Today’s 7th race was a $50,000 starter allowance for fillies and mares on the turf.

The  1 horse, Lavender Road  never made it to the starting gate.

While the horses were warming up and before they made it on to the turf course, Lavender Road was scratched. There was a lot of chatter about whether it was the jockey or the vet who scratched the horse, but it really doesn’t matter. From my vantage point it looked like Junior Alvarado initiated the scratch, telling the vet she was warming up poorly and making strange noises. Alvarado may have saved Lavender Road’s life because as they were leading her off the track she collapsed.

Clearly she was disoriented and in bad shape. The vets and track staff worked furiously to bring her back around, even starting an IV and  packing bags of ice around her. She tried getting up six or seven times, but collapsed back on the track each time. Finally, they managed to sedate her and load her into the horse ambulance and she was taken to the highly regarded Rood and Riddle Vet Clinic.

I would give the highest marks to Junior Alvarado, the track staff, and the vets for how they handled the situation. I’d also give high marks to the track for holding the 8th race up for an hour while the vets worked on Lavender Road. The potential biggest losers were the horses in that 8th race who had to walk endlessly around the saddling trees in the paddock, but incredibly they stayed calm and managed to run a fairly predictable race.

So why the blog? Two things. Trainer Abigail Adsit  doesn’t start many horses in New York. In fact, Lavender Road was her second starter at the meet. I don’t know anything about Adsit, but I have to wonder how the horse made it on to the track in the first place. Second, I’d be very interested to know if medications might have had anything to do with it.

I’ll tell you what I don’t think it was. The weather. It was not hot. The NYRA web site showed the temperature was in the 60’s at first post and it really didn’t get a lot warmer. It wasn’t one of those brutal northeast days where everything wilts.

I think the betting public deserves an answer. I believe we need to know how the horse got out of the paddock and what exactly happened to cause her collapse. I believe we are owed some sort of investigation into trainer Adsit’s training methods. There were people on the public media expressing sympathy for Adsit. I’m holding off feeling bad for Adsit until someone says she did everything right and it was just one of those unfortunate things. Now read that carefully. I’m not accusing her of any mismanagement. I’m simply saying until we know the whole story let’s hold off on making any conclusions one way or the other.

Horseracing suffers enough bad publicity. When this sort of thing happens at one of the biggest race meets of the year, only the transparency of full disclosure makes sense for Saratoga and horseracing in general. I hope we get the answers we deserve.