More footage including some from behind
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I wonder what he looked like say 6 months ago. Is that just how this horse moves? He absolutely looks unsound to me in the week leading up to the BC but did he always look unsound and that’s just how he went?
Connections of Midnight Bisou & McKinzie state they both will be back to race in 2020.
I for one am looking forward to another year of watching Midnight Bisou.
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I think that one is way worse than the Twitter link.
I hope we get more information.
I’m still just flabbergasted to see all of this. None of it makes sense with as stringently as they were examining horses. It wouldn’t make sense if the horse was running in the 3rd race on a Wednesday afternoon.
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Somewhere I saw an older video of him walking in the paddock; will try and find it later - but he looked more even in that one .
@Texarkana I would hope there is not a double standard that top trainer horses were inspected/judged more often/frequently/in detail than smaller, less well known trainers. But, I still wonder.
I also agree that I’m not on the OMG how lame is Mongolian Groom train. Too many variables and unknowns to make a determination based on one or two short videos.
Clearly Mongolian Groom wasn’t on the vet exam radar screen until after September 28 when he won the Awesome Again Stakes. The Awesome Again was a Win And You’re In race but horses still had to be nominated to the Breeder’s Cup (I can’t find the last date that a horse winning a Win And You’re In race could be nominated if they weren’t already.)
So, at the earliest, Mongolian Groom wasn’t a BC candidate until September 28… no Out Of Competition testing or any other scrutiny until that date.
From a LA Times article
Santa Anita announced a series of medication reforms and veterinary protocols in March that was designed to make Santa Anita the safest track in the country. The Breeders’ Cup adopted all those policies and put in place a system whereby horses were examined at least four times before race day and then watched at every phase of activity on race day. There were 30 veterinarians on site on Friday and Saturday.
I’d still like to hear from a spokesperson for the Vet Team on their thoughts/opinions on the video’s circulating. Is the video an accurate representation of how Mongolian Groom moves all the time? Did they see anything in any of their exams of Mongolian Groom between winning the Awesome Again and the Classic. They may choose not to say anything but that’s who I’d like to hear from.
Apparently the AAEP vets are “on call” vets who are not necessarily race track vets. Race track vets have the advantage of looking at race horses all day long, all year long, regarding soundness. And again, if there was not a vet watching him train that day, there would be nothing to report. And why didn’t the rider notice anything?
Wow. I am absolutely not a vet but that second video does not look great.
ETA: I agree, as others have posted, I cannot believe there is any way a vet saw that Mongolian Groom and deemed him fit to race.
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When I say Vet Team, I mean one of the, what was it 30, boots on the ground vets that was wearing a Vet Team vest clearly visible on TV. AAEP is not who I was thinking when I said Vet Team 
I don’t know which vets were assigned vests. If there were 30 different vets on TV with vests on who are not the AAEP contingent, kudos to the track for gathering that many.
No kidding. I’ll be the first to say I’m not very good at spotting subtle lameness and even I can see the horse isn’t comfortable.
Poor guy. He was really giving it his all out there until suddenly he couldn’t…
Did you read my quote from the LA Times which seems to match up to what I recall TVG broadcast in a safety/vet snippet they showed a few times.
The Breeders’ Cup adopted all those policies and put in place a system whereby horses were examined at least four times before race day and then watched at every phase of activity on race day. There were 30 veterinarians on site on Friday and Saturday.
I saw numerous times individuals that were wearing vests with the BC logo and Vet Team on the back. I assume that these were one of the 30 vets mentioned above that were on site Friday/Saturday.
I also just discovered an article from DRF confirming the number 30.
The team includes veterinarians from the Stronach Group, the track’s parent company, and veterinarians from the California Horse Racing Board and other regulatory agencies in the United States and Europe.
Lamparter said there have been 500 exams of Breeders’ Cup entrants as of Wednesday morning, with many runners examined on a daily basis this week. The exams have included physical inspections at the stables as well as watching horses in morning training.
“We’re looking at horses at rest and in motion,” she said.
Any abnormalities could lead to a horse being withdrawn, she said.
This is the group of vets that I’d like to hear from regarding the video’s floating around the internet and how the videos compare to what these vets actually observed with respect to Mongolian Groom.
If they weren’t keeping track of which horses they were examining and watching… shame on them.
Anyone else see this on Horse Racing Nation? Seems kind of weird phrasing.
"Enebish Ganbat, trainer of deceased Breeders’ Cup Classic contender Mongolian Groom , on Monday told USA Today he’s “very sorry” for the events of Saturday, when the gelding broke down in the stretch at Santa Anita Park and was euthanized due to injury.
Ganbat, a native of Mongolia, described the Breeders’ Cup as “a wonderful holiday” to USA Today’s Josh Peter , adding that “my horse made this a very bad holiday. I just want to say I’m sorry for everything.”"
I don’t believe English is his first language. I am guessing this because of his pronounced accent. I think I understand what he is trying to say. :yes:
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He should not have raced. Clearly he is lame- there’s no way the exercise rider wouldn’t have felt that and told the trainer he was lame. Heck, my friend went riding with me last weekend - took 6 steps on her horse at the walk and immediately noticed her horse was “off”. Her horse wasn’t nearly as bad as the horse in that video. Any decent rider can tell if a horse is lame -especially to that degree.
There’s no way the trainer didn’t know. Or the exercise rider. Or the groom. Someone definitely knew. As for the track vets, perhaps the horse was drugged so they didn’t detect the lameness. Either that or the vet that examined him was an idiot or paid to look the other way.
How does insurance payouts work on a horse like that? If a horse breaks down in a race is it covered under insurance?
I have ridden some older claimers that weren’t quite right behind, felt like a “flat tire” posting on one diagonal. With chiro, magna wave, and hill work, it might improve a little, but doesn’t go away, it’s just how the horse “is.” I wouldn’t call it sound as a sport horse, but lots of older low-level racehorses are uneven behind compared to a show horse. However the ones I rode trained on grass, ran on synthetic, and probably didn’t have enough talent or class to really endanger themselves. I don’t enjoy riding those uneven behind horses, but the trainer and track vets accept it and the horses run the same as their peers, sometimes in the money, sometimes not, doing their jobs.
That is a TOTALLY different game, though, than sending a horse to run in the BC. I would not expect any of them to move unevenly as shown in video.
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There will be a necropsy. No doubt they will test blood.
Every horse was tested for drugs at least once beforehand. No the vets are not idiots and they absolutely were not paid off. Just the fact that someone would ask that question illustrates the mountain that racing needs to climb PR wise to save the sport.
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Way back another lifetime ago, when I used to resell a lot of TBs, this was a problem I hit a lot. There are racehorses, particularly at the lower levels, who are clinically sound yet have unevenness in their gait. That unevenness will get a rider DQ’d from even the smallest of schooling shows. When you tell an owner or a trainer that you can’t resell their horse as a show prospect because he is not “sound” for the show ring at any level, that can ruffle a lot of feathers, especially when the state vet recognizes the horse as clinically sound for racing.
That’s also the reason I’m not willing to fully jump on the “Mongolian Groom was lame” bandwagon without hearing from someone in the know. I hope I have made it clear that my initial reaction to this situation was wrong; I did not think such a video could exist, yet it does, and I find it upsetting. Yet there still could be a plausible explanation. An explanation wouldn’t necessarily make the situation right, but it would provide us something to learn from this terrible tragedy.
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