Shared Belief prognosis excellent

It’s an amazing new world of information dissemination that we live in. I don’t know about you, but I have been on Shared Belief watch ever since the superstar gelding was pulled up in Saturday’s Charles Town Classic. Thanks to the steady stream of tweets tonight by majority owner, Jim Rome, we now know exactly what the injury suffered by the top rated horse in America was, and that the champ is doing as well as can be expected.

While the news of some sort of injury was expected, racing fans received the very good news that the prognosis for Shared Belief’s recovery is excellent. It was, what we all wanted to hear.

Rome, a television sports personality, not only demonstrated his love for the horse, by keeping his fans updated on Shared Belief’s status, but he also sent out a sincere thank you to Hall of Fame rider, Mike Smith, for pulling up his stable star before the injury worsened. You can also see just how much Smith cares about Shared Belief in the photo above.

Finally, Rome went a long way in reassuring Shared Belief’s large fan base that the Jerry Hollendorfer trained son of Candy Ride would be very well taken care of during his rehabilitation. My guess is that Rome will also see to it that Shared Belief is well taken care of for many, many years to come.

Never before in horse racing, has information been so quickly and readily available to the fan. Tonight was an example of social media at its best. Thank you to Jim Rome for making it so.

These were the good tweets. Not all of the messages relayed on Twitter since the injury could be categorized as such.

I wonder if the same people that immediately came down on Shared Belief’s connections after the Charles Town Classic for running the star at such a small track, are the same people that bitched about him never having run outside of California before his trip to West Virginia. Some people seem to be mean spirited no matter what, even if they contradict themselves.

I also saw plenty of tweets saying that Moreno likely would have beaten Shared Belief even if the prohibitive favorite had not been injured. Moreno deserves credit for winning the race, but I’m not buying that argument one little bit.

I’ve always liked Moreno, and know that on his best, he is a very good horse. I also know that he ran a very good race in winning on Saturday, while setting a track record. But, really ... did we not see how easily Shared Belief defeated Moreno, and the runner-up, Imperative, in previous shared races before the injury at Charles Town?

It seems to me that people take pleasure in being able to knock our stars down, as soon as there is any opening to do so. Disappointing. For those of us that have forgotten, this is the horse that we will miss until he is ready to race again...