Closing The Book On Big Brown?

"To have is to have however men do catch".

(from Mr. S.)

What happened to Big Brown? Heat, hooves, Winstrol, injury,training, rider, or simply a bad day? The most reasonable conclusions seems exactly what Desormeaux said. KD "had no horse" because Big Brown simply ran out of gas.

Speculate of course why BB hit the wall. I'd written in my 6/5 post questioning BB's fitness and outlining his training what anyone would conclude: "possibly Dutrow might have/has got a problem." My Belmont day post speculated that BB was barely on the edge of being able to make it all the way around but that his talent would prevail.

I reached this conclusion due to my contempt for the training of the other horses in the field. On paper BB's training looked the same as the others. I'd omitted consideration of the Winstrol factor, and failed to watch the Barbaro stakes from Preakness day that showed the developing monster named D'Tara.

You'd have to ride a horse to fully understand a horse pooping out. When you're going along at full speed there's wind noise that prevents you from fully hearing the horse's breathing, but the rider monitors the breathing by making mental note of the performance. When the performance starts to fade the rider pays very close attention to the breathing factor and you can generally feel the horse's breathing struggling in this circumstance despite the wind. When you then pull up the struggling horse(and wind noise reduces) you can hear the breathing as impaired to totally blocked. The horse is unable to get its air.

Big Brown had to be in this state or very near it rounding the quarter pole. KD and any jockey would understand that and that the race was over. KD failed to fully articulate probably because his formost concern was possible fracture.

While BB's training would be the primary problem and cause, there were other contributing factors. I'd think the clodhopper front hoofs that they failed to re-shoe pre-race hardly helped on the deep surface and contributed to accumulating fatigue. It's also possible the horse was distracted by mild pain associated with his quarter crack--I questioned why they would put composite over the laces when Ian McKinley's own videos show that you remove the laces prior to the patch, and that the method used might have pressed the wire laces into the laminae. Dutrow left the shoeing up to the experts, and as often happens in such cases, experts are other than trainers, and they thus make questionable decisions. (Recall that Barbaro was fine till they called in Dr. Scott ___ to rewrap.). And finally, of course, the big horse-hot day factor.

Will BB will be back? The low life Dutrow (normally) trains harder and more intelligently (from what I can tell) than most of his competitors. Given what Dutrow did with the horse after the Derby I fear for the safety of the horse, and would just as soon he be retired.

Training:
Wed. 6/11 Riderless with both horses, warm up + 6 x 3f at :15s with some spurting. Art for second consecutive night lost his left rear show which has very little holding it on at this point. Need to equilox, but it's too wet. We're without stalls. Art trotted under tack with 200 yds of gallop. The wet weather is hindering our galloping. Rod walked 8 min. under tack.