May Jesus Bless you and your family as you go on all your rides

And all the US racing world should be saying is ‘Thank
you, thank you, thank you.’ Not just because this
extraordinary filly has made the 2007 racing season far
more interesting than it was two weeks ago, but because
she IS a filly.

Not only that, she is a filly who belongs to owners who
care about US racing, even if they aren’t American.
Michael Tabor and Derrick Smith are British; both have
backgrounds as the British bookmakers; and both grew up in
a country where the idea that three year olds, and
especially three year old fillies, cannot negotiate a mile
and a half, is a non-starter.

When Rags to Riches got up off her knees after breaking
from the Belmont starting gate and began running, US
racing may have gotten up off its knees and began running
again as well. With no chance of a Triple Crown winner
coming out of the race; with no hope of a Street
Sense/Curlin match race, and with no hope that either of
those two colts is likely to set foot on a racetrack after
this year, there simply wasn’t much to get excited about
on Belmont Day.

A Secretariat-like performance from Curlin would certainly
have changed that, but when the pack passed the six
furlong pole in 1:15 and change, as opposed to
Secretariat’s 1.12, there was little doubt that we were
witnessing a rather typical and forgettable Belmont
Stakes.

Three furlongs later, however, all that had changed.
Curlin, in a remarkable bit of athleticism for a horse of
his dimensions, threaded his way through an opening
between C.P. West and Slew’s Tizzy, while Rags to Riches
had clear sailing four horses wide, and at the top of the
home stretch the two of them entered another zone. The
rest is American racing history, and American racing can
rejoice for awhile.

While Rags to Riches’ trainer Todd Pletcher does not seem
enthusiastic about running her against colts in the
future, her owners will have the final say. And because
they do not have to be cautious about preserving her
racing record and potential stud fees, they may once again
make the American racing public their priority. How
refreshing that would be!

My final thoughts on Triple Crown 2007 is that of all the
horses involved, the one which hooves-down ran off and
hid, in terms of his accomplishments, from all the other
contenders, was Curlin. I posted before his Preakness
victory that I thought he resembled his distant ancestor
Man o’ War. And when Curlin’s Triple Crown campaign is
viewed in its entirety, he can be described as nothing
else but a throwback to the Thoroughbreds of the 1920s and
1930s.

Curling had to do everything he did without having any
experience racing as a two-year-old. And what he did was
win his first three races by a combined 29 lengths, and
then head to Louisville and manage to outrun seventeen
far more seasoned animals, many of whom were major stakes
winners, after having traffic problems for nearly the
entire mile and a quarter of the Kentucky Derby.

Next came the Preakness, where he fell to his knees coming
out of the gate, had Street Sense pass him in the stretch
because he failed to change his leads, and then came back
after being passed to win the race in record equaling
time. His speed figures for the Preakness were the best of
his life.

The ‘bounce’, a term unheard of in racing days of yore,
did not catch up with Curlin at Pimlico, but many a racing
guru said that it would in the Belmont. It clearly did
not, and this horse, in the past five weeks, has proved
beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is truly the stuff of
champions. I sincerely hope that he and Rags to Riches
have another date, if not on the race track then, one day,
in the breeding shed!

Picture of Rags to Riches winning the  Belmont Stakes

No surprises for me this week with the news from the
Street Sense connections that their boy would be passing
on the Belmont Stakes, and they have sold him as a
stallion prospect to Darley Stud, which already owns his
sire Street Cry and dam Bedazzle.

The only reason, at this point, for Street Sense to keep
racing at all is that a year-end championship would allow
his initial stud fee to be higher. That is, if his future
owners don’t care about racing him for the sake of racing
fans–and apparently, for the time being, they do. We can
look for Street Sense at Saratoga in August, unless Darley
has a change of heart.

In the meantime, and going from what happens to horses in
the upper echelons of Thoroughbred racing at the ends of
their careers, to what happens to the hundreds of
thousands of others, the US Thoroughbred Retirement
Foundation has a program designed to save retired
racehorses from the slaughterhouse.

The Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation, which is itself
based in Saratoga, began working with the New York State
Department of Corrections in 1984 by sending a retired
racehorse named Promised Road to the correctional facility
at Wallkill, New York. Promised Road was the first
racehorse ever turned over to the TRF, and the founding
member of its cornerstone program.

The Wallkill Correctional facility, in the years since
Promised Road arrived, has provided a safe, comfortable
shelter in which hundreds of former race horses have spent
their final years. The Thoroughbreds get a home, and the
Wallkill inmates have learned the skills necessary to care
for the horses; the Wallkill program, in fact, has
received accreditation as a state-recognized vocational
training course in equine management. The inmates who
successfully complete the horse care program have viable
job skills to help them resume their lives upon their
release.

But even more importantly, the TRF program gives people
who may have never had the chance to interact and bond
with other living creatures an opportunity to take
responsibility for another life and to learn compassion.

The TRF is now overseeing programs which supply retired
Thoroughbreds to correctional facilities in Iowa, Florida,
Kentucky, Indiana, and South Carolina as well as New York,
and will be setting up two more programs in the near
future.

The TRF also runs both the Exceller Farm in Poughquag, New
York, and the Maker’s Mark Secretariat Center at the
Kentucky Horse Park, where hundreds of racehorses which
retired sound have been retrained as riding and jumping
horses and placed in good homes. And the TRF’s
Out2Pasture program in Jamestown, Missouri does just what
it says, placing retired animals in a pastured herd
managed by veterinary students at the University of
Missouri, who would otherwise have no way to work with
infirm Thoroughbreds.

Here in Canada, Woodbine Entertainment announced last
September that one-quarter of one percent of all its purse
funds would go towards funding the Ontario Thoroughbred
retirement organization LongRun, to help Ontario
Thoroughbreds after they leave the track.

If Street Sense’s connections did the same with his
winnings to date, they would be giving $7750 to the TRF
tomorrow, and if they did it based on what they will
receive from Darley Stud, Street Sense could very well
treat an entire barnful of his kind to the good retirement
he will soon be enjoying.

Just a thought.

My toes were ‘curlin’ with excitement while I was watching
the stretch run of the Preakness last Saturday and
wondering if and when my chosen steed would ever change
his leads.

He finally did, and I suppose I can offer myself a pat on
the back for picking Curlin to win, and even more for
narrowing the competition down to him and Street Sense.
Believe me, that is not my usual standard of performance
when it comes to horse racing.

But I have been a fan of the Thoroughbreds long enough to
have heard of or witnessed some stellar rivalries, and it
appears that we are on the verge of another one, if both
Curlin and Street Sense can remain sound and their owners
are willing to continue challenging each other.

Because it is virtually guaranteed that neither of these
horses will race beyond this year, whatever legendary
contests are going to arise between them will have to
occur between now and the October 25 Breeders’ Cup Classic
at Santa Anita. At this writing, it looks as if neither
colt has connections interested in pursuing the Belmont
Stakes.

The Belmont Stakes, it seems, has become almost an
afterthought in those years when there is no horse with a
chance to win the Triple Crown. As a mile-and-a-half
race, it sticks out on the calendar of stakes races for
three-year-olds in the US like a sore thumb, and is the
only time three-year-olds are required to run that
distance. So more often than not, it is a prime spot for
stamina-loaded horses who simply cannot run fast enough to
win shorter stakes.

My personal opinion is that, if it were not for the
artificial standard of the Triple Crown, the distance of
the Belmont Stakes would have long ago been shortened.
But it needs something to make it unique, and at its
current distance can call itself ‘The Test of Champions.’
The only problem is that fewer and fewer champions are
choosing to show up.

There is simply too much money at stake for the owners of
top class three-year-old male Thoroughbreds to risk them
without very good reason. Asking Street Sense to take on
Curlin in the Belmont does not, from an economic
standpoint, make sense. Asking him to do it later in the
year at a shorter distance makes perfect sense; it will,
in fact, be required of both horses if there is to be a
year-end championship awarded to either.

So, heaven willing and these two colts stay sound, we can
look forward to the Travers Stakes, or the year-end
weight-for-age contests when they will not only face each
other but their elders. Perhaps the ghosts of Alydar and
Affirmed, or Ridan and Jaipur, or Easy Goer and Sunday
Silence will be racing at their sides.

Other than the chance of a Triple Crown winner, nothing in
US horse racing has as much appeal as two evenly matched
champions looking each other in the eye and refusing to
blink. Will it happen at Belmont Park on June 9?

Don’t hold your breath.

War Admiral was not the only casualty of the 1938 Pimlico
Special, which became the famous match race immortalized
in the movie ‘Seabiscuit.’ The Pimilico infield’s slight
promontory, known as Old Hilltop, on which hundreds of
thousands trainers and racing fans had stood through 67
years of racing was leveled in April of 1938, so that it
would not obstruct the film cameras which recorded that
great race.

 The Old Hilltop might be gone, but its name remains, as do
the horses, trainers, fans, and cameras. They’ll all be at
Pimlico for the Preakness and a chance to witness Street
Sense duplicating what War Admiral did seventy years ago
in following his Kentucky Derby win with a Preakness Day
victory on his way to the 1937 Triple Crown.

 Of interest is that War Admiral had to beat nineteen other
horse win the Kentucky Derby, as did Street Sense, and had
to beat seven other horses to win the Preakness, while
Street Sense will have to beat eight. In one sense, the
Preakness is a much fairer test of ablility than the
Kentucky Derby, because for all its history, it’s never
been the glamour event that the ‘Run for the Roses’ is, and
does not attract horses simply because their owners like
the idea of photo opps.

 The horse voted by The Bloodhorse as the greatest of the
20th century, in fact, Man o’ War, did not even contest
the Kentucky Derby, because his owner Samuel P. Riddle
didn’t t feel it was in the colt’s best interests to run a
mile and a quarter on the first Saturday in May. Man o’
War went on to win the Preakness and Belmont, sire War
Admiral, and also sire Hard Tack, who in turn sired
Seabiscuit. In the 1937 Preakness, in fact, three of the
eight horses entered were sons of Man o’ War.

  Does any of this history tell us a thing about which horse
is likely to his owner’s colors painted on the Pimlico
weather vane as late Saturday afternoon? Not really.
Street Sense loves the Churchill Downs track and no one
knows if he will like Pimlico. He also loves the rail;
there are likely to be seven riders seeing that he does
not get it. He will be starting from the outside post, so
they may not have to work too hard to see that he stays
outside.

 On the other hand, Hard Spun, who set all the fractions
except the most important one in the Kentucky derby, is
likely to have company on the lead from King of the Roxy,
who did not race at Churchill Downs but has a sprinter’s
pedigree and could not hold off Tiago in the stretch of
the Santa Anita Derby.

 D. Wayne Lukas, who has trained five Preakness winners,
four more than the other seven trainers combined, has
Flying First Class in after he won the Derby Trial Stakes
three weeks ago. But Curlin, who finished third in the
Derby, had earlier trounced Flying First Class both in the
Rebel Stakes and Arkansas Derby at Oaklawn Park.

 And Curlin, who had a less than lucky trip in the Kentucky
Derby, was one of the few horses accelerating at the end.
He is still the greenest horse in the Preakness field, but
will not have nearly the traffic to contend with and in
the first three races of his life, which all had fields of
ten or less, simply annihilated his competition.

 I did some pedigree checking, and Street Sense traces back
to Man o’ War through his dam Bedazzle, while Curlin
traces back to War Admiral and Man o’ War through his dam
Sheriff’s Deputy.

 For no other reasons than that Curlin has a physique
resembling Man o’ War’s, and I think he learned a few
things in the Derby, I am picking him for the Preakness.
I would be very happy, however, to see Street Sense win,
and as always, just hope the contestants make it safely
around the track and back to their barns.

Well, I didn’t do too badly with my Kentucky Derby
predictions; I just had the wrong horse finishing first.
Street Sense and Calvin Borel took their time, picked
their spots, and in general put in one of the finest
horse/jockey team efforts, in making hash out of a
twenty-horse field, that I have ever witnessed.

Riding with their 2006 Breeder’s Cup Juvenile victory
weighing them down, Borel and Street Sense to their time
settling in on the rail, where they like to be, and
keeping well away from the 46-second opening half-mile.
I confess I was concerned when the track announcer pointed
out that Street Sense was next-to-last at one point, and
had eighteen horses to navigate over, under, around, and
through.

But Borel’s timing was absolutely inspired. Just as he
asked Street Sense to get started, the horses on the front
end of the pack, with the exception of Hard Spun, informed
their riders that it was time to stop.

One by one they began to drift out and away from the deep
going on the rail, and Street Sense wove in and out of
their vacated lanes until he finally swung to the outside
in the stretch and was home free. There would be no
repeat of the ducking in that he did at the very crowded
finish line of the Blue Grass Stakes, and the three horses
who were in the photo finish with him at Keeneland where
nowhere to be seen on Saturday.

Hard Spun hung on for second, in what was probably the
bravest performance of the day, and Curlin, the horse whom
I was hoping would duplicate the brilliant victories of
his three previous starts, finished eight lengths in back
of Street Sense in third. Curlin was also far back in the
early part of the race and making up ground at the end. I
still expect very big things from him in the future.

So we can now bid farewell to the myth that a Breeder’s
Cup Juvenile winner probably peaks as a two-year-old, and
if we are lucky, Street Sense will go on to win a Triple
Crown. He certainly looks the part, and with Mr.
Prospector on his sire Street Cry’s side, and Northern
Dancer on his dam Bedazzle’s side, he should run all day.

Of interest to those who are thinking of investing money
in a race horse, superstar trainer Todd Pletcher, to whom
the torch which once burned so brightly for D.Wayne Lukas
and Bob Baffert has supposedly been passed, started five
horses in the Kentucky Derby, and had five also-rans.

Prior to the Derby Pletcher’s five starters, Any Given
Saturday, Sam P., Circular Quay, Scat Daddy, and Cowtown
Cat had been very impressive in their prep races. Scat
Daddy’s rider said that his horse simply hated the
Churchill Downs track, and Cowtown cat was noticeably
upset in the post parade. But my personal opinion is that
the five horse together could have hemmed Street Sense in
all the way around the track and he would still have found
an opening and won his race.

So we head for Baltimore and do it all again!

Beyer speed figures. Dosage indexes. Post positions.
Track conditions. Past performances.

Put them all in a jockey’s cap, toss them up in the air,
watch where they fall, and then try reading some sense
into them. You’ll have as much chance as anyone of
picking out the name of the 2007 Kentucky Derby winner.

As with every Kentucky Derby, the one set to take place
this Saturday will have its share of proven starters who
should be there, starters just now reaching their
potential who should be there, and starters whose owners
have more money than horse sense, or just like a reason to
buy a big hat. The unfortunate thing about the starters
in Category #3 is that, because two or three of them
managed to scrape together enough earnings to make the Top
Twenty among horses eligible to run, two or three others
who might actually have a chance will not get in.

One case in point is Chelokee, a big, gorgeous, and very
professional son of Cherokee Run, who in his last start
finished third in the Florida Derby after an absolutely
horrendous trip. Chelokee is of interest because he is
trained by Michal Matz of Barbaro fame, and because at the
end of his most recent workout at Keeneland last Friday,
the right rein on his bridle broke. Although he had
already completed his scheduled run, Chelokee’s rider was
unable to pull him up, and Chelokee did another circuit of
the track on his own.

It seems fairly obvious that Chelokee is willing to run as
far as horses have to, and that the mile-and-a-quarter
distance of the Kentucky Derby would not have fazed him.
But with earnings of only $161,000, he was #22 on the
earnings qualification list. And Michael Matz, rater than
shipping him to Churchill Downs without knowing for
certain that he would make the final Derby cut, decided to
pass, saying there are other Derbies. Chelokee will have
the afternoon off on Saturday, and focus on the Preakness.

It would have been great for racing if Michael Matz had
been able to repeat his 2006 Derby win, and I beg to
differ with him on one point. There may be other Derbies
for Chelokee to contest, but there is only one Kentucky
Derby. Just as there was only one Barbaro.

I hate Kentucky Derbies with twenty-horse fields because
the horses who shouldn’t be there take up a lot of the
running room from those who should. But among those who
should be there is a ’street fighter’, last year’s
two-year-old champion Street Sense. Trained by Carl
Nafzger, who is undoubtedly one of the best Thoroughbred
trainers you never heard of, Street Sense has raced only
twice this year, setting a track record in the Tropical
Park Derby and losing the Blue Grass Stakes by a nose
after ducking in right before the finish line. It was a
very crowded finish line, with four horses separated by a
half-length.

It would not bode well for his chances next Saturday if
Street Sense ducked in because of the close quarters at
the Blue Grass finish line. With nineteen other horses
taking up track space, he is not likely to have much spare
room as he thunders down the home stretch.

So I am picking as the winner Curlin, the horse who has
won each of his three races by an average of nine lengths.
I know he’s not experienced, but I like that he did not
have to undergo the stress of racing as a two-year-old.
And his breeding is simply flawless, with his sire, Smart
Strike, being another of those perfectly balanced sons of
Mr. Prospector, and his dam, Sheriff’s Deputy, being a
daughter of Canadian champion Deputy Minister.

But what I really hope to see from this Kentucky Derby is
all twenty of its starters, no matter their order of finish,
returning to their barns safe and sound. Racing doesn’t
need another catastrophe.

Pictures of the Kentucky Derby 2007 Contenders :

1. Picture of Street Sense

2. Picture of Nobiz Like Shobiz

3. Picture of Scat Daddy

4. Picture of Curlin

5. Picture of Circular Quay

6. Picture of Any Given Saturday

7. Picture of Great Hunter

8. Picture of Great Hunter

9. Picture of Tiago

10. Picture of Dominican

11. Picture of Cowtown Cat

12. Picture of Stormello

13. Picture of Zanjero

14. Picture of Liquidity

15. Picture of Sam P

16. Picture of Chelokee

17. Picture of Cobalt Blue

18. Picture of Sedgefield

The most expensive Thoroughbred in history is 2000
Kentucky Derby winner Fusaichi Pegasus, who never won
another race. His breathtaking good looks, and his own
sire, Mr. Prospector, were to a large degree responsible
for the fact that when he was syndicated as a stallion the
asking price was $60 million dollars.

Those syndicate members’ first duty regarding FuPeg, as he
is known, was not to improve the breed. It was to get a
return on their investments, either by breeding their own
mares to him and racing or selling the offspring, or
charging horse owners not in the syndicate $100,000 for
one of their mares to have a private audience with FuPeg.

Since FuPeg began the trend, four other non-Triple Crown
winners have followed him into retirement with $100,000
price tags attached to their company–Smarty Jones,
Ghostzapper, and Bernardini. More than a few
non-racetracking Americans fell in love with Smarty, have
never heard of Ghostzapper, and may resent Bernardini
because he is not Barbaro.

So how much, , would a Triple Crown be worth to the owners
of a colt talented enough to win it? Given that the 1977
Triple Crown winner, the immortal Settle Slew, more than
equaled his racetrack glory by his performance as a sire,
the possible figures are mind-altering.

On the other hand, winning a Triple Crown is not guarantee
of a colt becoming a sire of Seattle Slew’s caliber. The
unchallenged master and commander of all the Triple Crown
winners was Secretariat, and he did not reproduce himself.
How could he have? Neither did Calumet’s two Triplers,
Citation and Whirlaway; nor its first and its most recent
winners, Sir Barton and Affirmed.

On the other hand, the 1930 Triple Crown winner Gallant
Fox sired its 1935 winner Omaha; granted, those were the
days when an entire year’s crop of Thoroughbreds numbered
less than 5,000, so the competition was not nearly as
fierce as it is today.

And 1937 Triple Crown War Admiral, a small horse–in
spite of Hollywood’s need to portray him otherwise in the
movie “Seabiscuit”–shows up in the pedigrees of some of
the greatest horses of the last fifty years, including
his grandson Buckpasser and, wouldn’t you know it, his
Triple Crown winning great-grandson Affirmed, and
great-great grandson Seattle Slew.

Count Fleet, the 1943 winner, is the
great-great-grandfather of FuPeg.

And let’s not forget Assault, the 1946 winner who proved
infertile. Buying a Triple Crown winner, it seems, is no
guarantee of anything, except that you will have to spend
a very large sum of money.

But consider that last year a Thoroughbred two-year-old,
since named The Green Monkey, sold at auction for $16
million and promptly suffered a hip muscle injury which
has kept him away from the racetrack. Given that, paying
a considerable amount of money for a horse which could be
another Seattle Slew does not seem like such a terrible
idea.

FuPeg, by the way, is now offering the ladies his company for a mere $75,000.

Pictures of the last Kentucky Derby

Picture of Barbaro the great champion

Picture of Fusaichi Pegasus (FuPeg)

Picture of Street Sense

Picture of Cowtown Cat

Picture of Circular Quay

But not very many people outside of Austria, including here
in Canada, are familiar with a breed of horses even more
indigenously Austrian than the Lipizzaner. I did a little
research and found that there are currently about a thousand
horses of this breed in Canada, which is not very many. But
the people who have, and breed, Haflingers are rabid in
their enthusiasm for their equines, whose human-loving
temperaments make them as much a part of their owners’
families as any horses are likely to become.

The Haflinger breed got its name from the Austrian village
of Hafling, where the foundation sire of the breed, Folie,
was foaled in 1874. Folie was the offspring of a
half-Arabian sire, El Bavadi, and a Tyrolean mountain mare.
Every Haflinger of today can be traced back to Folie through
one of seven distinct lines of stallions.

Folie himself must have been a remarkable animal, because
over one hundred and thirty years later his descendants are
noted for their Tyroleanesque surefootedness, their
tremendous stamina, their remarkable pulling ability–even
more remarkable when one considers that they normally stand
between thirteen and fifteen hands–their versatility, and
their golden good looks.

Haflingers are always some shade of chestnut, from palomino
blond to liver, and they all have thick wavy manes and tails
of white to flaxen, so resplendent that Trigger himself
would have been envious. They do every thing that is asked
of them, from heavy harness work to dressage and jumping,
and do it with intelligence and good spirits.

In spite of their relatively small stature, they are well up
to the task of carrying adults over long distances, yet
gentle enough to be ideal children’s mounts. They are so
people-friendly, in fact, that they are highly desired as
mounts for disabled children in therapeutic riding programs.

The first Haflingers came to North America almost fifty
years ago in 1958, when Tempel Farm in Wadsworth, Illinois,
imported some of them to begin a breeding program as a
companion to their Lipizzaner breeding effort. From there
the breed spread to Canada, and the first Canadian Haflinger
was registered in 1977.

In The US, the Haflinger breed had grown enough by 1998 to
merit its own registry, a joining of two earlier Haflinger
owners’ groups, the Haflinger Registry of North America and
the Haflinger Association of America. The resulting
organization, The American Haflinger Registry, has over ten
thousand of the breed, with over eleven hundred different
owners, on its books.

The Canadian Haflinger Association was created in 1980, and
currently has registered some one thousand horses belonging
to approximately two hundred and fifty owners.

But most Haflingers are still bred in Austria and exported
to other countries from there. The Austrian Haflinger
breeding program is run by government studs, which are at
pains to protect the breed standards.

Until I researched the Lipizzaners, I had never heard of the
Haflingers. But I have to admit that, after seeing pictures
of them performing at all sorts of tasks yet looking like
equine movie stars with those absurdly gorgeous manes and
tails, I definitely see the Haflinger appeal!

Picture of a Haflinger running

Picture of a Haflinger in the Bavarian Alps

More Pictures of Haflingers

The answer, which surprised me, is “Yes.” But what
surprised me even more is which other breed has this
delightfully smooth action in its collection of gaits.

To find them, head due north from the sun-baked pampas of
South America. When you’re about a hundred miles south of
the Arctic Circle, head due east. Don’t stop when you get
to the Atlantic; in fact, don’t stop until you get to
Iceland.

When you get there, you’ll be in a country where there is
one Icelandic pony for every five Icelanders. The figures
are about 50,000 ponies to 250,000 humans. Why?

Because without the Icelandic ponies, there would probably
be no Icelanders. Iceland is the sort of place which
takes no prisoners. Its cold, harsh, and barren
interior is largely composed of lava fields which support
no vegetation. That which does not support vegetation does
not support the cattle which graze on vegetation. So the
meat in the Icelanders’ diets–what there is of it– comes
from sheep and Icelandic ponies.

That may seem cruel, but we’re not talking about healthy
unwanted horses being shipped to Canadaian slaughterhouses,
now that the U.S. slaughterhouses have been shut down.
The Icelandic ponies are not killed to satisfy the palates
of Europeans who could just as easily eat beef, or pork,
or chicken, or seafood. Icelandic ponies are an
essential food source for Icelanders.

But because they are also an essential work and riding
horse, only the ponies which are unable to work are used
for food.

And work they do. Icelandic ponies are highly intelligent
equines which have adapted to survive in a place where
winter comes when the grass they forage on is still green.
They have evolved to take very shallow breaths, so that
their lungs are not damaged from the cold.

They are stout ponies with plenty of bone and the shaggy
coat necessary for their surroundings. They can go two or
three days between meals and are as surefooted as goats,
thanks to having learned to navigate those volcanoes and
lava fields.

They do not sound like they would have a way of going
similar to that of the Peruvian Paso. But they do.

Like all equines, each Icelandic pony comes equipped with
a walk, trot, and canter. Most of them, oddly, will also
pace when they are trying to recuperate from a long
gallop. But then there’s the “tolt.”

The tolt is the same four-beat gait that is known as the
“Paso LLano” seen so far to the south in the Peruvian
Paso. It’s a left rear, left fore, right rear, right fore
pattern in which the pony always has one foot on the
ground so that the bounciness of the trot is eliminated.
And the Icelandic ponies can do it double-time.

Icelandic ponies, unlike other breeds, take between seven
and eight years to reach their full growth, and are not
ready to be ridden until they are at least four. But
they more than make up for their long childhood at the
other end of their life spans. One Icelandic pony is
said to have worked until the age of fifty, and was still
going strong eight years later when its owner died!

Pictures of Icelandic horses grazing

Pictures of Icelandic ponies in the winter snow

Pictures of Icelandic ponies in their natural habitat

Cute closeup of Icelandic ponies

But what made the idea of a summer week on horseback at
this particular farm sound almost heavenly to me is that
their own string of trail horses includes Missouri
Foxtrotters, Tennessee Walking Horses, and Peruvian Paso
Horses.

I have been lucky enough to have already ridden both the
Foxtrotters and Walking Horses, but not a Paso. In fact,
I don’t know any one who has ridden a Paso, but from their
remarkable way of moving I know it must be the ride of a
lifetime.

Even though the ancestors of the modern Peruvian Paso
breed made it to South America with the Spanish
Conquistadors over four hundred years ago, the modern Paso
was inexplicably overlooked in North America until the
1970’s. But Peruvian Pasos are now showing up in both
Canadian and American show rings, and stealing honors from
the better-established gaited breeds.

The truly remarkable thing abut these horses is that they
can’t be anything other than magnificent movers. They are
genetically gaited, and need absolutely no training to
perform their classic “Paso Llano”. Performed on a very
even beat, in a left-hind, left-front, right-hind, and
right-front pattern, the Paso Llano will always have the
horse with one foot on the ground, eliminating the jarring
quality that comes with an ordinary trot.

It’s not only the smooth ride that makes Peruvian Pasos so
appealing; it is their “brio”, or natural flair. They
come into the world with inherited “termino”, a trait
which causes them, when they stride, to swing their front
legs to one side from the shoulder so that their back
hooves will hit the ground either in or beyond the front
hoofmark.

In doing this, they naturally lift their front legs as
high as other gaited breeds which have been trained with
artificial aids. Peruvian Pasos are always shown
barefoot, and still outperform many of their artificially
encouraged competitors.

The brio of the Pasos includes their abundant energy,
curiosity, and showiness, but they also are renowned for
their intelligence and calm demeanor.

Although they are small to medium sized-horses, averaging
between 14 and 15.2 hands, Peruvian Pasos are
exceptionally muscular and were originally bred for
stamina so that they could carry their riders without
tiring over vast distances on the South American pampas.
Their wonderful way of going and their endurance, would, I
think, make them the ultimate trail horse.

Add thick, wavy manes and tails, parade horse
presence–especially from the palominos–and I can’t
think of a better way to spend a few summer afternoons
than enjoying the outdoors atop a beautiful, graceful
Peruvian Paso!

Picture of Peruvia Pasos

The truth is that a breeder is about as likely to catch
lightning in a bottle as to produce multiple champions of
the same parentage. Yet the odds against getting any
champion at all are so enormous that breeders have to stay
with formulas that have worked. And when a baby with a
successful older sibling hits the auction ring, its
relationship to a star will often compensate for some
questionable conformation.

Without doing any research, I was able to come up with
five sets of siblings who had done their parents
exceptionally proud on the track.

Nantallah and Rough Shod II’s son and daughter, Ridan and
Moccasin, were both undefeated at two, each winning seven
races. Moccasin was named 1965 Horse of the Year, and
Ridan went on to participate in one of the great races of
the 20th century, the 1962 Travers Stakes, when he and
Jaipur ran a match race for the entire
mile-and-one-quarter, to have a single nose separating
them at the finish.

1962 champion older mare Primonetta, and her full brother,
1963 Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes winner,
and three-year–old champion, Chateaugay, were the
offspring of Swaps and Banquet Bell.

Wheatley Stable campaigned the champion two-year-old colts
of 1964 and 1966, Bold Lad and Successor, who were sons
of their great sire Bold Ruler and Broodmare of the Year,
Misty Morn.

And the breathtaking 1969 Majestic Prince, who won the
1969 Kentucky Derby and Preakness, and was America’s
champion three-year-old, had his brother Crowned Prince
named champion two-year–old in England after only two
races.

The final pair of champions I could recall was Canadian
Horse of the Year in filly Glorious Song and her brother,
the undefeated U.S. two-year-old champion of 1983, Devil’s
Bag. A third brother, Saint Ballado, was a Group Two
winner in England, but his importance has been in the
breeding shed, where he sired 64 stakes winners and two
champions, Saint Liam and Ashado, before his premature
death at age 13. Herbager and Ballade were their sire and
dam.

I drew a blank after that, so I went to Google and started
searching on the names of the Thoroughbreds who were
named by Bloodhorse Magazine as the top three performers
of the 20th century. The results were most enlightening.

Man o’ War? His full brother My Play won only nine times
in four years.

Native Dancer? No siblings of note.

And finally, Secretariat. Secretariat’s dam,
Somethingroyal, produced two full siblings to the immortal
chestnut. The first, a filly, Syrian Sea, won two stakes
as a two-year-old, and became a great broodmare in her own
right. Secretariat’s owner Penny Chenery said of the
second, a filly named The Bride, “She couldn’t beat a fat
man running downhill.”

Will Nicanor be another Barbaro? No one knows, and there is
only one certainty about his career: if and when he is
saddled for his first race, he will be carrying, along
with his jockey, the hopes and memories of thousands of
racing fans.

Picture of Nicanor (Barbaro’s Baby Brother)

Pictures of Nicanor and his mother La Ville Rouge

Picture of La Ville Rouge (Barbaro’s mother)

And as I was browsing through the horse-related news on
the Internet today, I came across an article suggesting
that the best time to view the Chincoteague ponies, for
which Misty has become an icon, is not during the annual
round-up in July, but when spring comes to the
Maryland/Virginia coast and they can be seen in their
natural habitat.

The article jogged my memory of the tough little ponies,
so I decided to see how they have weathered since I first
learned of them all those years ago.

There are actually two herds of ponies sharing Assateague
Island. In 1943, the U.S. Federal Government bought the
Island and in 1965 made the Maryland end into a national
seashore. The southern end, where the Virginia ponies
were, became the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge.

The herds are kept separated by a fence which splits the
Island along the Maryland/Virginia State Line, and the
Maryland herd is managed by the U.S National Park Service.
The Virginia herd, on the other hand, has been owned and
managed by the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Company since
1947.

Legend has it that the earliest ancestors of today’s
Chincoteague ponies came to Assateague Island when a
Spanish galleon with a cargo of mustangs sank off the
island’s shore in the early 1600s. But logic would
indicate that they are actually descended from draft
animals which the early Virginia settlers turned loose on
the Island to feed. It is known that by 1700, Assateague
was supporting herds of cattle, sheep, and hogs as well as
the ponies.

In the three-plus centuries since the ponies arrived on
the island, they have evolved into hardy, wiry animals
standing between 13 and 14.2 hands, and weighing between
800 and 900 pounds. They were able to subsist only on the
marsh and beach grasses which constitute the island’s
major sources of forage. There were both mustangs and
Arabians introduced into the herds during the 20th
century, in an attempt to diversify their gene pool.

The modern version of the Chincoteague Pony Round-Up and
Swim began in 1927, when the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire
Department needed to raise funds to replace its obsolete
equipment. Every July they round up and pen their herd,
which numbers between 130 and 150 animals, and drive
them across the shallow waters separating Assateague and
Chincoteague Islands. Those ponies which are too weak or
young to make the swim are ferried across.

The majority of the foals are auctioned off to people who
come from all over the United States to participate.

A few foals are allowed to return to Assateague as
breeding stock, but the proceeds for the ones sold not
only supports the Fire Department, it lets the Fire
Department keep the entire herd vaccinated, wormed, and
provided with health checkups twice a year.

The Chincoteague Pony Auction has become so successful
because of the marvelous temperament and adaptability of
the ponies, which are extremely friendly, intelligent, and
tough. They have been used for everything from driving to
jumping, and while they can be any color, a large number
of them are pintos.

The Chincoteague ponies have remarkably durable feet, and
are best left barefoot; they will also thrive on a diet of
high-quality hay with a salt lick and plenty of fresh
water.

Chincoteague ponies are now being bred across the United
States, so it looks as if the story of Misty, such a long
time ago, impressed more people than I ever imagined!

Are they names of characters from one Shakespeare’s more
obscure plays? No.

But they are responsible for some of the elite performers
of their species.

Those six names belong to the six stallions from which
every Lipizzaner, the magnificent white ballet-dancing
stallions of the Spanish Riding School, is descended.

Pluto was a grey horse of Spanish descent foaled in 1765
at the Frederiksborg Royal Stud. Conversano was a black
stallion with Neapolitan ancestry, foaled in 1767. Favory
was a dun foaled in 1769 at the Imperial Stud Kladrun in
Bohemia.

Neapolitano, foaled in 1790, was a brown horse who came
from the Po region of Italy: Siglavy, date of birth
unknown, was a grey Arabian foal from Syria who arrived at
Lipizza in Slovenia in 1810, and Maestoso was a grey 1819
foal sired by Neapolitaner and born in Hungary.

The first and last of these stallions were born over
half-a-century apart; each of the six came from different
parts of the world; and yet the painstaking process of
missing and matching their genes with countless
forgotten mares descended from ancient Iberian horses has
resulted in a bloodline as exalted of that of any of the
world’s remaining Royal Houses.

The Court Stud of Slovenia was founded near the village of
Lipizza in 1580, when Shakespeare was a mere lad of
sixteen. In 1735, Charles VI of Austria established the
Spanish Riding School in Vienna, named for the Iberian
horses in the Lipizzaner’ history. It was Charles VI who
began keeping records of the horse’s pedigrees.

The Lipizzaner breeding operation remained at Piber
remained there for 340 years, and was moved to Piber,
Austria, in 1920. The Piber stud farm was chosen for its
climate and the rich soil of the area, which produced
top-quality forage.

The Lipizzaner breeding stock lived peacefully at Piber
until World War II, when for their safety they, and the
performing horses at the Spanish Riding School, were all
taken to Holstau. Only two hundred and fifty Lipizzaners
survived the war, and conditions in post-war Europe were
so bad that only the intervention of General George Patton
saved the horses from being seized as draft animals.

In 1948 some of the Lipizzaners were moved to the South
Mooi region of South Africa, where Major George Iwanoski
used one of the donated stallions to start the Lipizzaner
of South Africa School, the world’s second accredited
Lipizzaner Center.

The Lipizzaner stallions selected for the Spanish Riding
School performing troupe are all grey or white, and stand
between 15.2 and 16 hands, with a crested neck, back and
neck of equal length, and short legs which they can easily
tuck close to their bodies when they perform the “Airs
Above the Ground”.

There are only about three thousand purebred Lipizzaners,
although the breed is gaining popularity for use in
harness. And Slovenia has honored the horses by having an
engraving of two leaping Lipizzaner on their 20-Euro coin.

The idea is that iron shoes will not permit the
hooves to expand as they com into contact with the ground,
and if they are not expanding properly, they are not
forcing blood from the hooves back up into the horse’s
legs.

A horses’ cardiovascular system, to work at its best,
needs all four hooves to get in on the act. Each hoof
has, underneath its hard outer shell, a tissue densely
packed with blood vessels, called the laminae (remember
Barbaro’s laminitis?), which will be acting to “pump”
blood back towards the heart with every step the horse
takes.

Horses in the wild are on their feet for close to
twenty-four hours a day, as they graze. They even sleep on
their feet, taking brief naps, but for the most part
staying alert to the chance of predators.

So wild horses, because their barefoot hooves are
constantly at work, are much less likely than confined
ones to develop circulatory problems than confined ones.

But horses both shod and stalled for the majority of the time,
some proponents of the barefoot trim say, are a different story.

Advocates of the trim might compare a shod, stalled horse
to a couch potato who, when he or she does get up to
exercise, has to do so in a pair of shoes a size too
small. A circulatory system already sluggish from lack of
exercise, combined with feet that cannot flex properly,
will likely find the couch potato heading back to the
couch in short order. And the circulatory system will
remain sluggish.

The “Barefoot Trim” technique, of course, has its
detractors. But one of the strongest arguments in its
favor is the experience of the Houston, Texas Mounted
Police Department.

The Houston Mounted Police Unit, with thirty-eight horses,
is the second-largest in the U.S, and over two-thirds
of their horses work barefoot. They initiated their
Barefoot Trim program in order to extend the working life
of their horses, which often had to be retired from active
duty because of lameness.

They began their program in 2004, when all their horses
wore barium-tipped shoes to improve traction on Houston’s
paved streets. Shadow, a four-year-old Dutch warm-blood
was their first horse to go barefoot, working up to
fourteen hours at a stretch in the week leading up to the
Super Bowl, on every imaginable surface.

Shadow’s rider, Officer Greg Sokoloski, noted that at the end
of the trial Shadow was experiencing some hoof soreness,
but not lameness, and put hoof boots on his front feet.
The soreness disappeared, and Shadow finished out the week
with no further difficulty.

Officer Sokoloski next tried the Barefoot Trim on Barney,
who suffered from chronic lameness and abscessing. He
pulled Barney’s shoes, trimmed and balanced his hooves,
and Barney has been performing, without further
discomfort, as a barefoot police horse ever since.

The Houston Mounted Police Unit continues to use hoof
boots when transitioning shod horses to going barefoot,
for long-duration assignments, and when the horses are
used in crowd control.

The newly-transitioning horses, especially those whose
hooves have become deformed from working shod over hard
surfaces, are given a trim and all the time they need for
their hooves to heal properly.

Some of the horses compensate for the discomfort they
experience when shod by adapting their gait, and cause
themselves conformational problems. So they need extra
time to return to their natural way of standing and
moving. But once they are up to being ridden, they are
schooled with hoof boots at the walk, trot, and canter,
over all types of terrain, until they are ready to return
to work.

I did have doubts about working barefoot horses for long
distances over asphalt, but the success of Houston’s
Mounted Police program is making me think again.