More On Mandella And Crown Of Thorns

Could the injury to Crown of Thorns have been avoided by rearranging the workout schematic? I'll come back to this and perhaps some other injured Derby horses as the blog proceeds to concluding the topic "how conventional training causes injuries." For now I'll simply give the opinion that yes, probably had Mandella done things differently he'd have avoided this particular injury. I'll go further to say that this is another training job--and we know how hard Mandella must have been trying with this horse, and how well motivated--that on the surface looks ok, but on closer scanning is just downright negligent. What happened to the horse is exactly what you'd expect. That can be said of most of the them, unfortunately.

Yet, we'll see whether this year's Derby class remains as healthy as a year ago. I noticed a very definite improvement in training a last year and the lack of injuries in the usual horrific percentages confirmed this. Nafzger led the way of course, but, as much as I bad mouthed Larry Jones and also Asmussen, both of their horses made it through. Blind luck or training? More will tell this year.

Meanwhile today's Bloodhorse provides even more fodder for the blog. Consider:

"Garrett Gomez, David Flores, and former rider Gary Steven on the jockey panel all praised the synthetic surface, despite the glitches.

My body has felt tremendously better, said Gomez. They really help with wear and tear on our bodies.

Stevens said that many of his 14 knee surgeries during his career occurred due to jarring or hard, sealed or inconsistent dirt tracks."

Nice to see Hall of Fame jocks confirm what I've posted about concussion at speed, that the rider can feel it, that it jars the rider, and so we may imagine what it does to the fragile leg bones of the horse.

I'll try to conclude next post what I believe we have to do in terms of training speed to avoid the injury to Crown of Thorns, or worse.

Training: About 14 degrees this morning, and a couple of inches of snow coming in. But, this is it. Winter's over and we're on the up and up from here on in. Good for the snow. I can run them on top of the snow tomorrow.