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The X-Ray Files: Liz Crow

The TDN sat down with bloodstock agent Liz Crow for this fourth offering in a series presented in cooperation with the Consignors and Breeders Association (CBA). Through conversations with buyers and sellers, the series looks to contribute to the discussion on radiograph findings and their impact on racetrack success.

Bloodstock agent Liz Crow, who has an ever-expanding list of accomplished sales purchases, as well as a burgeoning book of pinhook successes with partner Paul Sharp, admits there are subtle distinctions between buying to race versus buying for resale.

“There are several different findings for a horse that you can live with to race, but you can't buy to pinhook,” Crow said. “Some of those things, for example, are the moderate to severe sesamoiditis and juvenile tendonitis. Those horses will be perfectly fine and perfectly normal if you give them time, but you can't put them right into a 2-year-old sales cycle because you can't give them that time. They have to get ready and start breezing. Moderate to severe sesamoiditis requires 60 to 90 days before you break them. Obviously, you just don't have 60 to 90 days [for a pinhook prospect]. You've got to start breaking them when they get to your farm and they need to be breezing by January. And that just doesn't give you enough time. So it's all about timing.”

Whether it's searching for a racing prospect or a potential pinhook, Crow said the biggest part of her job may be determining what is consequential and what isn't on the vet report.

“I think your relationship with your vet is very important,” she said. “Not trusting just the vet report or what the vet reports say, but actually forming a relationship with the vet and having that line of communication where you can have a discussion. You as the agent, and with your client, you have to take that information and make that decision based on what you're given.”

Crow has been shopping the sales for over a decade and has learned to value just that type of relationship she has developed with Dr. Jeff Berk.

“I've been doing this for quite a while now and I've used the same vet my entire career,” Crow said. “I have listened to Dr. Berk read vet reports to me and talk to me about this for 12+ years at this point. We vet 400-500 horses in September alone. Oftentimes, Jeff will say to me in September–we are obviously all moving so fast–he will say, 'Call me on this one, let's talk about it.' And that means this is not a black-and-white thing. I honestly think it's a toss-up for what's more important for my job, whether it's picking out and finding a horse that has talent or is it really deciphering these vet reports.”

She continued, “Vet reports to me are very subjective. They are not black and white. If you get three different vets that give you three different opinions–and that happens more often than not–they are giving you their opinion. They cannot tell you if this horse can or cannot make the races. They are using their experience to tell you what they think based on what they found in the X-rays. But these are not facts. So the most important thing for me, as an agent, is to decipher what that means and if it fits for what my client is trying to do with that horse.”

Crow has built a career on finding horses on a budget who go on to do great things on the racetrack. She purchased future champion Monomoy Girl for $100,000 at the 2016 Keeneland September sale and was able to acquire subsequent Grade I winner Jack Christopher for $135,000 at the 2020 Fasig-Tipton October sale.

“Sometimes the best thing you can do for your client is find that horse that doesn't vet perfectly, but may be very athletic,” Crow said. “I've had a lot of success doing that and I think it's a great way to approach it, as long as your client is clear and understands the risk.”

After purchasing Monomoy Girl in 2016, the filly went on to win the 2018 GI Kentucky Oaks and twice won the GI Breeders' Cup Distaff. The two-time Eclipse champion provided Crow a case-in-point.

“Monomoy Girl had moderate sesamoiditis behind in both hind ankles and she had an OCD removed behind as well,” Crow said. “Dr. Berk and I had a discussion about it and I was completely comfortable with bidding on her based on what he had told me. And I think it did bother a few people, from my understanding. But that's the thing, when you get three or four different vets, they all have different opinions. I think that's part of the problem, all of the opinions.”

Over the years, Crow has developed an understanding of what are significant issues and what issues she can deal with.

“If your vet says the horse has this, this, this and this, I sort of go through it and immediately think, a P1 plantar fragment behind, a lucency in the upper joint, mild sharpening in the upper joint of the right knee, those things are all fine. I know those three findings. Like a sharpening in the knee, any finding in the upper joint of the knee, mild to moderate sesamoiditis that scans well, a fragment in the back of the ankle, these things don't mean anything really. They are just comments, a differentiation of normal. I think that there are a lot of findings that are just that, a differentiation of normal. And deciphering what is acceptable and what isn't is not as easy as just looking at the vet sheet. Monomoy Girl is a great example of a horse that, if you read her vet sheet without any sort of context or discussion, you could think she could have problem, but she didn't and none of those things bothered her throughout her entire race career.”

Advancements in veterinary scans provide potential buyers with a treasure trove of information to work through. That's not a bad thing, according to Crow.

“You can never go wrong with more information,” she said. “I am not going to say it's a bad thing that we have better information. I am just going to say that every horse has something and it's very rare that you vet a horse that is perfectly clean. You have to learn what you can live with. Most good horses have something. It would be great to continue to inform these buyers that horses don't have to be NSA [no significant abnormalities] to be able to be purchased.”

Click to read previous The X-Ray Files: with Tom McCrocklin, David Ingordo or Ciaran Dunne.

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The X-Ray Files: Ciaran Dunne

Ciaran and Amy Dunne's Wavertree Stables is perennially one of the leading consignors of 2-year-olds in the country, but their process for buying pinhooking prospects at the yearling sales changed dramatically with the advent of the sales repository over two decades ago.

“We started buying yearlings before the repository,” Ciaran Dunne said. “Back in those days, you had to shorten down your vet list because of the costs involved. There was very little that we couldn't live with because we might vet, at the very most, four horses a day. So if you were very picky, you didn't get anything. Back in those days, sesamoiditis wasn't as big a deal, there was no such thing as ultrasounds and soft tissue scans. So very early on we learned to live with a lot of things. And because of that, we trained horses who had various issues. We saw a lot of what horses can live with and what horses can't live with.”

Dunne said his decisions at the yearling sales are generally based more on the individual in front of him than on the expansive vet reports available today.

“Some years, I will say I'm not going to buy any horse that has any degree of sesamoiditis above mild,” he explained. “But if I find a horse I really, really like and he's got moderate or severe sesamoiditis and I still like him, I'll probably still buy him. I think if we allow the veterinary findings to dictate what we buy, then a lot of times you end up buying horses you are just OK on physically and you walk away from the ones you love because they have some little issue that might never have been a problem. I take the tact that I would much rather buy one that I love that has a little this or a little that than buy one that I'm just so-so on because he has a clean set of X-rays.”

The Wavertree team doesn't adjust its process just because they are predominately shopping for pinhooking prospects, rather than racehorse prospects.

“I have people tell me, 'He'll be OK to race, but not to pinhook,'” Dunne said. “Ultimately, they are all going to have to be racehorses. And I can't be a future purchaser's veterinarian. I can't say what they will like and what they won't like. There are plenty of horses that come with veterinary findings that are of no consequence to me, but the buyers run away from and hide. And then there are horses that, when we get the X-ray report back after the breeze show, I think we are in trouble here and nobody else seems to have a problem with it.”

Buyers relying solely on a vet report while neglecting to consider the individual may be missing the bigger picture, according to Dunne.

“I'm not going to say that everything with bad X-rays or a bad ultrasound will go on and run,” he said. “I think everything is relative. Some horses who have issues, if they have a lighter frame they can maybe live with them, whereas with a heavier-bodied type, you'd be less inclined to give them a chance. I think people use the vet reports to weed horses out, but I don't think you can look at a vet report and say this horse is no good.”

He continued, “In the same way, when people read X-rays or read soft-tissue findings and aren't physically there to look at the horse, I don't think they can give a fair judgement on whether this is representative of what the horse actually is. Trying to evaluate a horse off a piece of paper in terms of radiographic findings or trying to evaluate a horse digitally from 500 miles away, I don't think that works. I think there has to be a little common sense. Context matters.”

When Dunne switches from buying yearlings to selling juveniles, he sees a difference in how potential buyers utilize vet reports.

“I think they are harder on the 2-year-olds than they are on the yearlings with the vetting,” Dunne said. “We've seen a lot of yearlings sell for a lot of money with radiographic findings that really raised our eyebrows. Whereas the slightest thing in the 2-year-olds chases them away. Which seems to me to be backwards. Maybe it's that people [buying yearlings] think they have enough time to fix anything. I think they are looking for ghosts.”

Watching horses perform on the racetrack at a 2-year-old sale should provide buyers with more confidence than it generally seems to, according to Dunne.

“It amuses me when a horse goes up and works well enough and gallops out well enough to make them come down to see him and he comes out and he shows himself well and then they are going to come up with this huge problem that he might have,” Dunne said. “I don't know what they think we are that we would be able to mask something like that. At the end of the day, if you look at the scratch rate at 2-year-old sales, the ones that have problems are eliminated before they get to see them. And usually the ones that work good are the ones that end up being good horses. Again, you have to put the whole thing into context. How considerable can it be if they just performed at that level?”

Dunne stressed what he sees as the importance of potential buyers making decisions based on the findings of–and consultations with–their own veterinarians.

“I hate the vet reports,” Dunne said. “I hate showing the vet report because I feel like people, when they ask to see the vet report, are just looking for a reason not to go vet them. Whereas if they just go vet them, their veterinarian may not have an issue with the ink that's on the page. When we buy yearlings, I don't look at vet reports. If I like the horse well enough, I look at my vet's interpretation and I live or die by his opinion. I think everybody should do their own homework.”

Click to read previous The X-Ray Files: with Tom McCrocklin and David Ingordo.

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The X-Ray Files: David Ingordo

The TDN sat down with bloodstock agent David Ingordo for this second offering in a series presented in cooperation with the Consignors and Breeders Association (CBA). Through conversations with buyers and sellers, the series looks to contribute to the discussion on radiograph findings and their impact on racetrack success.

Bloodstock agent David Ingordo, whose resume includes such superstars as Zenyatta and Flightline, has a stockpile of experience and a team of trusted veterinarians to work with when he travels the sales grounds looking for his next future champion. For Ingordo the all-important vet work is just one part of the puzzle and utilizing it properly helps him to determine when he's getting a bargain and when it's time to walk away.

“The radiographs are one of many tools that we use once we are deciding if we are going to buy a horse or not,” Ingordo said. “Obviously, we inspect them on physical, and then we look at the pedigrees and then we decide if they make the short list. If they make the short list and they jump through a couple other hoops–do they fit whatever trainer or owner I'm working with–then we make that decision to move forward and turn the vetting in to the vet we use.”

Over the years, Ingordo has developed trusting relationships with vets like Dr. Keith Latson, Dr. Nathan Chaney and Dr. Jeff Berk.

“They are all really practical veterinarians,” Ingordo said. “They understand what these horses are going to do. One of the strengths, I feel, with our vets looking at radiographs and interpreting what they tell us is we tend to be forgiving from a practical standpoint. You have to remember, it's a very subjective game. I try to use people that I find their observation and subjectivity is in line with mine and the clientele that I represent and what our goals are.”

At the end of the day, the vet report represents a risk-reward quotient for Ingordo and his clients.

“The X-rays are just part of the puzzle,” he explained. “You have to know how that piece fits when you are buying a horse. If people want a perfectly clean horse, that's fine, that's their prerogative. They're going to pay for that because, if it's a good-looking horse with pedigree and clean X-rays, they top the sales a lot of time. That doesn't mean it's a bad thing, but if you are willing to be a little more forgiving, which we try to be, and you have experience with certain issues–Dr. Latson was great. He would say, 'David, on the racetrack, I've seen this issue 100 times. And my question would be, 'How many times was it limiting in the horse's soundness or their performance?' And he would say, 'Never.' 'Great. I'm in. I'll buy that one.' Or he would say, 'This is one we saw a lot of unsoundness with.' I would ask what is my percentile. He said, '60-40 to be unsound and then once we do the surgery, you have a worse chance of it recurring.' Ok. That's not for me. That's what I need to know.”

Knowing what he can and cannot accept on a vet report has often allowed Ingordo to buy horses at a bargain price.

“We take a lot of chips out,” he said. “At the 2-year-old sales, let's say, they work well and they chip an ankle. It's a garden variety P1 and they are clinical, they have a little pressure in there, and the horse should bring $300,000-$400,000, but because people don't want to give it the time, I can get it for half-price. And the horse is never going to have any residual issue there, best I can tell going into it. For a $2,000 surgery and 60 days stall rest and turn out, which the horse probably needs anyway. What the heck? That's not a bad thing for me.”

On other issues he deals with, Ingordo said, “A lot of sesamoiditis makes me want to scan a horse. If I scan them and that sesamoiditis isn't causing any tears or strain or there are no problems where the ligaments and the suspensory branches attach into the sesamoid, I will probably give that horse 60 or 90 days off and have a perfectly sound horse. And I will probably get a discount. That's ok for me. But if I scan that horse and I find tears, I am out. Because I have had bad luck with that.”

Knowing what issues are acceptable risks with a racehorse prospect should, theoretically, be the same criteria used for pinhooking prospects, right?

“One of my greatest pet peeves in this business is when a vet tells me this horse is OK race, but not to pinhook,” Ingordo said. “I understand what people mean by that, but it isn't a good way to describe it. Every horse is ultimately meant to be a racehorse. I don't care if you buy it for $1,000 or $1 million, the goal is to get these horses to a racetrack, run them around in a circle, bet on them and hopefully get your picture taken because your horse is faster than your competitors. So when I hear that, I understand what they mean and I will call it shorthand. If you are racing this horse and there is no more scrutiny on it from potential future buyers, then these little–I call them jewelry on their X-rays–they have a little old chip that is rounded off, they have some sclerosis here that looks like it's healing, they have an OCD that they didn't take out, but it's not on a weight-bearing part of the joint or doesn't communicate, or they have an OCD somewhere that isn't articular–the horse has a good chance of being racing sound and he's going to be ok. If you have to take this horse and resell it and it performs with a fast time at the 2-year-old sales or grows up to be some Adonis and everybody is going to come vet the horse, people could have differing opinions if this horse is 'clean.' I joke when you pinhook you have to find a horse that the most inexperienced person that has money can approve, so you get the most buyers on that horse.”

He continued, “I love a homebred that is a really good individual that you know he won't pass the commercial market standards on X-rays. What's wrong with him? Little B.S. stuff, but he's never been lame a day in his life, his joints have never blown up. He's been sound, he trains every day, he eats every day, he does everything right. Those horses usually stand up and they would have gotten killed by the scrutiny of the commercial market. Everything needs to be a racehorse and I think we need to remember that, as an industry. That's the ultimate goal.”

For the best way to back up the accumulated experience of what issues hinder performance on the track and the anecdotal evidence of racetrack success stories who had 'failed the vet,' Ingordo envisioned a quixotic research project.

“We have an amazing opportunity to get all this data,” he said. “If you just took the September sale–it's a huge population, it's an annual event–there are 5,000 every year and if you did a 10-year study, just on September yearlings, that's 50,000 horses that go from the most expensive horses sold in the world down to $1,000 or one bid horses and you would see all up and down the ladder. You could rate them, almost say these have a good chance of making the races, these ones we would say have super limiting X-ray findings and then follow those and classify them, these are stifle issues, these are ankle issues, these are hock issues, these are knee issues. I think you could start to draw some really good conclusions. If someone wanted to do that. But that's a massive, massive undertaking.”

Click to read last week's The X-Ray Files with Tom McCrocklin.

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The X-Ray Files: Tom McCrocklin

The TDN sat down with 2-year-old consignor Tom McCrocklin for this first offering in a new series presented in cooperation with the Consignors and Breeders Association (CBA). Through conversations with buyers and sellers, the series looks to contribute to the discussion on radiograph findings and their impact on racetrack success.

Tom McCrocklin, who was represented this spring by graduates in both the GI Kentucky Derby and the GI Kentucky Oaks, as well as by a pair of million-dollar juveniles in the sales ring, admitted his approach to vet work varies greatly whether he is shopping for a racehorse prospect or for a potential pinhook prospect.

“It's a very clear distinction when I buy a racehorse for myself or I buy a prospective pinhook horse,” the Ocala horseman said. “With the racehorses, I have a pretty good feel of what I can and cannot live with anymore. I feel like I've got my brain wrapped around what young horses can live with and move on with and be racehorses. And then I have the other category of pinhook horses where I know I will have to make buyers and buyers' vets on the other end happy. Then it doesn't matter what I think and what I feel like I know. It matters what they think and what they want.”

McCrocklin said veterinarian scrutiny of the horses in his 2-year-old consignments has only become more stringent in recent years.

“The diagnostics done on the sales grounds pre-purchase are off the charts,” he said. “I will give you a perfect example. The genie is out of the bottle now with ultra-sounding and ultra-sounding so many structures. These vets are all on a kick now where they want to ultrasound eight suspensory branches and four tendons and four proximal suspensories, which is a lot of soft tissue structure. The long and the short of it is this, in this age group, 2-year-olds in training, under pressure, breezing, very few are going to have pristine ultrasounds. They are almost all going to have some commentary; all ranges of everything from swelling to fiber disruption to actual tears. And they are learning as they go–just like me as a consignor–that we are going to get to where we can't sell many horses if the vets are going to expect perfection.”

McCrocklin purchased Kingsbarns (Uncle Mo) for $250,000 at the 2021 Fasig-Tipton Saratoga sale and sold the future GII Louisiana Derby winner and Kentucky Derby runner for $800,000 at the 2022 Fasig-Tipton Gulfstream sale. And he is co-owner of GIII Gazelle S. winner and Kentucky Oaks runner Promiseher America (American Pharoah). He said the proof of the vet report lies in the performance of horses like those on the racetrack.

“I compare the ultrasounds to their race records,” McCrocklin said. “I personally had a filly in the Oaks this year and I personally sold a horse that ran in the Derby this year and they both had soft tissue pathology at the 2-year-olds in training sale. They were both given 30-60 days after the sale and they both wound up being fine. A lot of very good, sound racehorses have significant radiographic and ultrasound pathology. They have it at the 2-year-old sale and they have it throughout their racing careers and a lot of them are very sound horses.”

He continued, “I had this conversation with Bob Baffert. 'I tell you what, you pick the 10 soundest horses in your barn–not the 10 best, but the 10 horses that you perceive to be the soundest ones. And you go through those 10 horses and you X-ray everything and you ultrasound everything and do everything these guys are doing at the 2-year-old sales and it will blow your mind what those horses have on radiographs and ultrasounds. You will not believe what you find. And the first thing you are going to say to me is the same thing I am going to say to you at my consignment. I don't know what to tell you, I've been training this horse for six months and he's never had a bad day and he's never had a gram of bute, he's never taken a bad step, he's never worn a bandage. And here you come with all of your machines and when you are done, I want to start crying.'”

Once McCrocklin buys a yearling in the fall, he will spend the rest of the year and early spring working with the youngster. That experience gives him a unique perspective on both the horse's potential and his limitations.

“So many of these horses on all ends are being bought by agents,” he said. “These guys are really bright and they are good horse buyers. I am in no way criticizing them for the decisions they make, but one distinction between us is that I am in my horse laboratory every day in my barn. I put my hands on horses and I am training horses and I am putting young horses under significant pressure to buy them in September or October and make a 2-year-old in training sale in March. They show up in September, October and August and they are on the buying end. And they come back in March, April, June and they are on the buying end again. What gets lost along the way is everything that happens on a daily basis in the six to eight months in between. And there is a significant amount of knowledge and education that comes with that process.”

Asked for specific examples of issues with yearlings that will knock them out of his pinhooking portfolio, but not necessarily his racing stable, McCrocklin said, “Subcondylar cysts in cannon bones–basically a hole in the cannon bone that you are never going to be able to sell as a 2-year-old–subcondylar cysts in a stifle, which would basically be a femur. I can live with those horses because I've trained so many of them that they are fine. But you take that horse to a 2-year-old sale and you are dead, you're absolutely dead. So I can't buy them anymore.”

McCrocklin's biggest vexation, he said, was the variance of opinions on throats.

“When we're looking in a horse's throat with a scope, everyone has a different opinion,” McCrocklin said. “Some people like this, some people like that. On these real popular horses, you can have 10 to 20 scopes and I can have 10 guys come in and say, perfect, perfect, perfect and then the 11th vet comes in, a really reputable vet, and says this horse flunks miserably. It is not black and white, it's far from it.

“But here's what I can tell you, again, as a horse trainer, not as a buyer, not as a seller, I have a lot of horses that scope fine and they can't breathe and I have horses that scope like shit and they breeze great, never made a noise, they get their air, they don't make noise when they are breezing. Again it's very mysterious because we keep those vet books at our consignment and it says Grade I, everybody loves it, and I'm thinking I've been training this horse for eight months, this horse can't breathe. The only way to identify those horses that scope great at the barn, but can't breathe is what we call a dynamic scope where we put it on them and we actually view what's happening in their throat while they gallop and or breeze. And we see a lot of crazy things happen in these throats that are good at rest and the horse can't tolerate training. And then we have horses that can't fully abduct, they can't open their arytenoids all the way to clear their airway, but they've never made a noise and they don't have exercise intolerance. And they breeze great.”

McCrocklin's advice to shoppers is to find a vet who knows what's a deal-breaker and what might not hinder a horse's performance on the track.

“The big-picture message is that there are definitely not parallel lines between racing performance and vet work,” he said. “There is a lot of gray in there. What I tell people is get yourself a very experienced–not just a good vet–but an experienced vet that has a body of work and says, 'Look, I've seen a lot of these horses and they can live with this,' and he also has a body of work and he says, 'Look, I've had a lot of these and none of them make it.'”

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