I blogged the other day about the incident with Lavender Road. If you hadn’t heard she scratched before the 7th race on Wednesday and as she was returning to the paddock she suddenly collapsed. She tried getting up and on her way back down she apparently hit her head on the padded rail. She tried getting up at least 9 more times, and 9 times she flopped right back down. Finally they sedated her and took her to the Rood and Riddle vet clinic.

Initially they though it might be her right foreleg but x-rays were negative. She seemed to be exhibiting symptoms of heat stroke and was treated for that, but when she didn’t respond as expected they did further x-rays. At that point they found a fractured vertebrae that could not be repaired and she was humanely euthanized.

Trainer Abigail Adsit had the horse since she was a weanling, so she is taking the loss very hard.

In my previous blog I gave high praise to Junior Alvarado who sensed  something was wrong with the horse in warmups and alerted the vet who then scratched her. Alvarado indicated that her strides were choppy and she was making strange sounds. I also think the track vets and attendants did their level best to treat the horse on the track.

Heat stroke would have been quite odd given that it was not hot and the horse hadn’t done more than warm up, unless the horse had some sort of inherent problem with heat dissipation. And the speculation was that the cracked vertebrae happened after she smacked her head on the rail.

But the question remains. What caused her to go down in the first place? Did no one see the signs before she got on the track? Was it perhaps a virus with symptoms that mimicked heat stroke? Could it have been the Lasix she was given on race day?

Abigail Adsit is like a lot of trainers. Her charges are like pets, and they are treated as such. But five years ago she was matriculating at Union College. Did her lack of experience as a trainer cause her to miss something? She obviously doesn’t have a big stable – she only had one other starter at Saratoga. It seems unlikely if the horse was stepping badly or was showing symptoms that looked like heat stroke that there wouldn’t have been some sign in the paddock.

The general sense is that we’ll never know what happened to Lavender Road to cause her to collapse on the track. It seems highly unlikely that a foreleg injury was the explanation, and while I’m not Maggie Wolfendale I watched the horse trot off after Alvarado dismounted and the horse did not seem to be seriously injured. People who were watching the horse thought that when she was up long enough she seemed to be favoring her leg, but she was never up for more than a few seconds. It didn’t look that way to me, but I’ll admit I was focused more on the fact that she looked pretty loopy. Ostensibly the x-rays on her foreleg confirmed that it wasn’t a bone injury anyway. The turn of events after she banged her head seem to have led to her ultimate demise, but again we may never know if the vertebrae was a prior problem or completely happened when she banged her head on the rail.

In my history of going to racetracks, Lavender Road was not the most obscene injury I’ve seen. The reason Lavender Road got so much press was that the whole thing took place in full view of the crowd. It’s hard to ignore a horse struggling as she was on the track and not have it have an impact. Most of the time horses are attended behind a screen out of view of the crowd. It was also hard to ignore that the 8th race was held up for close to an hour. Had she made it to the paddock and fallen over we may never have read about her. But in today’s facebook and twitter world, nothing publicly happens that isn’t making it’s way around the planet 30 seconds later.

I think the stewards need to at least do a little investigating and rule out either prior injury or a medication problem. This would certainly be in the best interests of the racing public, but moreover it could fully keep negative speculation about Abigail Adsit from circulating.