I burned through the King Ranch website scanning for Hamilton.
Saw that her sister Helen Alexander is a Jockey Club member. Thanks for sending me back to the history. 
You are absolutely entitled to your opinion, and I am not attempting to argue you out of it.
I happen to have a different one, and that’s okay. I have a lot of sympathy for the outrider who was in a very difficult situation. Would it have been better for the public perception of the sport if it had been handled differently? Sure. I’m just not as willing to criticize the outrider, especially not knowing the entirety of the situation, like how the outrider lost that first strap.
As for how babies are started, I wish they were all started the way you described. I worked for a locally well known breeder/trainer/author back in the day, and they brought their horses home from the track, let them down, reschooled them and sold them as sport horses. That was their end game, so everything was done in their training with that likely second career in mind. Of course, some went to the breeding shed, but because they were smart and responsible, only a small portion of them did - the rest moved on to non-racing homes, not the killer sales.
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For another connection, Mike Matz (Olympic Show Jumping Rider and later Ky Derby winning race horse trainer with Barbaro) is married to D.D. Alexander, who is also part of the “Kings of King Ranch” family.
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Also people forget that sometimes horses just take a like or dislike to each other. We have two geldings that cannot be on cross ties together or turned out together but both are completely fine with other geldings and go out in a herd with them. They just took an instant dislike to each other. Horses are not robots.
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You’re cracking me up. It’s like you saw my computer history from last night. I did a mini-grad course in Ms Hamilton – read: I skimmed like crazy and now consider myself an authority.
(Not, really.)
Old enough to remember Matz in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and beautiful tragic Barbaro.
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Anyone know where RS’ dam ended up after the auction and where she is now?
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That will leave a mark…
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We have two geldings here who are the same way. Great with every other horse on the place - except each other. Even a shared fence line is not an option… they must be have at least one paddock/pasture between them. This has been War ever since the younger one retired from the show string and came home. 
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So he did get the lead rope on RS. That bite looks painful. So do the bite marks on the outrider pony that someone posted earlier in the thread. .
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Here’s a story about the guy who purchased her last time she sold:
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Sorry for picking a nit, but yes, a lead rope, not a pony strap. They’re different. A pony strap is a straight piece of leather, threaded thru the near bit ring, the pony rider or outrider holds both ends of the strap.
The advantage of this is you don’t have to get near the horse’s head again to release the ponied horse, you just let go of one of the ends of the strap.
A lead rope is much more complicated, because you have to open and close the snap. And getting close enough to get the lead rope snapped looked to be a challenge with RS. (I don’t know if you’ve ever snapped a lead rope on a moving horse from another moving horse; but it’s not easy, even if the horses are cooperating.)
I’m guessing that the outrider tried to get the pony strap on him and failed and lost the strap; and that his back up plan was the lead rope. Because what we saw in an earlier video was another rider trying to give him a pony strap and RS getting more worked up at the approach of another horse.
But I am probably extrapolating from incomplete data.
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Small Victories.
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This situation with a crowd of reporters is not the norm for the horse and could be unsettling. Better to be safe with any 3-year-old colt and have the chain on just in case. If you don’t need to use it, great. I don’t think it’s a reflection on this horse’s personality or disposition.
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For those missing the reference
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OMG. I have always loved that song… and it was a special treat to sit right in front of Garnet Rogers as he sang it live in a small cafe…
" … and this morn as I crept to the barn, along 'bout half past three… there stood nursing on still trembling legs… one more small victory."
I was sitting there in tears… having been through many of those small victories.
This video shows another outrider coming around and up on the near side to hand over a lead shank… after which the bite we see in the photo above happened… after which the lead shank finally gets snapped on and they move off…
@Angela_Freda - your video will not play for me… I am also hearing that RS bit his original lead pony before the race - as well as the rider - and another pony had to take him to the gate while the rider saw to their injuries. Trying to verify that - but that horse was obviously ready to run the race of his life!
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Just dropping this one in. It’s from the interview this morning.
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I can’t imagine a ton of people are going to want to send their nice mares to be bred to RS, he’d probably savage them, too. He just looks like an asshole. I’d place him in the ‘he’d make a really great gelding’ category lol.
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