Leave the Jockey Alone

Saturday’s 134th running of the Kentucky Derby saw the favorite and triple crown hopeful Big Brown win in dramatic fashion, and it appeared that horse racing’s popularity was on the rise.

However, a quarter mile after the finish line, second place Eight Belles went down with two fractured ankles and was euthanized on the track a few minutes later. A day of good fortune had turned ugly, and everyone looked for someone to blame.

After the race, PETA and other animal-rights groups jumped on jockey Gabriel Saez, saying that he should be suspended because he knew the horse was injured before the end of the race and kept pushing him instead of pulling up. This assumption is completely unwarranted and unfair to Saez.

How can you just assume that he was injured and that the jockey knew this? You will never be able to prove that Saez knew that the horse was injured. If Eight Belles goes down before the finish line, Saez goes down with him in traffic and gets trampled by 18 other horses; then both horse and jockey may be dead. I don’t know Saez, but if he has any sense at all, he would rather pull out of the race when the horse is injured rather than risk going down with him.

Besides, not even PETA can honestly tell me that Eight Belles could finish second with two fractured ankles against 19 of the best race horses in the country. Even if the horse was a little gimpy, he finished strong enough to where Saez would have no reason to believe the injury was serious enough to pull out of the biggest race of his life.

That is the problem with animal-rights groups getting involved with sporting events like this. These groups are mostly made up of women who hardly know anything about sports; they don’t understand that a horse cannot possibly run on two fractured ankles. They also don’t understand that it takes more than a hunch for an athlete to completely give up on winning the biggest event of his life. Saez has probably dreamed of winning the Kentucky Derby for years, and if the horse is not even injured enough to finish lower than second, you cannot expect him to know the injury was serious enough to pull out of the race down the stretch. There is not even any proof that the horse was injured before the finish line anyway.

So leave the jockey alone. He is probably already feeling down about Eight Belles passing away, and to blame Saez for his death is just wrong. It was a sad day in the horse racing world, but don’t try to falsely accuse someone for this freak accident that could not have been avoided after the race started.

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