Saving Barbaro

NOTE: Writer Roger Morris was assigned to write the article printed below by a magazine that decided not to publish it following Barbaro's death. He thought it might be of interest to readers at timwoolleyracing.com Morris writes for The Hunt magazine and has a weekly wine column in The NewsJournal as well as contributing to national publications such as Saveur, USAirways Magazine, Drinks, Wine Enthusiast, and The Robb Report.

Saving Barbaro
A year ago, Barbaro won the Derby, then broke down at the Preakness. For tens of thousands of people, one horse's survival suddenly mattered.

By Roger Morris

Alex Brown is an exercise rider at Fair Hill Training Center, a necessarily thin Englishman who also has a passion for the internet, going so far as to put up a website for Tim Woolley Racing, for whom he works thoroughbreds. Woolley's stables at Fair Hill -- a bucolic swatch of green pasturelands and woods in the rolling hills of Cecil County just west of Newark, DE -- are located next to those of Mike Matz, the trainer who burst onto the racing scene on May 6 last spring when his horse, Barbaro, handily won the Kentucky Derby.

Just two weeks after the Derby, many of the Fair Hill clan traveled the 45 miles to the Pimlico race track on the west side of Baltimore for the running of the Preakness with visions of the Triple Crown dancing in their heads. If Barbaro won in Baltimore, as he was heavily favored to do, their next jaunt would be up the New Jersey Turnpike to Long Island for the third leg of the Crown, the Belmont Stakes.

But Brown stayed behind to attend the Preakness party being held by Fair Hill vet Kathy Anderson inside Matz' stable, where her office is located. Brown had had a great time at Anderson's Kentucky Derby party, watching on TV as undefeated Barbaro, owned by Roy and Gretchen Jackson's Lael Stables in nearby West Grove, left Bluegrass Cat 6 ½ lengths behind at Churchill Downs.

"There were maybe 100 of us there watching the Preakness on the big screen," Brown says, "and when Barbaro broke out of the gate early, we were like, let's get him
back in there and get this thing started so we can party. We figured he was easily the best horse there."

A few miles east, Alie Bragg-Berstler, owner of Kennett Florist, was herself watching the Preakness with a crowd at a local restaurant, Giordano's, as the race finally got underway "Suddenly, the whole place went, 'Ah,'" she recalls.

Outside of Atlanta, first-grade teacher Carol Crawford, watching at home by herself, was concerned as Barbaro was being put back into the gate. Although she and her family have two quarter-horses -- a totally different world than thoroughbred racing -- she did not consider herself a racetrack person. "I would watch the Triple Crown on TV, if I could, and that was about it."

Jennifer Rench, who is on the public relations staff at the University of Pennsylvania's New Bolton Center in Unionville, considered the best large animal hospital in the country, was also at her home watching the Preakness.

None of them was prepared for what happened next.

Just after the gates flew open and the field of nine horses raced for the first turn, Barbaro pulled up after a few strides, and jockey Edgar Prado was immediately off his back. In a moment that was at once touching and bizarre, the small man tried to cradle and support the huge animal, who was holding up its right rear leg. The support might have for a time saved the horse's life.
It is a sad fact of modern-day racing that delicate-boned horses sometimes break down during a race, an occurrence that usually results in the horse being immediately destroyed or "put down." This happens because it is nearly impossible to put the bones back together again and to prevent infection and other illnesses for a large animal that must stand to survive.

Yet with survival lingers hope. The Jacksons immediately decided they would make an attempt to save their horse.

And just as suddenly, "Saving Barbaro" became a national obsession that would enmesh Brown, Bragg-Berstler, Crawford, and Rench and thousands of others.

"It was devastating," Rench said. "I knew immediately he would be coming to New Bolton, so I called and volunteered to work."

Brown recalls, "Before the Preakness, I said to Tim that I might put an update on Barbaro on his website. I see Mike [Matz] at the track practically every morning." But now there would be no party, no update. "That night I was thinking that I was done with the Barbaro project"

Bragg-Berstler knows many of the horse people whose stables spread along Route 926 that crosses southern Chester County. "We do an occasional delivery to the farms," she says, "and I figured there might be a few orders for roses and things like that for Barbaro."

"I was devastated," Crawford says. "That evening I kept searching the channels and CNN trying to find out how he was doing." But all she found were snippets of news as Saturday turned into Sunday. "I prayed and prayed for him."

By the time that Rench reached New Bolton, TV news vans with their satellite dishes were already there. Barbaro arrived around 9 in a high-tech Pimlico van "with a police escort and an NBC-10 helicopter." Well-wishers had gathered on overpasses of I-95 holding signs and shouting encouragement as the contingent had sped north.

The surgery, led by head surgeon Dean Richardson, began at 1 p.m. the next day -- Sunday, May 21. More than 100 members of the media were kept busy touring the facilities at New Bolton until shortly after 7 p.m., when the marathon operation ended.

In the first of many press conferences and briefings, Dr. Richardson told the reporters that, "Barbaro presented with a case that was about as difficult as such an operation could be," citing three different bone breaks and other complications that required insertions of metal pins. But, he continued, "We are optimistic." Local fans were already posting signs of support and love over the gates and fences of New Bolton.

When Bragg-Berstler arrived at her shop on Monday, orders for flowers to be sent to Barbaro were pouring in, a big under-evaluation on her part. And it wasn't just from locals, but from Barbaro fans all over the world.

"In the days and weeks afterward, we started getting calls for gifts and food for the staff, as well as flowers for Barbaro," she says. She found herself handling non-floral orders for pizzas, bagels, donuts, and snack baskets. As the recuperating stallion began to show more and more strength, carrot cakes and horse treats gained in popularity. Plus the singing balloons, gift certificates for staff to local restaurants and golf courses, and a sheet cake with Barbaro's picture on top.

"We've been contacted by around 600 different people," Bragg-Berstler says, many with repeat orders. And the florist shop, located on West Main in Kennett Square, became the unofficial Barbaro headquarters for fans who over the summer made pilgrimages to see where Barbaro lived, even if they couldn't see the celebrity himself.

Things changed for Alex Brown as well.

"I went to lunch on Sunday with friends," he says, "and everyone was asking what was happening at New Bolton." So when a vet acquaintance that evening told him Barbaro was out of surgery, Brown immediately posted the news to www.timwoolleyracing.com and took out an ad on Google to trumpet his scoop.

"We had 3,000 hits the first day, and the site crashed," Brown says sheepishly.

But he was soon back up, posting new information once or twice daily. Within days, the Woolley site, where fans could also post their own news and messages, and Kennett Florist became the information hubs for racing fans and ordinary people worldwide who wanted to Save Barbaro.

In Atlanta, Brown's website became required reading for Carol Crawford.

"By Tuesday, I had found the Tim Woolley website," she says, "and I was so relieved." And so she became one of the legions of people who sent gifts and checked the website, in her case "sometimes three times daily."

The site grew to receive as many as 7,000 hits daily, says Brown, who also teaches internet marketing at the University of Delaware. There was a new rush of concern in July when Barbaro's uninjured left rear hoof became infected with laminitis, and major portions of it had to be removed. Dr. Richardson, who performed that operation as well, said the prognosis for the beleaguered horse was "poor," yet Barbaro's recovery continued as summer turned to fall.
Gradually, the fans, who called themselves "Barbaromaniacs," began to tackle projects beyond Barbaro immediate health, such as highly-successful, fan-centered fundraising efforts for New Bolton, support for anti-horse slaughter legislation, and demands for safer race track surfaces that would lessen racing injuries such as Barbaro's.

Eventually, Crawford and Brown became internet friends, so on a chilly November weekend at Churchill Downs, where the Barbaro saga had started six months earlier, Crawford and her young daughter attended their first horse races -- the Breeders' Cup series -- with Brown there to explain to them what it was all about.

"It was wonderful to see all those marvelous horses that I had been reading about all summer long," Crawford said, now fully a racing fan. "But, of course, I had mixed emotions." That was because two horses suffered track injuries during the weekend of racing. The one to the filly Pine Island was so severe that she had to be put down.

"Barbaro has heightened the consciousness of racing," Brown says, "and racing needs to figure out how to minimize the risk of fatalities."

The Monday afterward, he was back in the saddle at Fair Hill, exercising the last of four mares in the brilliant morning light. Crawford was back in Georgia in front of her first graders with new experiences to share. Rench was in her office answering media calls. "I don't know if we'll get back to 'normal' here," she had said during the summer.

And Barbaro was quietly grazing, not too far away.

"Mrs. Jackson was once asked why there was so much interest," Rench recalls, "and she said something like, we are all looking for heroes, for someone to get behind."

But after months of appearing to be on the road to recovery, the great horse's health took a turn for the worse in the last days of January. After discussions among the New Bolton staff at the Jacksons, Barbaro was put down on January 29, 2007.