I remember talking to my dad Saturday morning and him asking if I was going to watch the Preakness horse race that afternoon, and I simply responded that I wasn’t too into it, so maybe. Well, since then I have become engrossed in it. A little background:

In horse racing, their are three main races every year, the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont. These races are normally about 2-3 weeks apart, and are for horses that are 3 years old. If you are able to win all three, you have won what is called the “triple crown.” To give you an idea how difficult it is to do this, there have only been 11 Triple Crown winners since 1919, the last one coming way back in 1978.

A couple weeks ago an undefeated horse named Barbaro ran away with the Kentucky Derby (see picture above), and was the odds on favorite to win the Preakness at 3-5 odds. Everyone thought this may be the year as this horse was just plain awesome. Anyways, I happened to click over to the race just as it was about to begin, and saw Barbaro jump the gun, ie. jump out of the gates too soon and have to be put back in. So, now the stage is set to watch this horse run away with the 2nd of the Triple Crown races. The gates open, and all the horses take off. Normally the horses jockey for position, then settle into a groove for most of the race, and then have a huge final spurt at the end. Well, as they were jockeying for position, Barbaro mis-stepped severely with his back right leg and immediately started to limp. Well, the TV crew immediately picked up on this, as did the jockey, the only problem was the TV crew had to continue to follow the horse race while the jockey tried desparately to halt Barbaro so he wouldn’t injure himself anymore. Needless to say, I, as well as the rest of the world, sat there having to watch a race I didn’t care about instead of seeing what was going on with this horse that had just become injured. As most of you know, if a horse breaks his leg, odds are they have put them to sleep because a horse is not able to survive on three legs b/c of their weight and possibility of disease.

So, here I am, feeling a ton of emotions for a horse that 5 minutes prior I didn’t have a care in the world for. Obviously the horse was taken immediately into physical care for X-Rays and to be sedated. Crazy thing was, they said they had to first try and calm the horse down before giving it a sedative as a horse still wants to race despite being injured, hence why the Jockey has to literally stop the horse. The reason being, I assume, is because the horse has been training its whole life to race, and has been prepared for the last couple of weeks to race, so it wants to release all that energy and win, just like he has been trained to do. Anyways, the X-rays revealed 3 broken bones, above and below the ankle, which meant obvious surgery. On Sunday, they performed surgery on Barbaro inserting 20+ screws along with metal plates to try and stabilize his ankle/leg. The good news is … 1) he survived the surgery 2) he looked and acted fine afterwards, even slightly jogging back to his stall and, 3) he still has a chance to live. The doctor says he still has a 50-50 chance of survival, but things are looking good so far. On the right is a picture of Barbaro’s ankle after surgery, and on the bottom is a picture of him after surgery with his cast on.