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Preakness vet recalls fateful day

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published May 25, 2006

PHILADELPHIA - David Zipf, chief veterinarian for the Maryland Racing Commission, knows by now that NBC's cameras never showed him taking a look at Barbaro after the horse prematurely and now famously left the gate before Saturday's Preakness Stakes, causing a lot of viewers to make the leap that Barbaro wasn't examined and was, in fact, hurt by that gate incident.

"I really wasn't worried about being on the television," Zipf said Wednesday in a telephone interview. "Maybe next time I'll have a private photographer."

Zipf can provide a firsthand look at the harrowing minutes after Barbaro broke his right hind leg in three places - Zipf held the leg as a splint was put on it - and the veterinarian also was as close as he could be to the horse in the minutes just before the race.

He is as sure as he can be that Barbaro wasn't hurt before he took that fateful misstep in the first furlong.

Watching from the side of Pimlico Race Course down by the starting gate, Zipf thought at first that another horse had jumped in front of Barbaro and interfered with him. He quickly saw it was much worse than that. Zipf hopped in the equine ambulance and got out past the finish line just after Edgar Prado gingerly jumped off Barbaro's back.

"Prado might have saved his life, because he pulled him so quickly," Zipf said. "These fractures very often compound. Then you can get infection right away. About 60, 70 percent of the time, they do compound, then you're in deep doo-doo."

It was bad enough, Zipf knew, without that.

"This is the worst-case scenario," Zipf said. "Hind legs are hard to handle, to splint. They're kicking. We're at a real disadvantage."

After trainer Michael Matz arrived on the track, racing down from the grandstand, a tarp was put up behind the ambulance, shielding the horse from the crowd.

"He thought it was kind of spooking the horse," Zipf said of Matz. "He said, "Maybe you ought to put that down.' "

Barbaro already looked frantic, Zipf said, "and to have that thing flapping ... "

On the track, the veterinarian didn't hear any discussion about doing anything but saving that horse's life.

"There's no question, he had this look of almost like hysteria - that's one reason Michael Matz wanted to get that tarp down," Zipf said of Barbaro as he was being initially examined and getting the splint put on. "He was almost agitated, almost like panic setting in. Rapid breathing, and the pulse rate increased, and the pupils dilated. It's almost like a fright, an hysterical fright syndrome setting in. You could sense it. His muscles tightened up. It's like a frantic situation."

Most of the questions Zipf gets are about what happened several minutes earlier, after Barbaro broke through the gate before all the horses were loaded.

"Any chance I get to loosen the fog," Zipf said of talking about that starting-gate scene.

One part a lot of people didn't see: "The assistant starter got out of the way," Zipf said. "In some cases, they would have grabbed him. But he was kind of in between a rock and a hard place. I heard the assistant starter say to the starter: "I thought we were near a start and I didn't want to grab him.' Another thing, if he had grabbed him, he could have twisted him."

Zipf knows there are enough conspiracy theories going around about what happened. You can imagine what television viewers would have thought if all the gates had opened and there was a man trying to hold the heavy favorite back.

"That would have looked really good," Zipf said.

[Last modified May 25, 2006, 00:55:15]