Spectacular Bid S. winner NOTONTHESAMEPAGE (Catienus) suffered pulmonary
bleeding during his seventh-place finish in Saturday’s Fountain of Youth S. (G2)
and will be sent to a hyperbaric chamber and pointed to shorter races in the
future.
“He bled pretty bad,” trainer Wesley Ward said Sunday morning. “It’s
something we’ve been fighting with him and it came out again yesterday. It’s
unfortunate, but I think we’ve got the makings of a pretty good miler. That’s
where we will look from here.”
Notonthesamepage was an impressive front-running winner of the Spectacular
Bid on January 3. With a fast pace expected in the Fountain of Youth, owner Ken
Ramsey, Ward and jockey Elvis Trujillo decided to experiment with taking back
off the pace. Ramsey now regrets that call.
“I told them let’s see if he can take back, but it now looks like that put
stress on him,” Ramsey said. “We’ve studied why horses bleed like this and it’s
always the stress. We thought maybe we could take him back and send him a signal
when it was time to go, but instead it just stressed him out. It was bad
timing.”
Ramsey and Ward have brought Notonthesamepage back from a similar situation
successfully in the recent past.
“We started him out at Keeneland last year and that’s when we first saw he
had a bleeding problem,” Ramsey said. “We got him back, cleaned him up and he
set a track record at Churchill next time out. We’ll try that again and see
about a race like the (August 29) King’s Bishop (S. [G1] at Saratoga) and the
Met Mile ([G1] at Belmont Park) next year.”
Meanwhile, BREAK WATER EDISON (Lemon Drop Kid) was scheduled for X-rays, a
head-to-toe once-over and likely a nuclear scan as trainer John Kimmel seeks to
explain why the three-year-old had to be pulled up in the stretch of the
Fountain of Youth.
The winner of the Nashua S. (G3) at Aqueduct on November 2 has now finished
last in his two stakes attempts at Gulfstream Park, and the way he ran Saturday
under jockey Eibar Coa has Kimmel, a licensed veterinarian, concerned about what
the tests will find.
“Eibar said he seemed to put himself in a great position until they got into
the turn,” Kimmel said. “He switched his lead and immediately took himself off
the bridle and kept switching back so that Eibar thought he hurt himself. He
tried to protect the horse and the horse seemed pretty willing to pull himself
up.
“We don’t know yet, but if these X-rays don’t show anything, I have a feeling
the nuclear scan will. A lot of times the X-rays will come back clean, but the
scintigraphy will light up bruises on the cannon bone. I hope that’s not the
case, because that’s 60-90 days right there, and that would pretty much wipe out
his season.”
Scintigraphy is a diagnostic test in which a two-dimensional picture of a
body-radiation source is obtained through the use of radioisotopes.
The dust wasn’t completely settled from the Fountain of Youth when trainer
Todd Pletcher threw another three-year-old on to the stage in a big way as the
AFFIRMATIF (Unbridled’s Song) rolled to a nine-length victory in his career
debut, covering the the one-mile maiden turf contest in 1:34.27 — faster by .04
than the time run by five-year-old Pletcher-trained stablemate Twilight Meteor
(Smart Strike) two races earlier in the Canadian Turf S. (G3).
“That was very impressive,” Pletcher said immediately after the race. “He had
been training really well and we were optimistic, but you can never really know
with a first-timer going long. He was bred to run long and he was training like
he was going to run long. I wouldn’t have any problem running back in a stakes
after that.”
The win was also the first at Gulfstream for jockey Chris DeCarlo since his
return from shoulder surgery.
“That felt great,” DeCarlo said. “He was looking around at everything and not
knowing what he was going to do in the post parade. He was a little green early
in the race, but then he settled in and ran like an old pro. It felt great to be
back. It felt great to win.”