the excuse for eight belles

[click images]

Native Dancer
1952 and 1954 Horse of the Year
Earnings: $785,240 ($5.3 million in 2002 dollars)

Nicknamed the "Grey Ghost," Native Dancer lost only one of his 22 career races, an upset to Dark Star in the 1953 Kentucky Derby. He became the nation's first racing idol on television, and even made the cover of Time magazine.

I think there is merit in this argument, but there simply is no getting around the fact that we're racing them too young. Horse's bones are not solid and completely formed until they are six, and Eight Belles was entirely too big too fast for anything as taxing as the Kentucky Derby, irrespective of unsoundness in her pedigree.

Compare the most aptly-named race horse in history, John Henry:

He was gelded both for his orneriness as well as his lack of breeding. A Golden Chance Farm foal, John Henry was from breeding that might best be described as plebeian. His sire, Ole Bob Bowers, once sold for just $900 and was not in much demand by breeders. His dam, Once Double, was an undistinguished runner and producer, but was sired by Double Jay, a brilliantly fast graded stakes race winner who had proven to be a useful broodmare sire.

John Henry became the first horse to win a million-dollar race, the Inaugural Arlington Million, retired after many years of racing, winning more money than any horse in history to that time, finally dying at the age of 32.

And it appears that Homie and I are not the only ones contemplating strengthening the breed:

The many lines that branch out from Native Dancer include names that fairly light up a yearling catalogue page and bring the highest prices, and Parker sees their presence and influence so much on the rise -- so much Northern Dancer and Raise a Native, so much Danzig and Danehill, so much Nureyev and Sadler's Wells, so much Storm Cat and Storm Bird -- that she fears a gene pool grown narrow and dry, one in which it will be impossible to find a sound, viable outcross unless the grand pooh-bahs open up The American Stud Book, which has been closed to anything but purebred thoroughbreds for more than 100 years.

"You think The Jockey Club is going to allow something like that?" she asked. "Not hardly. What you have to deal with is what's left, and what's left is very little."

They damn well should open the stud book! Since Arabians have been as polluted by commercial breeding as Thoroughbreds, I do seriously wish we would turn to the other foundation line, the Turkoman line, to get rid of this barrel-bodied-toothpick-legged mess we've made of the breed.

Hang tough, I'll dig you up a couple pictures and links to strengthen my case... no... better still, you should google "Turkoman horse" and "Akhal-Teke"... and go to the images yourself....

As soon as we've stopped fascism in America, averted WWIII, and cured the CO2 problem, we should mob The Jockey Club to save the Thoroughbred line from the human greed and stupidity that has ruined it....

I'm rooting for Big Brown to win and to make it out alive on Saturday. Can't help it.