said.

Dutrow added: “As long as the horse stays the way that I see him right now, then things are just going to keep building up for me to know that it was the ride that did him in.”

He said he hadn’t spoken to Desormeaux, but “if he calls me I’ll talk to him, sure.”

If Big Brown is healthy, the plan is for him to run next in the Travers Stakes on Aug. 23 at Saratoga.

Dutrow had no regrets about his bombastic proclamation that Big Brown clinching the Triple Crown was a “foregone conclusion.”

“It’s not like I’m going to go and cry in the corner,” he said as he prepared for several of his horses to run Wednesday at Aqueduct. “I’ve got plenty to do here.”

As Reported by sportsillustrated.cnn.com

They will run another major horse race on Saturday: The 133rd Preakness in Baltimore. This will come 14 days after Eight Belles' awful breakdown more than quarter mile past the finish line of the Kentucky Derby. There have been hundreds of races run since the Derby, at tracks across the nation, but in the vast majority of cases, only a few people were watching. Millions will be watching Saturday.

This is a good thing for racing, and not just because many of those millions will be feeling precisely what I am feeling as I stand by the rail at Pimlico Race Course: Just get around the track alive and ambulatory. (It's a lousy feeling.) From a journalist's standpoint, there are only a few events that induce galloping butterflies just before the start: A heavyweight fight, a 100-meter dash, a horse race; events whose outcome will be -- or in some cases, could be -- decided almost instantly. A journalist prepares days on end to write about the event and it's suddenly over and then one reacts. The NCAA men's basketball championship game takes two hours, with countless ebbs and flows. The Derby starts ... and it's over.

These days there is an altogether differing feeling at the start of a horse race. I could toss off a human metaphor here (think Super Bowl, catastrophic injuries), but I would get flamed in comments because horses are not humans. And that's totally fair. Horses are not humans. I'll let it go at this: Too many major horse races have ended lately with at least one of the participants getting a memorial fund named after him or her.

But to repeat: The swiftness with which the Preakness comes around is a good thing for racing. Allow me to self-reference here. In last week's Sports Illustrated story about the Derby, I wrote the following at the end of the piece: "... Now it is Big Brown's turn to try to make history. To erase the memory of a fallen filly. To elevate the sport.''

Several e-mailers to the magazine took issue with my use of the verb "erase.'' As in, how could I ask that we forget Eight Belles, a majestic and powerful dark gray filly? I get that. Maybe I should have written, "Erase the image of a fallen filly,'' and that would have been better understood. But it's basically the same idea. The point is this: Racing needs to move forward and quickly. And that encompasses everything that goes with moving on, including learning from Eight Belles and making whatever changes can be made.

But it's deeply important that the sport put itself back on the public stage again, and quickly, and in that way, the calendar is kind. The Preakness always comes two weeks after the Derby. (This scheduling has come under fire as being potentially injurious to our current crop of racehorses, diminished as they are in toughness and pumped full of legal medication; another fair point).

The Belmont Stakes was run today.  Click here to read about the crushing loss by Big Brown