Perils of Popular Thinking

It doesn’t matter where you put the S and the L, the battle of Salix / Lasix will be raging for a while. And rage it should because we only have ourselves to blame.

We, as an industry, wanted the bigger, faster, better Thoroughbred – at any cost. Forget the argument about breeding for speed not soundness; our biggest problem is that we didn’t see bleeding as a sign of weakness: we saw it as a surmountable obstacle on the way to the next Kentucky Derby winner.

A horse’s will to win is only impeded by his physical limitations

Consider Midnight Lute: as talented a horse as Baffert ever trained and the only horse to win the Breeders’ Cup Sprint twice. He could not breathe right: 3 tie-back surgeries helped but, best-case, he had an airway getting 60% capacity.

Will he be anything like Two Punch as a sire? Don’t get me wrong, I love Two Punch progeny and many of his babies run very, very well. Many of his babies also fail a veterinarian’s scope because he passed on small airways. And a horse who can’t get enough air in tends not to run very far.

These aren’t quarter cracks, folks. Those are situational. Sure, a horse can be prone to them, but a quarter crack heals completely as long as you give the proper time off – see Big Brown.

Every stallion passes on positive and negative traits to their progeny and most flaws we as buyers can live with: it’s our job to find those specimens that have the best of mom and dad. But we, as an industry, should have known better when it comes to bleeders. We’ve allowed traits to be passed on for so many generations; yet, being prone to bleed is often overlooked for the distance or surface a horse should be able to run.

So man invented a salve: something that slows down the evolutionary process of thinning out the herd. In the wild, if an animal can’t keep up, it is – sadly – often left behind. That’s also true in every other professional sport. Don’t have the speed to make the 72 man roster in the NFL? You make the practice team. Can’t keep up there? You’re cut. It’s not nice, but it gets wins.

In racing, it’s become Win At Any Cost

There is a story out there right now about the harness trainer who’s been banned for being too good. He admits to using a drug from France that is widely used in the sulky community. Well, TP-500 has made its way to the Thoroughbred ranks. At $7,000 a pack, it’s quite an investment. Anything to get the win, though! And – like the steroid ban – I don’t believe for one minute that veterinarians won’t still be giving Lasix on backstretches across the country: as long as it’s not on race day, anything is possible.

One of the arguments against Lasix is the case of a horse who was beaten some 30+ lengths, was given the anti-bleeder medication, and came back to win by a comfortable margin. That’s a performance enhancing drug!

No: that’s a horse who probably couldn’t breathe because of blood filling his lungs and, when given something to stop the bleeding, he was able to run at maximum capacity. And, at maximum capacity, he wasn’t all together awful.

But why was he even on the track? If memory serves, the horse in question was a claimer – the backbone of the industry. If we don’t have cheap horses to fill races, we don’t have much of a game. But isn’t it up to us as owners and trainers (at all levels) to say, “this horse bleeds – he’s not meant to be a racehorse.” No, we shoot ‘em up and send ‘em out.

So, now, we’re left with the ultimate problem: we let this go for far too long and now we want to correct the mistake. At least we gave ourselves a year’s head start. Doing this was always going to be painful and I applaud the various committees’ efforts to put the ban into place because it takes guts. But why a sudden ban, not a gradual one? This cliff’s edge approach will undoubtedly lose us a generation of runners. A let-down approach over the next 7 – 10 years would have allowed it to be weaned out of the gene pool.

I can’t name one G1 winner in the last 5 years that didn’t run on Lasix, at least in North America. When Silver Charm shipped to Dubai and won the World Cup, he did it with nothing in his system. And he paid the price: he was never the same, probably because his lungs were already scarred and the problem was greatly exacerbated from being “allowed” to bleed again. Silver Charm’s been a useful stallion, but will never top the yearly rankings. What about every horse who does? Lord knows what they would have really been had they not had a little help.

We let this happen. And now the solution we’re about to put into place is going to make it ten times worse before it gets better. I never really understand the long-term planning by the federal government when they dole out $20 billion over the next 10 years – give us the funds, we could use them now.

In the case of racing’s ban on Lasix, though, I believe the only way to do it is long-term: we bred it into the Thoroughbred, we should be allowed to breed it out.