This time, it happened off-camera, and post-race.
We were spared the footage of Eight Belles' catastrophic injury in Saturday's Kentucky Derby and immediate euthanasia, but no matter. If you saw the 2006 Preakness, the image probably still haunts you: of Barbaro, just out of the gate, falling away from the thundering pack that he was favored to beat, limping off on three legs as his shattered fourth one dangled in the air.
We might not have seen Eight Belles collapsing - after finishing a surprising second, the filly broke both her front legs - but it's becoming impossible not to see the tragic toll underneath the thrill of horse racing.
The one time I saw a racehorse up close was a couple years ago at Rendez-Vous Farm in Parkton, almost to the Pennsylvania line. I was struck by both his magnificence and his fragility, the way his sleek yet massive body was carried atop improbably delicate legs.
"Ah, I knew his grandfather as a yearling," the farm's owner, Debbie Frank, told me that day as she fondly stroked the horse's glowing brown coat.
The horse was a grandson of the great Seattle Slew, the 1977 Triple Crown winner that was trained in nearby Monkton, and had raced as well, until he developed bone chips in both front knees. While his surgeon - "the same doc who operated on Barbaro," Frank said - thought he could race again, the horse's owner brought him instead to Frank, telling her, "I just want him to be a horse for a change."
He came to the right place. Frank's farm is home to Equine Rescue and Rehabilitation Inc., a nonprofit she started 14 years ago to take in injured, damaged or simply aged horses. Frank and her volunteers nurse them to health, retrain them for "second careers," perhaps to be ridden on trails or as companion horses, and then try to arrange adoptions. (You have to live within a 150-mile radius of the farm so ERRI can perform regular inspections and make sure you haven't turned around and sold the horse at auction.)
She gets all sorts of horses - over the years, they've included a Chincoteague pony, a former jousting champion, one-time show horses and animals whose owners have divorced, moved to nursing homes, or just couldn't handle their expensive upkeep any more.
And then there are the racehorses, those that have suffered injuries that are neither life-threatening nor attention-getting in the way of a Barbaro or an Eight Belle.
