JUST When You Start to Like Them
Pays to Dream on the outside lives up to his name (Bud Morton)
They’re retired with an injury!
Pays to Dream, the long shot that came on to surprise in the Dixie and then ran a game third in the Manhattan was retired with a fracture. Ugh is all I can say to that, and of course, get well soon!
Here’s his eye popping run in the Dixie on the Preakness Card:
And his game effort in the Manhattan:
Posted by dana on Jun 09 2008
Filed Under: Turf, :(, YouTube, Get Well Soon, Bud Morton, 2008, Injury, Javier Castellano, Belmont, Retirement, Race Replay, Pimlico, Edgar Prado, Racing
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...
Loading ...
Damn, here we go again! What a gutsy horse…I hope he has a wonderful next life off the track. I feel bad for David Donk who doesn’t get too many top stakes horses, but does amazing with those he does.
Dayum. Can anyone dig up statistics about injury rate now vs. fifty years ago? It seems like the horses (or at least their precious ankles) are dropping like flies these days, despite the fact that they run only about 1/2 the races as their predecessors did.
I can’t find (or rather, I’m not inclined to look for!) the sources, but I’ve heard/read on more than one occasion that injury rates (between 1.5 and 2 per thousand starts) have remained consistent for the last forty years.
Dammit!
He was a nice payoff for us in the Manhattan too, here’s hoping he recovers well.
the injury rate is the same, about 2 per thousand starts. Go too any OTB parlor or simulcast facility and watch the sheer number of races going on any one given day. If you have 12 tracks running 10 races a day with an average of 8 horses entered that is 960 horses running in one day and 6720 starts a week. The day after the Belmont, tracks were running…Monmouth, Finger Lakes, etc, etc–no injuries…but the Peta folk and racing non fans don’t care about that–they just pick individual races and say it is a “trend”.
agreed, plus we are in the information age, back in the day the only way to see a race was to go to the track. Today we have all of this stuff available to us instantly, so the injuries are alot more visible than they used to be.
Of course now that I know he likes both soft and firm turf, he’s gone (I didn’t think he’d like the rock hard Belmont turf, my bad!).
But seriously, I hope he recovers well too. And agreed about David Donk, that was a nice surprise while it lasted.
Man, so many conversations I’m seeing are all alluding to the need for data transparency (and in this case, collection). Imagine if real data was collected on all injuries, crazy nerdy data hounds could probably uncover a lot of trends that we could only speculate about… but then again, angry zealots could probably drum up plenty of bogus arguments as well. It’s a Pandora’s box that I think needs to be opened.