A champion until the end
The first flowers arrived on the morning after the Preakness, a breezy and sunlit springtime Sunday that turned the rolling hills a brilliant shade of green in Pennsylvania horse country south of Philadelphia. Signs were hung from the wooden fence rails outside the New Bolton Center, where Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro was being treated for what surgeons would soon call "catastrophic'' injuries to his right hind leg. A family arrived with a bunch of carrots and asked that they be given to the horse.
The love never ceased. When May turned to June and then June to July and it appeared that Barbaro might steadily be winning a battle for survival that surgeon Dr. Dean Richardson called, from the very beginning, "a coin toss,'' the tokens came less frequently. It was as if the public felt the big horse no longer needed its care because he was doing so well on his own.
But in the second week of July, when Barbaro developed a terrible case of laminitis in his left hind foot -- the good one -- the flowers again began piling up at the hospital. After Christmas he appeared to be doing better, but he suffered a severe setback last week when he developed an abscess in his right hind foot and had to undergo another surgery. The pain was too much for the horse to bear. When he was euthanized on Monday, a profound sadness fell across the sport, and far beyond, touching humans in ways they could not explain.
His passing can be measured in many ways. The sport lost a giant talent who might have won the Triple Crown (he might, in fact, have dominated the Triple Crown; more on that later). It lost a sire whose impact might have been felt for many generations to follow. It lost a champion whose class and bravery -- before and after his injury -- were inspiring and lent a visceral touch to a sport that is rapidly becoming disconnected from human emotions.
His passing, upon further review, is immeasurable.
I first watched him run in a small video box on the desktop of the Apple laptop on which I'm writing these words, winning the Florida Derby. The book on Barbaro was that he was a front-runner who would wilt when pressed on the lead. On that day, he was pressed nearly to the wire by Sharp Humor and won the race. Granted, Sharp Humor was just a tough sprinter stretching out, but still....
Three weeks later I met with Michael Matz, Barbaro's trainer, in a spotless tack room at Delaware Park race track. We talked about Matz's epic history. As the survivor and hero in a 1989 plane crash. As an Olympic medalist in 1996. And we talked about Barbaro. I could not have imagined that less than nine months later, Barbaro would be humanely destroyed less than half an hour away. Of course, that is a reality of horse racing. Sometimes horses are injured and sometimes they cannot be saved.
Three weeks before the Kentucky Derby, as I sat and wrote about Matz, my cell phone chirped. On the other end was Sports Illustrated photographer Bill Frakes, who was shooting the pictures that would accompany my story. "Have you seen this horse?'' Frakes asked. I had not.
"`Wait until you do,'' said Frakes. Five days before the Derby I was walking the Churchill Downs backstretch and passed Matz, who was riding alongside Barbaro and exercise rider/assistant trainer Peter Brette. Frakes was right. What a majestic animal. There are beautiful horses who cannot run fast; we already knew that Barbaro was fast and now to see him in the flesh was breathtaking.
Barbaro won the Kentucky Derby in the manner of an athlete who is evolved beyond his peers. He cut a massive, striking pose in the Derby paddock before the race, taller and more muscled than the others in the race. The breeding industry buzz had been that Barbaro would one day do his best running on the grass. As Barbaro circled the Churchill paddock, Jill Baffert, the wife of three-time Derby-winning trainer Bob Baffert, turned to her husband and said, "You better hope he's a grass horse.''
He might have been, but he was brilliant on dirt. He won the Kentucky Derby by six lengths without feeling jockey Edgar Prado's whip. Eight days later I talked with Prado in the jocks' cafeteria at Belmont Park, and he could scarcely find the words to describe the feel of sitting on Barbaro's back.
Matz lightened up on Barbaro leading to the Preakness, until putting one stiff, short breeze into him two days before the race. Barbaro was so full of himself that Matz had to gallop him on the morning of the Preakness, just to take the edge off.
There are very wise handicappers who suggest that Bernardini would have beaten Barbaro in the Preakness. The absolute and obvious truth is that we will never know, but that is a towering presumption. Barbaro never lost a race. He was dominant in the Kentucky Derby and razor sharp before the Preakness. It is hard for me to envision him losing. Perhaps I would have felt differently if Bernardini had proven himself a great racehorse, which he did not.
Yet this is the point, is it not?
We can debate forever why we feel pain at losing Barbaro. There is a significant lobby out there that despises the fact that horses are bred to race. (Trust me, I have heard from this lobby). It is a fair point.
For me, pain came from the other side of that same coin and it hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks at the Preakness. In the minutes before the race, I stood with owners Roy and Gretchen Jackson on the infield grass at Pimlico, so close that I could have reached out and patted Barbaro on his forehead (which I did not). He was stunningly ready to race, a mass of barely contained muscle and veins. (Maybe of all that energy signified something more ominous; we'll never know that either).
Moments later I stood on the Pimlico dirt as track attendants and veterinarians tried to steady Barbaro on three legs. The magnificent horse tossed his head about and tried to break free. All I could think was: He wants to race. I could feel a huge lump in my throat. Barbaro was bred to run and couldn't understand now why he was being restrained from doing so.
Now that he is gone, there is another sort of sadness altogether, a sadness at never learning what Barbaro might have done. He has a place in history. No horse has ever won the Derby and broken down in the Preakness so publicly and so sadly.
In a much larger sense, Barbaro leaves that deepest of empty wells, of greatness never fulfilled. Many wise people thought he would win the Triple Crown, ending a drought that is approaching three decades. He might have run a memorable Preakness and few doubted that he would have been nearly unbeatable in the Belmont, with his long, swift stride that it seemed he could carry forever.
On June 9, 1973, Secretariat won the Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths in the untouchable time of two minutes, 24 seconds. People of many ages can tell you that as Big Red opened 15 lengths on the turn, track announcer Chic Anderson intoned, "He is moving like a tremendous machine.'' Barbaro might have given us another moment like that.
We will never know and that will always pain us most.
I found this article on SI.com, and I thought I got the citation in it, but I guess I missed it. This author seriously got it right, though. Watching the races this year will definitely sadden me.