I'll Have Another's bid for the first Triple Crown in 34 years ended shockingly in the barn and not on the racetrack Friday when the colt was scratched the day before the Belmont Stakes and retired with a swollen tendon.
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Triple Crown hopeful I'll Have Another is ridden by exercise rider Jonny Garcia during a morning workout at Belmont Park on June 1, 2012 in Elmont, New York.
"It's been an incredible ride, an incredible run," trainer Doug O'Neill said. "It's a bummer. It's not tragic, but it's a huge disappointment."
I'll Have Another, who won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes with stirring stretch drives, was the 4-5 favorite to win the Belmont and become the 12th Triple Crown winner and first since 1978.
Instead, he becomes the 12th horse since Affirmed, the last Triple champion, to win the first two legs but not the Belmont.
The scratch marks the first time since Bold Venture in 1936 that the Derby and Preakness winner didn't run in the Belmont. Burgoo King skipped the race in 1932.
O'Neill said the swollen left front tendon was the beginning of tendonitis, which could have taken six months to treat, and so the popular horse was retired.
"Yesterday he galloped great, but in the afternoon we noticed some loss of definition in his left front leg," he said, addressing the media outside the Belmont barns while I'll Have Another grazed nearby. "We did just an easy gallop today. I thought he looked great on the track, and then cooling out, you could tell the swelling was back."
O'Neill said he conferred with owner J. Paul Reddam and they contacted Dr. Jim Hunt, who examined the horse.
"Immediately we got Dr. Hunt over here and he scanned him and he said it was the start of tendinitis in his left front tendon and you can give him three-to-six months and start back with him," O'Neill said. "It was unanimous between the Reddhams and my brother and I and everyone at the barn to retire him."
After the news conference, the O'Neills led I'll Have Another out of the detention barn and walked him down a path toward the barn where the colt had stayed for most of the time he had been at Belmont. Starting Wednesday, all the Belmont Stakes horses were housed in the same barn; the track said it was a security measure.
"Some people have asked did the detention barn have anything to do with this, absolutely not. Just a freakish thing," O'Neill said.
His brother Dennis said: "We're very, very bummed out, but we'll be back next year."
He said it was hard to tell anything was wrong just by looking at the horse.
"He looks great. He's sound. He went great this morning. He looks super (but) you just can't take a chance. He's too valuable of a horse and we love him to death like all of them," he said. "You wouldn't run a horse if you think something might happen."
Larry Bramlage, Belmont's on-call veterinarian, called it a "slow-healing injury."
Bramlage compared it to an Achilles tendon injury, which usually keeps a person off his feet for six weeks.
"This one to the horse is nowhere near that severity," Bramlage said, "but it takes the same amount of time to rehab it."
Bramlage said, for this horse, it would probably take a year to recover. He added that a tendon in a race horse is "more highly evolved" than anything in a human.
"It's an early injury," Bramlage said. "If you went on and had he raced, the danger would have been a bowed tendon, meaning a significant number of fibers injured."
Other trainers sympathized with O'Neill's plight.
"I feel terrible for Doug," said D. Wayne Lukas, who trains Belmont starter Optimizer. "To come this close and have arguably the best horse, everything being equal, you have to give him the nod as being the best horse. He's done everything he was supposed to. He had four big ones (wins) in a row. That fifth one is tough. That's what I've always said, it's not a Triple Crown, it's a five or six race series."