In the aftermath of tragedy, a writer's job is to make sense of it all for our readers. Bring new information, bring schooled perspective, bring some poetry that will console them in times of uncertainty.
But after the stretch run of Saturday's Test Stakes at Saratoga, what can you say?
I've had the misfortune to be in the press box at several racetracks when a horse has suffered a fatal injury. It never leaves me, but often the trauma is second-hand. I can see the way an ambulance is angled to block the public's view, and dread the reason why. I'll watch someone carrying an empty halter, sprinting on foot up the track. None of those days were as awful as this one.
I don't know how much people saw at home, where the race was being broadcast on FOX Sports, but I imagine it was enough. For thousands of people who were frontside at the track, the scene was so much worse. I've never heard a crowd move so quickly from cheering, to a collective gasp, to stunned silence. I looked away as soon as Maple Leaf Mel got up and I could see her front fetlock wasn't at the angle it should have been, but hundreds of people standing in the winner's circle couldn't turn away. They saw her leg. They saw her trainer in inconsolable tears. Despite the tarps, some saw her die.
I imagine breakdowns are upsetting to anyone, but when you've sat on a horse, or laid on the grass hand-grazing one, or spent your whole life reading their eyes and ears, I think it's harder. Something will look familiar about that horse, even if you don't know them, because it will remind you of the horse you love. It will be easier to imagine your horse standing in their place. I'll never know how grooms, exercise riders, trainers like Melanie Giddings, ever recover from seeing a horse they actually do know struggle in such foreign, terrible situations, mere minutes after going to the post slick and happy.
Many fractures are repairable with surgery, but it was clear from her movement as the gray filly stood up that this wasn't just a serious fracture, but there were also likely failures in the soft tissue supporting the delicate fetlock bones. In those situations, there's almost never anything they can do to fix it. The only question is how long the horse must suffer before euthanasia. It was unsettling to know she died right in front of us, but to van her back to the barn would have accomplished nothing but prolonging her pain, and that would have been an injustice to her.
I can see now why people cling so fiercely to the bad step myth. It really did look like Mel just missed straightening her pastern fully before her foot came back down to the dirt – the same way my dressage horse does now and then as we trot around the schooling arena or as he bumbles around in his paddock – and that she just had too much momentum behind her to straighten up again. We know, from academic research, that this is almost never the reason breakdowns happen, but I don't also know anyone who would suggest that Mel's trainer is someone who would push a horse, or ignore any sign of trouble, or take liberties with substances. Not with any horse, and especially not with this one.
So what do you say? There are people who were at the races Saturday who may never go back. There are people who may take weeks or days of flinching through stretch runs before they decide they've had enough. I'm not sure I can blame them.
You could say that horses suffer injuries like this in other sports and they do, although those incidents are not nearly so well-documented or broadly-observed. You could point out that they also find ways to have accidents in comfortable, safe stalls, or running free in a paddock or on a plain out West. I don't think that response really works anymore, because the people at Saratoga on Saturday only saw this horse, doing this job, suffer a traumatic accident, so other possibilities probably feel pretty remote. And that doesn't really absolve the sport from its responsibility to try to stop these things from happening.
You could say that she died doing the thing she loved most in the world, and that's true. But I don't think horses think about life and death the way we do. She hadn't contemplated the ways in which she would and wouldn't be OK leaving this world. Like most animals, horses live in the moment. Most of those moments were good ones, but the procession of them ended too soon.
You could say it's just part of the game. The race card went on after Mel died. The paddock bell tolled just minutes after the ambulance carried her body off the track, sounding like a funeral knell, but really it was telling us the horses for the next race were in the paddock. Horses went to the track this morning like always, although the people seemed a little quieter than usual. But the question that will always follow that is, should it be part of the game? And if you can't have one without the other, should you have both?
I've spoken with so many people in the last year who have been in the racing business their whole lives and who, from one vantage point or another, fight to do the right things by horses. They're tired. They're jaded. They're getting tired of answering questions from their barista or taxi driver about horse deaths. They're telling me they're not sure how much longer they can keep defending the sport, and starting to wrestle with their own moral responsibility in continuing on.
More and more, I don't know what to say to them.
The post Voss: In Wake Of Maple Leaf Mel Tragedy, There Are No Easy Answers appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.
