Casse runner bounces back from heat distress at Saratoga
Corruption, the 4-year-old gelding who was in heat distress after winning a race at Saratoga on Wednesday is in fine shape, trainer Mark Casse said Friday morning.
The Equibase chart for the 1 3/8-mile optional-claiming allowance on turf said Corruption "pulled up in heat distress after being brought back in front of the grandstand and was walked off."
But that only begins to tell the story of what happened.
"He won easy, came back and just started staggering and he went down a couple times," Casse told Horse Racing Nation. "But what was so nice was everybody was helping. Miguel Clement, some of his people, they brought ice to put on him. And Jose (Ortiz) and Irad (Ortiz Jr.) and (Kendrick) Carmouche, Dylan (Davis) and I think Manny Franco? They were all running back and forth, getting ice and throwing it on him and everybody was hosing him."
"The NYRA vets, the New York State vets were tremendous. It's very dangerous, people don't realize, but when you have a 1,000- or 1,200-pound animal that has kind of lost control of his whereabouts, you could get seriously hurt. There were people jumping in and putting their own lives in danger. Like I said, it's serious. He went down three times."
It was moving for everyone who was at the Spa when it happened.
"What was amazing to me, when we did get him up and we started walking him home, the crowd just started cheering for him," Casse said. "It's kind of like, you see where an athlete gets hurt and they're down and when they get up, the entire crowd cheers for them. That's what happened. So as we walked down the stretch, which is a quarter of a mile long, at each section they would stand up and cheer for him. A lot of them ran down to the rail and were cheering for him."
The temperature was 92 degrees at race time, but Casse said the incident is inexplainable.
"You just never know. He's been in hotter weather. What makes them react the way they do? It was hot, but it wasn't Florida hot. So I really don't have a good explanation, and I don't know that anybody does. And just because they do it once doesn't mean they'll do it again. It doesn't mean that they're more likely to do it than somebody else again. Obviously we'll do all kinds of tests on him. I was a little worried that maybe there were some issues with his heart, but that wasn't the case. I've had vets listen to him. So far as blood work came back fine. We'll play it day by day and see."
For Corruption's part, he seems fully recovered, Casse said.
"Now this morning, even the next morning, he's like, Put me in, coach. I'm ready. In fact, he was bucking and kicking this morning. He's an extremely nice horse. He's got a wonderful personality."
Corruption, by Medaglia d'Oro, has five wins from seven starts this year and was fourth in the Grade 1 Manhattan in his prior race.
Casse is most encouraged by what the reaction says about racing.
"All you have to do is be there and you understand. So many times people want to write how the horses are treated and this and that. You saw this was a family to come together, our competition, a lot of them. But they all came together to make sure this horse was OK. And one of my assistants, her name is Amanda Romero. And she was there getting buckets, using the hoses. And as everything was calming down, she started crying. And I put my arm around her and I said, 'Amanda, he's going to be fine.' And she said, 'that's not why I'm crying.' I said OK.
"She said, 'I'm crying because of how wonderful everybody was and to see everybody come together. That's why I'm crying.' I was saying to somebody yesterday, if it happens to a person, everybody's like, OK, but let something happens to an animal, and everybody cares. I came away from there feeling great, awesome how everybody handled it and how everybody reacted. And I was proud of I was proud of our industry, I was proud of our people. People don't get it. They don't understand that these are our kids, right?"