NEWS
VIDEO - O’Brien drops Salix in trying to end Breeders’ Cup drought
Posted: Wednesday, November 04, 2009 5:16 PM
by Jeff Lowe
Defending Breeders’ Cup winners Conduit (Ire) and Goldikova (Ire) will both compete with furosemide for the first time as they return from Europe to defend their victories this weekend, but Irish trainer Aidan O’Brien is taking a different approach with his horses for the Breeders’ Cup World Championships.
Breeders’ Cup Marathon entrant Man of Iron will be the only one of O’Brien’s seven horses who will race with the antibleeding medication, also known as Salix.
O’Brien was fined $2,500 by the California Horse Racing Board last year for making a late declaration that his Breeders’ Cup horses would race with Salix.
O’Brien said he will go the opposite way this year as he attempts to halt a 28-race losing streak since his most recent Breeders’ Cup victory in 2003 at Santa Anita when High Chaparral (Ire) finished in a dead heat with Johar for the win in the John Deere Breeders’ Cup Turf (G1).
“No one is more aware of that than we are,” O’Brien said. “The season is long for some horses and we’ve had some near misses. That’s just the way it goes. You do your best everyday. Sometimes you make good decisions and sometimes you make bad decisions, and you try to learn from your bad ones. …Starting very early in the season [for the classics] it gets long, but it’s the same for everyone really. Some people maybe did better jobs than we did.
“Obviously that’s maybe part of the reason that we’re not using [Salix] this year. Maybe just because the horses that won the Breeders’ Cups were on the [Salix], we probably went along with that policy, and maybe it wasn’t a good policy.”
O’Brien said Man of Iron has battled a few colds this year, so he will be the exception in receiving Salix, which is supposed to prevent pulmonary hemorrhaging.
“We scope a lot and none of them showed anything,” O’Brien said. “[Man of Iron] had a few colds, whereas the others didn’t. If we can get them here to perform near the races they did back home, you’d imagine they would have big chances. Rather than taking the initiative to put them on [Salix] and there might be a chance that it might flat them. Who knows really what’s the right thing, but we just decided to leave them natural and let them do what they’ve been doing all year.”
Conduit and Goldikova both will race with [Salix] for the first time, along with most of the other European-based horses. The other exceptions include Fleeting Spirit (Ire) in the Sentient Jet Breeders’ Cup Sprint (G1) and Zacinto (GB) in the TVG Breeders’ Cup Mile (G1).
Jeff Lowe is a Thoroughbred Times staff writer
