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Inside Horse Racing

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Tiznow, and Again  

A career-threatening injury couldn't stop a repeat winner in the Breeders' Cup Classic

By Tim Layden

Those who saw Tiznow in the $4 million Breeders' Cup Classic last Saturday will remember that the race alone was a punishing endeavor. Tiznow made a measured run down the backstretch, just off the lead, followed by a modest move at the quarter pole that promised little. Then, in the cold autumn gloaming at Belmont Park, he pounded through a desperate stretch run that carried him to a nose win over gifted European champion Sakhee and made him the first horse in the 18-year history of the Breeders' Cup to win consecutive runnings of the Classic.

Tiznow and and McCarron (10) held off the Godolphin-owned Sakhee in a thrilling stretch duel. Heinz Kluetmeier

But as tough as it was to win the Classic, getting to the race in good health was even more problematic. On April 20 the 4-year-old Tiznow left trainer Jay Robbins's barn at Santa Anita for a routine morning workout. At the time, Tiznow was not only the reigning Horse of the Year but also a genuine threat to replicate that performance in 2001. On March 3 he had won the $1 million Santa Anita Handicap by five lengths, drawing clear in the lane with a burst unlike anything jockey Chris McCarron had felt. Still, the ride toward a Classic repeat was interrupted when Tiznow returned from that April workout scarcely able to walk.

At first Robbins thought Tiznow might have suffered a recurrence of the broken tibia in his left hind leg that had kept him from racing as a 2-year-old. But the veterinarian who examined Tiznow gave him a tranquilizer and a muscle relaxant and suggested that he might have injured his lumbar vertebrae (near his tail). It was a slippery diagnosis; horses' backs are as inscrutable as humans'.

Robbins rested his horse for 30 days, and in mid-May, Tiznow began exercising lightly, still apparently uncomfortable. "He could hardly move," Robbins says. "I put a poultice on his back every day and walked him around, but he wasn't right. I was thinking, I don't know if I can put him through this. My peers were saying every day, 'Why don't you retire him?' Some days I was thinking the same thing."

Robbins nursed his horse patiently. On July 13 Tiznow went three furlongs at Del Mar in 362Ú5 seconds, his first encouraging work in three months. He was short in third-place finishes in the Sept. 8 Woodward at Belmont and the Oct. 7 Goodwood at Santa Anita, but in each race he gained fitness. Only after arriving in New York a week before the Classic did Robbins see the old Tiznow. Only in the last 200 yards of the Classic did McCarron feel the old Tiznow in his hands.

Robbins still isn't sure what ailed the horse, only that it healed sufficiently for Tiznow to make history. "Maybe a ruptured disk," he said late on Saturday, shrugging. If Tiznow stays sound, owner Michael Copper says he will race as a 5-year-old, and in the winter the war between health and speed will begin anew.

Issue date: November 5, 2001

For more Inside Horse Racing see this week's issue of Sports Illustrated, on newsstands Wednesday, October 31. Click here to subscribe to SI.

 

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