Hay nets hang. Fans buzz and blow. Sponges sploosh and splash. Sweat scrapers scrape. Horses head to the track as riders adjust tack. Grooms speak in English and Spanish. Over there, a goat wanders everywhere she’s not supposed to.
And one hurt horse points his hip at his webbing and dozes.
Sporting a cast/pressure bandage on his left front leg, he listens to a visitor, hears a carrot snap and turns around – slowly. Cautious, chill, friendly, he bites the carrot in half and grinds it up like a wood-chipper. Crumbs hit the stall mat, others stay on his lips. He leans into an ear scratch, accepts a pat between the eyes. You can go mad trying to apply human feelings to animals, but Blue Creek seems to show a few – boredom, sadness if you think about it, grogginess for sure.
The 4-year-old gelding won the Jonathan Kiser Memorial novice hurdle stakes Wednesday, rolling past China Beach and Quick Master in the stretch and drawing off by 4 1/4 lengths. Then he pulled up lame. Jockey Stephen Mulqueen jumped off and the equine ambulance provided a ride to the Rood and Riddle veterinary clinic on Henning Road. He wore a metal Kimzey splint for the ambulance ride, got scanned and X-rayed, medicated, poked and prodded.
The veterinary work revealed an injury to his left front suspensory, an important ligament that supports the fetlock (ankle) joint. Common in racehorses, or any athletic equines, the injury can be treated and – more importantly – fully repaired. Blue Creek could race next year, maybe. He faces several treatment options and a graduated recovery process that involves stall rest, hand-walking and turnout time. As usual with horses, the calendar might be the most important ingredient even with veterinary advances.
“We’ll give him as much time as he needs, and probably a little bit more, just because he’s a really nice young horse,” said trainer Keri Brion, pulling up an ultrasound image on her phone. “It looks like all the ligaments holding it together are still in place, which is the most important. There’s a hole (in the suspensory), but it could be much worse. The structure around the injury is OK.”
Brion was impressed with her horse’s reaction to it all, at the clinic and back in his stall at the Oklahoma Annex.
“He didn’t like the Kimzey splint at all, they’re made for broken bones and of course you’re going to put it on him because you don’t know if anything else is there,” she said. “But when they got it off, he was like ‘Oh, thank God.’ He just put his foot down on the ground and stood there and let us help. That made me feel better, made me realize what we were dealing with.”
Like any athlete, even one who understands what doctors say, Blue Creek reacted to the news. Wednesday night, he was “angry at the situation,” Brion said. Thursday morning, he was much more chill though some substances were helping that mindset.
“We haven’t given him any Bute this morning but he had some last night,” said Brion of the common anti-inflammatory. “He did get a tranquilizer today because he was just agitated watching all the other horses go to the track and move around. He’d be more lame without the cast, but he’s pretty comfortable.”
He shipped to Brion’s base at Fair Hill Training Center in Maryland Friday morning, where he’ll get more scans and a full evaluation by veterinarians. Treatment options include injections with platelet-rich plasma and a newer concept using stem cells. In both cases, shockwave therapy helps speed the healing and regular ultrasound scans check the progression.
“It’s ligament damage, same as a person,” said veterinarian Dr. Stowe Burke. “An ACL or MCL tear is in a knee, but it’s similar. It takes time. It’s repairable and these days there’s a lot more advanced technology to have horses race again or have a great life if the injury is too severe.”
The new treatment starts with amniotic fluid or membrane from a mare’s placenta that is “spun down to the level of the messenger RNA,” Burke said. When injected, the cells migrate to the area that needs healing and can grow bone or cartilage tissue depending on the injury. Even newer technology – ultrasound tissue characterization – takes it a step further where veterinarians can accurately monitor progress.
“It color codes the fibers to tell you when you can start to increase training where before you’d see black and white and you’d have to guess or go off whether they were sound or not,” said Burke, who runs the Burke Equine therapy center in Saratoga. “We just started doing it here and it has helped track horses and create better plans for them.”
Professional sports teams and sports medicine experts use UTC to monitor athletes recovering from ligament tears and create custom training plans, thereby reducing missed games.
Burke didn’t examine Blue Creek, but mentioned horses making full recoveries from such injuries to compete successfully and even win Grade 1 races.
“You keep an eye on it,” he said, “but they can come back as good as ever.”
For trainers of competition horses, injuries to ligaments (which connect bone to bone) and tendons (muscle to bone) are constant possibilities. For steeplechasers, taking off and landing over jumps adds stress though Burke said the slower galloping speed and turf surfaces can mitigate some of that potential when compared to racehorses who don’t jump and race faster over shorter distances.
Jumping adds strain, Burke said, “but they’re older horses who have made those structures more solid over their lifetimes too. They’re going slower and they’re doing it on turf, both of which should be favorable to the horse.”
Blue Creek has raced on the flat and over jumps. He got hurt in a jump race, but it could have happened anywhere and that’s not changing much anyway. All going well, he’ll respond to treatment and be healthy enough to hang out with other Brion trainees for some winter turnout in Pennsylvania.
“Normally, in six or seven months they can be outside like a normal horse without an injury,” his trainer said. “We’ll just forget about him for a while then, let him be a horse for a couple months and before you know it he’ll be jogging roads and getting back to work.”
Make sure he gets a carrot.
