Flatter: This could be positive, lasting legacy of Art Collector

We are in the midst of my 47th annual campaign to stamp out August. Most of that time it was an irreverent way to whine about a month that has too much heat, too many back-to-school sales and too few holidays.

Got a birthday right now? It is not Aug. 18. It is July 49.

Along came this August. Now this campaign has gotten serious.

As if the Test Stakes were not bad enough, then we were hit with what happened Thursday. For me that was when a phone call brought the news that Art Collector was euthanized after being diagnosed with laminitis.

If the Inuit language has 50 words for snow, how many does racing have for the tragedies we have experienced this month?

We barely got to know Maple Leaf Mel. By the time we realized she had built a perfect record, and before we could memorize the details of her roan features, she was taken away from us in the Test.

Art Collector was different. Much different. Before we stopped calling it the coronavirus and started calling it COVID, Art Collector was there for us. Remember?

Around the time we would have been sharpening our focus on the Kentucky Derby winner, there was no Kentucky Derby. Art Collector filled the void with a story that kept us entertained while we were locked down.

Where to begin. There was the win at age 2 that was taken away after he was flagged for a deworming drug. Owner Bruce Lunsford, a high-profile Kentucky Democrat who once made a competitive run at Mitch McConnell, moved his homebred colt from Joe Sharp to Tommy Drury, a trainer best known for handling horses who are taking a break from racing.

Drury’s farm was supposed to be just a halfway house. Art Collector’s next move was going to be to trainer Rusty Arnold, but the pandemic and its new red tape got in the way. If it was a case of being stuck with Drury, it was like a shelter pet getting stuck with a loving foster home.

By the time the rescheduled Blue Grass Stakes finally came around in that ad-hoc, summer meet at Keeneland, Art Collector had become racing’s new star. Our new star. We could not wait to share the ride with Brian Hernandez Jr.

The win in the Blue Grass convinced horseplayers. Art Collector went from 30-1 to 10-1 in Las Vegas futures to win the Derby. That would be the Kentucky Derby. As in the derby in Louisville, Ky. Because there was another Kentucky derby, lower case, that Art Collector’s mere presence turned into an event.

If there was a moment to remember during the summer of Art Collector, it was the Ellis Park Derby, a listed stakes that was given the sudden cachet of being the last major points prep on the road to Churchill Downs.

In a lot of ways, it really never got better than it did that Sunday in August 2020. Art Collector never trailed at the windows or on the track. At 2-5, he wired that little ol’ $200,000 race out in Western Kentucky.

Thanks to an ill-timed nick on the bulb of his left heel, he never got to the Kentucky Derby, where he would have been the second choice behind Tiz the Law. He raced in the Preakness and the Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile, but he would not win again for Drury.

By the time Art Collector was sent to Bill Mott in the summer of ’21, it was different. We were coming out of lockdown and easing back into whatever normal was going to be. That son of Bernardini who felt like an overachiever had turned into a legitimate player.

With Luis Sáez and later Júnior Alvarado doing the riding, Art Collector won six times in 11 starts for Mott. He would rise to be the top-ranked horse in America and no. 4 in the world. He got his Grade 1s in the 2021 Woodward and this past winter in the Pegasus World Cup.

I was there in South Florida for that last win nearly seven months ago. It felt a lot different seeing Art Collector in the flesh and being among a small throng to cover him and his connections face to face than it did in quarantine watching him and them on a flat screen and relying on a phone to be the lone conduit to talk and text.

By then it felt like we were living “A Star Is Born.” Art Collector had become the character played by Janet Gaynor and Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand and Lady Gaga. We stopped looking at him as having the blush of unexpected success and came to take his marquee-worthy triumphs for granted.

Damned if it didn’t end sadly, too.

Laminitis. Gdsobmf laminitis. I am pretty sure I do not have to spell it out for you.

While animal-rights demagogues rail about the most visible tragedies in our game, it is left to those of us immersed in racing to reckon with laminitis. It does not make for splashy video. It does not lure drive-by media to send their real-life cartoon characters to stand in front of racetrack entrances, feign knowledge and breathlessly make like chatterboxes that begin every sentence with “now” and eventually send it “back to you.”

It takes more than a breezy, 90-second, live report to explain laminitis. Therefore, it does not play well between fires and the weather. Years ago someone explained laminitis by comparing it with a car needs a front-end alignment. Except in the case of horses, no amount of overcorrection can compensate for it, and there is no equivalent of a mechanic to fix it.

This might be the part in the script where we can agree on something for a change. In what has come to be known as horse-racing Twitter – or HRX, if we must – Parx track announcer and FanDuel TV publicist Jessica Paquette has risen above the populist cesspool to become one of its most trenchant posters.

“Laminitis is insidious and devastating, and a positive outcome can come down to luck,” she wrote Thursday. “Donate to @Grayson_JC (Grayson-Jockey Club) to support research to help continue to find ways to help horses get to the other side of it.”

If there is something us racing lovers and those racing haters can get behind as one, why can’t this be it? Go to the Grayson-Jockey Club website and learn just what laminitis is and, more important, the deep dive into the science that could get rid of it. Since 1999 the research foundation has spent more than $2 million to pay for 23 projects, all in search of cures.

While we rue the fate of Art Collector, maybe a heightened awareness of laminitis and, in turn, an infusion of research dollars can be the good that comes out of all this.

The better to stamp out laminitis than to waste time fretting about August.