Thoughts on the Haskell

Michael Iavarone and Rick Dutrow must be breathing again after Big Brown, no doubt, caused them to hold their breaths down the stretch in the Haskell yesterday. I watched it and it wasn't pretty--in fact it was pretty bad. Coal Play gave him a run for his money and ran like a race horse. Big Brown veered way wide and finished in the middle of the track, somehow only getting into his mythical "next" gear within sight of the finish line.

This is NOT the same horse that won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness so effortlessly. This is a horse that is finished. Sore feet. Sore muscles. Sore back. Who knows? But if nothing else, yesterday's demonstration was a clear indication that it was not training and not riding that made Big Brown win the first two legs of the Triple Crown. It was whatever else they shot into him and probably put in his food. And you can't tell me it didn't make a difference.

Big Brown is a mediocre race horse that was shot full of chemicals to make him appear to be a superstar. Take away those chemicals and he seemed way outclassed in a race that should have been a romp in the park.

Make no mistake about it--Dutrow is not doing anything that most in the business do. It's just that he now has to race clean or lose the gig training for Iavarone and partners. And I don't think he wants to put his career on the line with Big Brown ever again. So my guess is that they won't run him in the Travers , much less the Breeder's Cup--which is drug free, by the way, and retire him to stud to sire more horses with problematic feet.

There was a fascinating article in The Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday about H. Lee Sweeney, chairman of the physiology department at Penn's medical school. His research into muscular dystrophy involves the injection of synthetic genes. Apparently after he gave a talk about his work in Beijing, he was invited by Chinese scientists to consult on how to detect the presence of these genes in athletes. You see, "for many years, Sweeney had warned of potential performance enhancing applications of his work for human athletes."

Luckily, while the injection of synthetic genes in mice has resulted in stronger legs, it has proved to be much more difficult to make the same transfer in humans. In fact, he assured the Chinese officials that no American athletes in this year's Olympics have benefited from his work. But Sweeney does think that his research "could transfer to a sport such as horse racing." In fact, he was contacted by an Australian breeder several years ago.

The specific techniques involved with Sweeney's work are so advanced that there are few people in the world who can replicate it, but the point is, there's always somebody willing to try, if, as Sweeney notes, "the money is right." And don't you know that somebody seems to be connected to horse racing.

So excuse me for being cynical but I think we saw what happens when an average racehorse is synthetically manipulated into a "super" one and then what happens when those magic pills go away.