Former Derby favorite Omaha Beach undergoes surgery

Omaha Beach’s surgery, rescheduled from Thursday afternoon to Friday morning, was successfully completed, and the former 2019 Kentucky Derby favorite is back and resting in his stall at the Rood & Riddle Equine Hospital in Lexington, Ky.

Rick Porter’s Fox Hill Farm provided the update through Facebook, also giving followers a look inside the operation room as doctors repaired an entrapped epiglottis, or a block in his breathing passage.

Dr. Foster Northrop, who sat alongside Richard Mandella at a Churchill Downs news conference this week the morning after Omaha Beach scratched from the Derby, explained the issue.

“It blocks probably about a third of the airway, and in a race of this magnitude, that's too much to give up,” Northrop said. “So the only option is to treat it. And medically you can treat these things, but once they entrap, it's very difficult to treat them medically and you usually have to do surgery.

“The surgery is very simple. A lot of times it's done standing. They will go in and make an incision in that tissue. Basically cut it in half. It will fall back off the epiglottis and shrink up and disappear like it was before this all started.”

In this case, Omaha Beach, a son of War Front who won both the Rebel Stakes (G2) and Arkansas Derby (G1), laid down during surgery. Fox Hill Farm shared video of the full operation in a rare look at this side of the industry. Dr. Rolf Embertson led the surgery.

“Let me say is he a special horse,” Mandella said Thursday. “I mean, you watch him out there on the racetrack, he was galloping one day. I said to somebody, I forget, I think it was Mike Smith, I said that looks like Muhammad Ali when he's going into the ring. He would just bounce and hardly touch the ground and float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. It just said it to me. He is really special.

“And then the kind personality. I never had a good horse like him that had such a kind personality and took it in stride the way he does. So it's just an unbelievable thing to have one like him, but I have not had time to sit down and look at the schedules ahead. And obviously what happens today at the hospital and the next two weeks will be fit into what I make plans, and Saratoga could be a possibility.

“There's a couple of races there. There's the Haskell in New Jersey, the Pacific Classic in Delmar. Breeders' Cup at the end of the year is the obvious big goal. We'll find something else to do.”