The first of the UBS horses in this crop to fall by the wayside was Midshipman, winner of the 2008 Breeders Cup Juvenile and champion 2 year-old colt. He made 4 starts, all of them as a two year-old, before being sidelined with a soft tissue injury in March 2009. He did not return to the track until this past weekend, and while he did win, it remains to be seen how many more starts he’ll make before re-injury and/or retirement.
The next to go was Old Fashioned, another of Larry Jones' charges. He made it through six starts, four of them wins, before being retired with a slab fracture in his right knee in April.
The last was Dunkirk who surprisingly made it all the way to June, running 11th in the Derby before coming back for a truly gutsy second place finish in the Belmont. He suffered a non-displaced condylar fracture in his left hind cannon bone in that race and is on the sidelines for the time being. (Despite being G1 placed, he has never won anything more than an allowance race, so it is likely he will be brought back to race if it all possible. Got to have that black type before he goes off to stud after all.) And despite actually making it through the Triple Crown, Dunkirk has only 5 starts to his name. Mine That Bird and Rachel Alexandra, by comparison, had each made 11 starts by that time.
These three colts are hardly the first of UBS's offspring to become injured on the Triple Crown trail. Over the last 10 years or so, it's become a frequent occurrence (for those UBS offspring who actually make it to the races). Buddha was a Derby favorite but retired just before that race with only 4 starts; Eurosilver managed 12 starts, but his career was plagued by injury; Half Ours fractured an ankle as a 2 year-old and was laid up for 19 months, only to return to the races at 4 where he fractured a cannon bone and was retired with only 7 starts; Rockport Harbor suffered regular setbacks in his career and made only 8 starts over 3 seasons. The list goes on and on.
To be fair, not all UBS offspring have shortened careers. Domestic Dispute raced 21 times in three seasons; Thorn Song has made 29 starts to date; and the Australian-bred gelding Grey Song made an astonishing 65 starts over 5 seasons. (Perhaps turf racing made the difference for Thorn Song and Grey Song?) Unfortunately, these horses are still anomalies when it comes to UBS offspring.
There is no doubt that horses sired by Unbridled’s Song are frequently fast and precocious. For breeders and owners alike, this often translates to a quick return on the stud fee ($125,000) or the purchase price. Or that is the hope at any rate. Dunkirk sold for $3.7 million as a yearling but has made only $393,200 in purses. Old Fashioned sold for $800,000, also as a yearling, and made $583,280. Given the high rate of attrition on the race track, buying a UBS horse seems like a very risky venture to me. Breeding to UBS with the intention of selling, however, appears to be a far more profitable venture. A quick scan of UBS’s page on the Stallion Register Online shows that his weanlings and yearlings on average bring two to three times the cost of his stud fee.
And therein lies the rub. So long as buyers continue to support UBS as a stallion by keeping his offspring in demand, he will continue to produce brilliant but unsound horses. Not only is this a bad idea in terms of investments, it is also extremely damaging to the sport---witness the media storm after Eight Belles broke down. Accidents like that drive fans away, both casual and die-hard, and even the non-fatal injuries that lead to premature retirements turn fans off. It’s hard to follow and get excited about a horse that only starts 4 or 5 times. It’s also not fun to watch a race and find that you’re more worried than excited and just hoping all the horses will come home in one piece.
The worst problem, however, with breeding unsound horses is the obvious one, the toll on the animals themselves. Is it not cruel to breed an animal with a greater risk of injury or fatal break down? Is it not a disservice to the American Thoroughbred to perpetuate unsoundness and fragility? What becomes of the UBS sons and daughters who did not accomplish enough on the track to be viable breeding animals and who are too unsound to have secondary careers as riding horses? (A long, cramped truck ride and then a bolt through the head...) The horse market is glutted already with poorly conformed, ill-bred, untrained equines of any breed and of no breed. The last thing we need is to add fragility to that equation, no matter how beautifully pedigreed.
So what's the solution? Short of gelding UBS, I'm not really sure. Breeder incentives for proven durable bloodlines? Bigger purses for races for 4 year-olds and up? Importation of new blood from Europe or South America? It's going to be an uphill slog no matter what, and I worry that it may take several more Eight Belles-like accidents before the American TB breeders get the message. Speed and precocity are so deeply entrenched in the mind set of so many breeders, pinhookers, and owners that I fear for the future of the breed.
