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Trio Of Off-Track Thoroughbreds, Now Police Horses, To Present Colors At Pegasus World Cup

Three retired Thoroughbreds who have excelled at second careers as members of mounted police units in South Florida will help present the colors before the singing of the national anthem Saturday at the Pegasus World Cup Championship Invitational at Gulfstream Park.

Tizrobertcharles and Guidoinaspeedo, both members of the Davie Police Department's Mounted Patrol Unit, and Rockaway, a member of the City of Coral Gables mounted unit, will help present the colors before the playing of Saturday's anthem on Pegasus World Cup Day featuring the $3 million Pegasus World Cup Championship Invitational (G1) and $1 million Pegasus World Cup Turf Championship Invitational (G1).

“Gulfstream Park focuses on racehorse aftercare to provide one time competitors a meaningful second career,” said Mike Lakow, Vice President of Racing at Gulfstream Park. “We welcome these athletes back to the track alongside local equestrian law enforcement. The Stronach Group supports accredited programs so these horses can be retrained, rehomed and retired to caring homes.”

Tizrobertcharles, retrained at the Florida Thoroughbred Retirement and Adoptive Care (TRAC), was adopted by the Davie unit by former trainer and Officer Gary Cortolillo. An 11-year-old son of Bwana Charlie who won his seventh and final start, Tizrobertcharles patrols the town daily and has attended several special events. 'Charlie' has a soft eye and a great mind.

Officer Mark Groeneveld, 'Charlie's' partner, has been an officer for 21 years and joined the mounted unit in 2019.

Katie Schmit, farm manager and trainer at TRAC, says retired Thoroughbreds can be retrained for lesson horses, therapy horses, trail, pleasure and show and performance horses.

“What makes OTTBs so incredibly special in my eyes is their impeccable work ethic and desire to please,” she said. “They are meticulously bred to win and thus have an inherent need to feel successful. The exposure they receive at such a young age gives them a huge step up when their racing careers are over. When we match their second careers with their personalities, they truly take it from there. They thrive on learning new things and have a love for adventure. We have seen them graduate from our organization and excel in every area imaginable, from simply bringing a smile to their owner's face each morning, to the most demanding athletic pursuits.”

Guidoinaspeedo is a 9-year-old son of Maryland-bred Meadow Monster who also won once in seven starts while racing in the Mid-Atlantic. 'Buddy,' as he's affectionately called, has been with the mounted unit since 2015.

Officer Richard Spradling, 'Buddy's' partner, has been an officer since 2007 and joined the mounted unit in 2019. Spradling has an equestrian background, having ridden Criollo horses in Argentina.

Rockaway, a retired Thoroughbred who raced 10 times in South Florida, is the first documented police horse in Coral Gables in nearly 90 years. Rockaway, who served as a flag horse at Bergeron Rodeo, enjoys the attention he receives from the public. His partner is Officer Ashley Sheran.

Lt. Dan, a 15-year-old Quarter Horse who has been with the mounted unit since 2018, will join Tizrobertcharles and Guidoinaspeedo. Officer Angela Creel is Lt. Dan's partner and has been with the unit since 2016. Lt. Dan will serve as the flag bearer.

Drako, a 21-year-old Belgian-Quarter horse cross, will also join the group. Sergeant Chad Bishop will partner with Drako, formerly a member of the Miami-Dade mounted unit. Bishop has been an officer since 1997. He is currently the K9 sergeant as well as a mounted unit sergeant.

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Causes Of Wobbler Syndrome Discussed At UK Equine Research Showcase

University of Kentucky hosted the first session of its 10th annual UK Equine Research Showcase in a virtual setting Jan. 5. The session emphasized musculoskeletal topics in weanling to yearling horses and presented both completed and work-in-progress projects.

Jennifer Janes, DVM, PhD, Dipl. ACVP, associate professor of anatomic pathology at UK's Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory presented on bone pathology in equine Wobbler Syndrome during the session.

She focused on the condition seen in younger horses, which can develop anywhere from 6 months to 7 years of age depending on breed.

Janes defined equine Wobbler Syndrome as an equine neurological disease resulting from spinal cord compression in the neck due to vertebral malformations. This is a disease that is caused by skeletal malformations or related pathological changes that decrease the space available in the spinal canal. On a clinical level, it presents as a neurological disorder. The underlying skeletal changes that lead to a stricture or narrowing of the spinal canal can be variable. What they all have in common, however, is a resulting compression of the spinal cord that leads to the observed neurological deficits.

According to Janes, research shows that although the disease isn't gender specific, males are more predisposed to developing wobblers compared to females, by a ratio anywhere from 3:1 up to 15:1 described in the literature. The disease is seen most commonly in Thoroughbreds, Tennessee Walking Horses and Warmbloods, but can be found in other breeds.

According to Janes, neurologic deficits are typically more severe in the hind limbs than the forelimbs in Wobblers. This is because nerve tracts that control hind limb placement are more superficial in the spinal cord. Thus, they are the first to be a compressed due to vertebral malformations.

Janes said Wobbler Syndrome is considered a multifactorial disease with contributing factors including rapid growth, high energy diets and altered copper and zinc. A potential genetic role is suspected but has yet to been specifically characterized. Available treatment options range from conservative management and nutritional changes to surgical intervention. Appropriate treatment recommendations can be made in consultation with a horse owner's veterinarian.

There is evidence showing that horses with Wobbler Syndrome can have increased frequency of osteochondrosis in the neck as compared to unaffected horses. Osteochondrosis is a developmental orthopaedic disorder where the normal transition of cartilage to bone does not occur. In Wobblers, osteochondrosis is located in the articular processes of the cervical vertebrae.

Janes and colleagues investigated articular process pathology in the entire cervical column, comparing horses with Wobblers Syndrome to unaffected horses. The goal was to increase knowledge on the skeletal pathology associated with the disease in order to advance our understanding of the underlying causes and disease mechanisms.

As background, according to Janes, articular process joints in the neck are synovial joints that function to link adjacent vertebrae in the column. For reference, the knee is a type of synovial joint. This type of joint is composed of two adjacent bones lined by articular cartilage that are connected by a joint capsule and synovial fluid fills the intervening joint space.

The investigative approach was to first quantitatively assess lesions identified on postmortem MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). Secondly, a representative group of identified of articular process bone and cartilage lesions were further characterized using micro-CT (computerized tomography) and histopathology.

Findings included cartilage and bone lesions in the articular processes occurred with more frequency in Wobbler horses as compared to controls. In addition, articular process lesions were not limited to only sites of compression but also located at sites away from compression as well. All lesions involving the articular process cartilage were osteochondrosis. Lesions in the bone included bone cysts, areas of fibrosis and osteosclerosis (thickening of the bone).

“Osteochondrosis and true bone cysts support developmental aberrations in bone and cartilage maturation and osteosclerosis was also observed, supporting likely secondary biomechanical influences,” Janes said.

Researchers Taking First Small Steps Toward Genetic Test For Arrhythmias In Horses

Arrhythmias, or irregular heartbeats, in horses remain a fuzzy picture for those looking to prevent fatalities in horse racing, but one academic research team believes they will soon be able to make the causes slightly clearer. At a virtual presentation of the University of Minnesota's annual Equine Conference held Jan. 21, Dr. Sian Durward-Akhurst outlined the progress on a large scale research project that she hopes will produce the first step toward a genetic test for cardiac arrhythmia in horses.

It's not easy to catch arrhythmias in horses, in part because they don't necessarily occur all the time. An electrocardiogram taken of a horse at rest may detect no abnormalities even if that horse experiences exercise-induced arrhythmias 20 minutes later when galloping on the track. Researchers also believe that arrhythmias can come and go, appearing during one bout of exercise and self-resolving spontaneously. They may come back again in days or weeks, or never again.

Research has shown that based on the arrhythmias that can be diagnosed, the condition may be surprisingly common. A series of peer-reviewed studies published between 2005 and 2015 showed that more than 20 percent of racehorses have arrhythmias during or after exercise, with 22 percent of Thoroughbreds showing supraventricular arrhythmias (originating in the upper portion of the heart) and 29 percent showing ventricular (lower portion of the heart) arrhythmias. As many as 46 percent of studied Standardbreds were found to have supraventricular arrhythmias, and 19 percent to have ventricular arrhythmias.

“What's really interesting is when you look at these healthy racehorses, 16 percent of them have what we call a complex arrhythmia,” Durward-Akhurst said. “This is an arrhythmia that if you were in a hospital you would probably have defibrillator pads put on you because this gives you much greater risk of having sudden cardiac death. We're seeing these arrhythmias in completely healthy horses that are racing and performing as they should be, or maybe have just a little bit of poor performance. They're certainly not showing signs of really severe cardiac dysfunction, and we just don't know why.”

The most common type of arrhythmia in horses is atrial fibrillation. The primary symptom of this and other types is poor performance, but many horses seem to live with the condition with no outward signs.

For many years, veterinarians have wondered whether so-called “sudden deaths” among racehorses could be blamed on undiagnosed arrhythmias. These sudden deaths are those that occur without any outward sign of fracture or trauma and account for about 19 percent of racing fatalities, according to Durward-Akhurst. Frustratingly however, about 47 percent of those cases seem normal when they undergo a necropsy, making it difficult to pinpoint the cause.

“Unfortunately, unless you have an ECG on a horse when it collapses and dies, it's very difficult to prove arrhythmia is causing sudden death,” she said.

Sudden cardiac deaths also occur in human athletes, and about 30 percent of those also have no diagnosis on autopsy, which has led medical researchers to suspect exercise-induced arrhythmias could be to blame. We know that in both horses and humans, about 30 percent of atrial fibrillation cases are due to genetics, and we also know that research on humans have shown that exercise-induced arrhythmias are highly heritable, or likely to be explained by genetics.

Durward-Akhurst and her team have begun work on a large scale study aimed at identifying any genetic abnormalities that could predispose a horse to arrhythmia. Her plan is to perform cardiac exams on 500 racing Thoroughbreds and 500 racing Standardbreds and perform genetic analysis on 100 Thoroughbreds that had suffered sudden cardiac death and 100 Standardbreds diagnosed with atrial fibrillation. The goal was to see how useful ECGs were in identifying arrhythmias, and to determine if there were any common genetic variants among the horses found to have arrhythmias. In initial data-gathering, Durward-Akhurst sequenced the genomes of six Standardbreds with atrial fibrillation and cross-referenced gene variants that ere also present in the DNA of humans with the same condition. That brought her to 69 identified gene mutations in common.

Durward-Akhurst was partway into collecting cardiac exam data on racehorses when the COVID-19 pandemic hit last year, which has slowed down the process.

It's likely, Durward-Akhurst said, that this issue isn't as simple as a single gene going wrong, but rather several mutations coming together in the same horse to make cardiac problems more likely. That also means the study isn't likely to find a single gene that can clearly mark breeding stock a “positive” or “negative” for arrhythmia, the way Quarter Horses are now identified by their HYPP status. Instead, it may lead to a genetic test that could determine whether an individual has a low, moderate, or high chance of passing on mutations that could predispose their offspring to the problem.

Of course, while genetics may account for 30 percent of atrial fibrillation cases, environment accounts for the other 70 percent. There are lots of other potential factors, and one of them Durward-Akhurst is most interested in is what trainers may have in their feed room.

“One thing we do worry about is supplements,” she said. “There's an awful lot of horses out there that are on thyroxine, which is a thyroid hormone stimulant. When you look at what the thyroid does, it certainly does increase heart rate. There is no evidence that I'm aware of to show that these supplements are definitively causing a higher incidence of arrhythmias, but that's something we definitely would like to look at. The same thing for the diet — some horses get very high and excited on high concentrate diets, but as to whether or not that contributes to risk of arrhythmia, that's not yet known.”

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Centennial Farms To Sponsor TAA Best Turned Out Awards During Pegasus World Cup Card

Centennial Farms will sponsor the Thoroughbred Aftercare Alliance Best Turned Out Horse Awards during the Pegasus World Cup Invitational Card Jan. 23, 2021 at Gulfstream Park. This is the third year in a row that Centennial has sponsored the awards.

Centennial Farms, an ownership group with more than 30 years of experience operating elite Thoroughbred racing partnerships, will sponsor the cash prize and gift bag to be given to the winning groom of the Best Turned Out Horse for eight races on the card.

TAA and Centennial Farms representatives will select the horse in each race that is deemed to be the best presented, and that horse's groom will receive a gift bag and cash prize. The TAA and Centennial Farms will promote the winners on their social media platforms, and the winning groom will be mentioned on the live simulcast feed.

“We are honored to again partner with and support the great work of the Thoroughbred Aftercare Alliance, an outstanding leader in aftercare for our industry,” said Don Little, President of Centennial Farms. “Everyone at Centennial feels very strongly about the lifelong commitment to our horses and ensuring they have a secure home when their racing days are over. This period of unprecedented challenges has affected all aspects of racing and aftercare, from daily life on the backstretch to the ability of organizations like TAA to thrive. We are thrilled to help shine a well-deserved spotlight on just some of the grooms who have continued to work so hard each day to help these magnificent athletes reach their potential.”

Centennial Farms was the sponsor for the TAA Best Turned Out Horse Awards at the Pegasus World Cup in 2019 and 2020, with Little personally selecting the winners.

The TAA is a charity partner for the Pegasus World Cup.

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