Lentenor, now a yearling, is a full brother to 2006 Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro.

Story By Amy Wilson
awilson1@herald-leader.com

The last time the cameras were on this newly foaled colt, he was all legs and simply could not believe how much spring he was getting out of them.

Now, this full brother of Barbaro is a yearling, and he stands for the camera like the young thoroughbred male he is, behaving fine but wishing he was somewhere else, like out in that empty impossibly green paddock running with his buds.

Still, his heritage tells him to stand and let others take a look. That is their job. His job is only beginning.

The newly named Lentenor, last year’s son of LaVille Rouge by Dynaformer, doesn’t know it’s Derby Week. Or that he is full brother to a legend that had every gift but for that one step.

He’s just this yearling out at Mill Ridge Farm, owned by Roy and Gretchen Jackson, the same family who let Barbaro live as long and as well as he did.

For now, says Mill Ridge general manager Headley Bell, Lentenor’s job is like every other one of the 3,500 foals born in Kentucky last year — to “grow and play like the children they are.”

Every day after lunch, come rain or shine, he is let out of his stall with a dozen other promising yearlings and plays through the night before being reluctantly asked to come in for breakfast.

There, he’s examined for nicks or strains, fed again and allowed to patiently pace until afternoon rolls around when and his cohorts are taken individually to the paddock and let
go. No one pays much attention to who is shoving whom or who is fastest around the far tree.

The homestretch, for now, is something Lentenor does only when he gets up from a late evening nap.

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Below is the original video of Lentenor from April 2007, born only days before the Kentucky Derby.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

BARBARO LOST HIS LIFE, WON MANY HEARTS

By Amy Wilson
awilson1@herald-leader.com
Editor’s note: The original video of Lentenor above was produced in conjunction with the following story, published in the Lexington Herald-Leader on April 29, 2007. Barbaro, the 2006 Kentucky Derby winner, was euthanized on Jan. 29, 2007.

Here was the presumed heir to the Triple Crown who only two weeks earlier had run the best Kentucky Derby in over half a century. It wasn’t just the die-hard racing fans who were electric with joy, it was the sometime racing fans who gathered around the TV, the marginally intrigued watching from sports bars, and parents wanting their children to witness history telling their 8-year-olds to “watch this.

“They watch as Barbaro, so eager to further his own legend, bolts from the gate early. They watch, too, when he finally is allowed to fly, to quickly falter and be forced to stop by jockey Edgar Prado, who has felt in his own bones the shattering of the horse’s right hind leg in the first seconds of the 2006 Preakness.

Greg Avioli, spokesman for the National Thoroughbred Racing Association, sees this moment as a potential tipping point when the general public — the one who watches three races a year but on whom the continued financial health of the industry depends — could have turned away in disgust.

“For Barbaro not to come away alive would have been horrendous,” says Avioli. “It would have driven some from the game forever.”

The very future of American thoroughbred racing then hangs in the balance of what comes next.

Dr. Larry Bramlage was watching Barbaro through his binoculars. Bramlage, a veterinary surgeon with Rood & Riddle, is already in contact with the vets in the ambulance headed toward Barbaro. He takes off from his position at the finish line, running toward the hobbled horse, even as he is talking to vets in a stall being readied for Barbaro. He is the American Association of Equine Professionals’ vet on call at every Triple Crown race.

He sees a horse that can be helped.

“The injury hadn’t broken the skin,” he says. “We immediately saw the opportunity for implants.”

It is hard to watch horses’ bodies fail. In the 1990 Breeders’ Cup Distaff, the year’s outstanding 3-year-old filly falters at the 16th pole. Go For Wand’s right front ankle has splintered, and her momentum forces her to fall forward onto the track, throwing her jockey.

It gets worse. Mortally wounded, she rises valiantly from the dirt and runs as best she can to finish the race. The audience gasps, with a stark realization of the creature’s indomitable will, that she is running and dying at the same time.

It is a horse lover’s worst heartbreak. It is the horse racing industry’s worst nightmare.

It had been 15 years since another magnificent filly named Ruffian had been euthanized a day after her own hideous, blood-drenched fall in a nationally televised match race. So the industry knew there would always be another catastrophe. It was long past time to prepare for it.

With Go For Wand’s death, there had been too little real information, too much filling of air time with panicky speculation and bad information. So a Newsroom Guide to Thoroughbred Racing was drafted, says NTRA chief executive Alex Waldrop. It was designed to prepare the media to deal with any on-track crisis by detailing the workings of the horse’s muscular and skeletal systems and talking about applications of veterinary science. Then the NTRA communications department got pro-active, scheduling meetings with TV production teams and newspaper reporters who were new to horse racing.

Shortly thereafter, in 1993, the American Association of Equine Professionals began its on-call program, the one Bramlage is a vital part of. At every major horse race, a vet is now on hand to talk to reporters immediately if a breakdown occurs.

Horse racing carries on, getting public image boosts from movies such as Seabiscuit and Dreamer. It gets public attention with the likable stories of winners like Funny Cide, Smarty Jones and Afleet Alex.

Then Barbaro blows away the field at the Derby, and no one sees what’s looming at the Preakness.

But the industry is ready.

It is also lucky. Barbaro is the perfect horse patient.

He is calm from the minute he is hurt. Barbaro, says Keeneland president Nick Nicholson, speaks to every critic who thinks the industry is cruel and uncaring because at that most terrible of moments, when Barbaro’s leg was shattered and he, like every other prey animal, wanted to flee, he let Edgar Prado help him. He then went willingly to the stall, never doing anything to thwart his caregivers.

Nicholson said that behavior came from a combination of all those who handled him as a baby, those who weaned him and saddled him, those who got up on him and those who groomed him. Every step ever taken for him prepared him for that horrible moment.

“Barbaro,” says Russell Williams of the American Horse Council, “was what everybody thought we were looking for. A Triple Crown winner. If he’d done that, he would have enlivened the business. But he does better than that. He goes out there and, without trying, raises the consciousness of the general public to how much we truly love the horses we own.”

Barbaro, who would have celebrated his fourth birthday today, lives long enough to make fans of everyone.

If he had died at Pimlico, the chance to fall in love with him would have been lost. The public, instead, watches for eight months as the story unfolds of a brave horse, loving owners and a brilliant (not to mention telegenic) doctor. They get to read the scads of supportive letters sent to Barbaro’s hospital stall at the New Bolton Center at the University of Pennsylvania. They can almost smell the bouquets of flowers and delight in the crates of get-well carrots. They learn about horse anatomy and about the debilitating laminitis, a separation of the hoof wall from the foot bone. They learn that nothing can be done to cure it.

Barbaro is owned by Roy and Gretchen Jackson, who already have professed deep love for him. Money, as an extension of their love, is no object in his care. His trainer, Michael Matz, is beyond reproach. His Derby jockey visits him in the hospital. His doctor, big and broad and smart, professes a deep attachment to his patient.

They almost convince the public they can will Barbaro to live.

His eight months are, reports Richardson, full of good days. Matz tells how Barbaro loved to wait for the school buses to go by on the road. He’d graze and wait, then pick up his head as the kids rode by and, invariably, waved for his pleasure.

The public cries, or least notes on Jan. 29, when he is finally deemed to be in pain they cannot fix and, so, mercifully relieve him of it forever.

As much as it might show the world that the industry loves its voiceless employees, it also showed the horse industry that the public is watching.

“The telling thing,” says Sean Clancy, author of Barbaro: The Horse Who Captured America’s Heart, “is the amount of people who have talked to me and e-mailed me and said, ‘Now I understand why they couldn’t save Ruffian, now I forgive them for not saving her.’ It’s been — what? — 33 years they’ve held that grudge.”

And they have now let it go.

Jeannie Edwards, ESPN’s horse racing reporter, says what impressed the industry with Barbaro is “that they found out that no one out there thinks these are just numbers running around in a circle.

“What the industry was really surprised by was the length of Barbaro’s reach.”

Because the public is watching so intently for those eight months, the industry’s critics have an opportunity, too.

Debbie Leahy, director of captive animal and entertainment issues for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, says the organization got a large increase of daily phone calls and e-mails during the eight-month Barbaro ordeal, all concerned about his plight and his prolonged suffering for financial gain.

PETA wrote editorials for newspapers and appeared frequently to question the industry’s overbreeding, its dependence on immature and fragile horses to carry the racing burden and its penchant for administering pain-killing drugs to injured horses.

Barbaro’s owners’ emphasis on speed over stability, Leahy says, was evident and self-damning, making them no better than any other owner out there.

There has been no better forum, Leahy says, to remind the public that racehorses still die on tracks.

The best available data suggest that, on average, more than one horse per day is, as the industry likes to say, “humanely destroyed.” These deaths are swift and are the result of hard decisions made by owners and trainers who do not have the money to do for their animals what was done for Barbaro.

Because the public is still watching, the Barbaro legacy is still being written.

The question of how many horses are put down annually after suffering severe injury on the track is hard to nail down and even harder to defend. But there is new industry momentum for creating nationwide and uniform system of reporting track injuries. They push as well for pre-race testing by a method known as nuclear scintigraphy, which can show areas of deep bone weakness and inflammation that indicate an increased chance of imminent breakdown.

In October 2006, the Jockey Club held a multi-day, multi-disciplinary conference titled “The Welfare and Safety of the Racehorse Summit.” Its participants discussed, among other things, the poor durability of the breed, trainers who put their horses at risk, poor barn design relative to respiratory disease and horse stress, misuse of the whip, and racehorse attrition from excessive use of medications.

Post-Barbaro, the Jacksons are elevated such that they are now successful public representatives for many causes, including asking for congressional action against horse slaughter. They are listened to.

Synthetic track, while certainly in play before Barbaro’s birth, has now been mandated in at least one state — California — by the beginning of next year. Research into the debilitating ailment laminitis is getting renewed funding through the Barbaro Foundation.

And post-Barbaro, a Lexington horse farm is getting unusual media attention.

Nine days ago, in a Mill Ridge Farm foaling barn off Bowman Mill’s Road, Barbaro’s mama, La Ville Rouge, brought forth another colt. His daddy, who is also Barbaro’s daddy, is the magnificent sire Dynaformer.

The Jacksons, who own the mother and the independent-minded colt, were delighted, of course, at their new 148-pound bundle of legs and potential. Matz, Barbaro’s trainer, dropped in on that first day to see the baby take its first confident wobble around the paddock with mom. It’s never too early to look. It’s never too early to notice how the brothers share a bearing, a high-step and a personality.

It is not really too early to be thinking ahead. The horse racing industry is always thinking ahead to the next great horse.

The Jacksons, explains their advisor Headley Bell, do not expect the baby to fill the void left by Barbaro.

“It is a turning of the page,” he says.

At Mill Ridge Farm, life after Barbaro also includes another full brother, Nicanor, who is a yearling and will be the first to get the full-bore comparative sibling scrutiny.

Will the world watch them? Will the world hold its breath when they bolt from the gate?

Nothing is ever sure in horse racing, except maybe that.</p>

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