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IMO Fallon did his job by highlighting his concerns to the trainer….the trainer ignored the jockeys concerns
Who has the most experience when sat on top ????
Money Talks :shrug:
Anything Fallon felt when cantering down to the start would have been felt more at racing pace. Horatio Nelson not only travelled well, but he held a beautiful position for a long time with little trouble/effort. This leads me to think there was nothing wrong with the horse.
But if there was, and Fallon was against running the horse, surely he had every opportunity to pull the horse up…as if there was something wrong he would have felt it early in the race.
PaulCS…dont bring up the London bombings…last time i did i was virtually accused of making them up..!
There will be some debate about this but ultimately we will never know the answer…whats happened has happened
What did strike me was what a tiny horse he was! Someone compared him here to hawkwing. HW was at leats five times the size!
Because he hasnt progressed physically, I doubt whether he would have been a true contender this year, but they have a nice one in dylan thomas…thats for sure
Horatio was beaten at the time he broke down in my opinion. He was a very good 2-y-o but was a small horse that lacked a great deal of scope and looked as though he hadn’t trained on all that well.
Ofcourse it is a shame that he was fatally injured, nobody would dispute that.
‘Magnier and Tabor are worth at least 500 million quid put together. Do you honestly think they would care if they lost 100k or so on him??? I watched them walk down by the stands towards where Horatio was being treated. I saw the looks on their faces – I just didn’t want to admit what had happened to myself. ‘
Dear jackane
It’s not what you lose it you don’t run. It’s what you win if you do.<br>
I was struck with the parallels to Barbaro’s injury – including the dubious situation at the start – and it shows how lucky Barbaro was that he didn’t break the skin.
Quote: from trackside528 on 3:35 pm on June 4, 2006[br] IMO he sustained the injury when he was just squeezed for room in the straight. He may have gotten unbalanced and took a wrong step, we will never know… RIP Horatio Nelson.<br>
You know, I wondered that myself. Is there any question that he may have clipped the heels of the horse that was in front of him (I think it was Visindar)? <br>The view of what happenned was partially obstructed by the other horse you see.
<br>On Ceefax p359 they have a sporting letters page and one guy who says he’s now ashamed to be involved in the sport mentions the expression on Fallon’s face (clearly seen on tv) when he was sat in the stalls on HN and I’d forgotten about that but I remembered straight away.
He was shaking his head and talking to a jockey on his left who you couldn’t see because of the camera shot but he certainly didn’t look 100% confident that the horse was o.k. to race.
I know that Kieren loved this horse like a pet so this is going to hit him very hard but is there is bit of guilt in there as well?
UN I don’t think anyone would despite that Horatio Nelson before it got injured. With wishing any disrespect it makes you question how unlucky HN was in The Dewhurst when 2nd to Sir Percy.
I felt that it may not have had anything to do with what happened at the start. It seemed to me that he trod into something – although I have only seen the incident once from above. It reminded me of the Oaks on Friday when Rising Cross seemed to step into something, and also of a Derby a couple of years ago, when a long priced horse was third (well behind) when he too stepped in a hole and was put down.
Anything to do with the track?
I don’t think KF would have set off on HN had he felt there was any risk to either his own life or the horse’s.
I did spot the look on his face in the stalls, and I read his statement that he asked Aidan/Vet to look at the horse at the start as he wasn’t getting a good feel from him – but that as he trotted him he began to feel better.
I think he was in the stalls thinking that it was unlikely he was sitting on the winner – not thinking"They’re sending me out here to my possible death!". I don’t believe he would allow himself to be placed in that situation, or that Aidan/Coolmnore would take such a risk with a horse either.
I also recall John Magnier – interviewed after the Oaks – saying about HN (not exact words) "This horse is still coming….he may be spot on tomorrow, or it might be the next race". At that stage I concluded that HN might not win the Derby but I still hoped he would.
However after the display at the start I reckoned he just wasn’t going to…and I suspect KF had come to that realisation as well.
I haven’t been as upset about a racing fatality since Golden Cygnet…HN was a lovely little horse with a great heart and attitude.
J
<br>The following article appeared in the Bloodhorse.com <br>I share it with the forum readers <br>Oxford Prince died in front of me, a breath before the finish line at Timonium, some 25 years ago. His leg had broken, sending him into a ghastly tumble, his jockey kissing off the ground like a stone on a still pond. When the vet came, the colt lifted his leg obediently, and the cannon bone swung from its middle as if hinged. The needle came quickly, and Oxford Prince sank to the dirt and was gone.
What I had seen came as an explosion. I was a kid at the time, and though I knew of Ruffian’s death, I thought this kind of horror was a great rarity. I assumed that such a wrenching event would be huge news, spurring the soul-searching and reform that you see when an athlete dies in any other sport. But nothing happened. There was a sodden weight in the air, a quiet grief, yet the card proceeded with no comment, only a few remarks of "that’s racing." I sat against the rail and cried.
On Preakness day, as I watched Barbaro standing on the track, turning his ruined leg in plaintive circles, I thought of that day at Timonium. Now, as then, there is a stricken horse whose sport failed to prevent his injury. There is anguish, shibboleths of "that’s racing," and in a situation that screams for sweeping action to stop this from happening again, the familiar passive resignation. It was the same for Timely Writer, Go for Wand, Prairie Bayou, and so many others. We love and mourn our horses, yet our hands are largely idle.
We speak of catastrophic breakdowns as if they are blue-moon anomalies. They are anything but. The most comprehensive investigation of breakdowns, the Equine Racing Injury Reporting System, found a rate of 1.6 fatalities in every 1,000 starts. Other studies have found almost identical results.
By this measure, every horse has a one in 624 chance of dying in each race. If that statistic held true for the 469,644 individual performances in the United States and Canada last year, 753 horses died in races in 2005. That’s more than two per day. Untold more died in training; while there is scant information on training deaths in America, horses in a Japanese study suffered more fractures in training than in racing. The fate of jockeys follows. Virtually every year, at least one jockey is killed as a result of a horse’s breakdown. Others are paralyzed or severely injured.
A comparison to the National Football League puts this death rate into perspective. Every week, each of 32 teams fields between 40 and 47 players; at minimum, 1,280 players produce 20,480 performances per 16-game regular season. Even if every team fielded only the minimum number of men, if football players died at the same rate as racehorses, 33 players — more than two per week — would die in the regular season alone. That the NFL would tolerate such a thing is inconceivable, yet racing does just that.
This is not to say that we do nothing for our horses. No athletes in any sport are as closely monitored for soundness, as the system of multiple pre-race veterinary inspections attests. And we have made some promising, albeit piecemeal, efforts to study breakdowns. This is admirable, but the statistics demonstrate emphatically that we aren’t doing nearly enough.
NASCAR offers a model that the industry ought to emulate. When Dale Earnhardt died in the 2001 Daytona 500, NASCAR launched an exhaustive safety research campaign, then implemented changes with alacrity, installing new head restraints, shock-absorbing track walls, crash data recorders, and reconfigured cockpits. Earnhardt’s death was NASCAR’s fourth in nine months; in the ensuing five years, not one driver has died.
In breakdowns, racing has a massive, deadly serious problem, and we all know it. The Thoroughbred industry has a moral obligation to horses and jockeys to pursue solutions on a grand scale and with the utmost urgency. We must summon the best minds, create a truly comprehensive, uniform injury reporting system, and fund a slew of controlled studies. Most importantly, we must be willing to make the difficult choices that follow.
We need to do this not only for Barbaro, but for the hundreds of Oxford Princes who pay for our ignorance and inaction with their lives.
Laura Hillenbrand is the Eclipse Award-winning author of Seabiscuit
Last seasons 2 year olds created quite an impression, what with George Washington, Sir Percy and the much hyped talking-horse Pescatorio among others, however from the time he made his debut my favourite was Horatio, I always new he wanted further than a mile and thought he would take some stopping in the Derby. Arguably very unlucky not to win the Dewhurst on his final 2yo start and its very sad to lose such a talented animal after breaking down in the Epsom showpiece, Sir Percy’s win was overshadowed and some of the gloss had been taken away from his victory, rightly so in my opinion, Sir Percy lives to fight another day and will move on to further glory but Horatio has been taken from us in tragic circumstances, the memory of the Derby of 2006 will be marred by this sad loss to horse racing. R.I.P. Champ.:(
Anybody who is standing in O’Brien and Fallons corner after what happened I applaud you, anybody doubting eithers integrity and laying the blame at their feet are watching racing for the wrong reasons.<br>You would be hard pushed to find someone more in love with horses than Aidan and he would never have let him run if he thought his safety was in question. As for Kieren he reacted so fast to pull the horse up as quick as he possibly could to prevent the horse suffering any more pain than he had to, then helped Horatio back to his feet keeping him as calm as possible until medical attention arrived.<br>Aidan O’ Brien and Kieren Fallon are Professionalism and Compassion defined, nobody is feeling the pain more than them.
I dont think there is a more sympathetic rider than Keiren Fallon and when he says the horse didn’t feel right then you have to take his word.<br>He could hardly come out afterwards and say I told you something wasn’t quite right.<br>That would undermine Aidan and the whole Colmore operation.<br>No a very sad day for racing and as the proverb said Live with wolves, and you learn to howl.
If money HAD been the over-riding consideration, they certainly wouldn’t have let him run.
He was probably worth a fortune at stud then, but his potential was awesome. His Dewhurst run marked him out as a champion-in-waiting, imo. Only champions really take off like a bat out of hell, when terrific horses are tiring at the end of a Group I.
Time has proven that Aidan made the wrong decision in running both Georg W and Horatio N in their most recent runs.However that is the price you pay when you are in business. You make decisions. Some are right some don’t work out.Horses break down on the gallops, coming back from injuries, between  the winning post and the unsaddeling enclosure. If Aidan had the time to do a cost-benefit analysis he might have made a different decision. However as a trainer he made the best decision he could. If the jockey disagrees he can  lead the horse back to the barn but he will probably end his career by doing that, no trainer wants to be confronted by a jockey saying he was put up on an unsound horse by a trainer who should know better.
The question is; how would you decide if you were the trainer and did not know the tragic outcome of the wrong decision? If you were the jockey what would you do if you thought the trainer made the wrong decision. Does the jockey have a third choice rather than just doing what he is told to do, by the trainer, if he believes the horse is "wrong"?
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