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We used to spend a lot of time at New Bolton when DS was playing hockey as there was a rink down the road and we'd stop by and visit. They do magnificent work and I am certain they did absolutely all they could do...

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Kentucky Derby champion Barbaro euthanized

By Mike Jensen
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

Eight months after he romped to a 61/2-length victory in the 132d Kentucky Derby in front of 157,536 people at fabled Churchill Downs, Barbaro was euthanized, according to co-owner Roy Jackson.
Owned by Roy and Gretchen Jackson of West Grove, Chester County, Barbaro became far more famous for his battle to live at New Bolton than he ever had been for his great feats on the racetrack.

"We knew we had to put him down," Gretchen Jackson said today. "It was too much, and the guy didn't need to go through anymore."
Both Roy and Gretchen Jackson were with Barbaro when he was euthanized by injection in his stall around 10:30 this morning, Gretchen Jackson said.
"He was the same, which made it hard," she said. "It's just so hard for Dean [Richardson, Barbaro's surgeon], and it wasn't great for anybody."
They had talked about the options with Richardson, earlier in the morning.
"It is rough, but not to be there is rough," Gretchen Jackson said of being in the stall at the end.
"He's been a friend or whatever, everything to us... I think we've been concerned about him for a while. We just wanted the right moment where he's still himself. I think it had reached the point where it was timely."
The day after the May 20 Preakness, Richardson repaired Barbaro's multiple "catastrophic" fractures in his right hind leg in a surgery that lasted over five hours in the Kennett Square veterinary facility. At that point, Richardson put in 27 screws and a 16-hole steel plate and said the chances of Barbaro's survival was "a coin toss."
In July, there was a most-feared complication: Barbaro had laminitis in his left hind foot. The inflammation of the tissue in that foot caused Richardson to remove 80 percent of Barbaro's hoof. Richardson called it, "basically as bad as laminitis gets." He called Barbaro's recovery a longshot.
There were better days after that, although the hoof re-grew unevenly and Richardson had to surgically remove tissue in the hoof. Then came yet another complication: An abscess in Barbaro's right hind foot. That eventually necessitated yet another surgery, as an "external skeletal fixation device" was attached to keep weight off that leg.
During Barbaro's stay in New Bolton's intensive-care unit, web sites emerged devoted to his survival and on-line "candlelight" prayer vigils were held as new fans followed his daily progress.
The New Bolton Center and the Jacksons were honored with a special Eclipse award for all they had done for the horse. At the time, Richardson said he hoped the honor was for the effort, not any achievement.
Richardson became the most famous horse surgeon in history. Throughout Barbaro's stay, through multiple surgeries and countless cast changes, Richardson always pointed out that Barbaro was not "out of the woods.
In addition to the thousands of cards, e-mails, religious medals, and letters from children - one girl sent 19 cents for the Barbaro Fund plus two 4-H ribbons - so many medical suggestions came in that the New Bolton Center assigned one of its doctors to field them, from people who had "products, machines, paranormal offerings, nutritional and therapeutic suggestions." Barbaro even received a wedding invitation from a Baltimore couple.
Horseracing will never know how good Barbaro could have been. The winner of this nation's most prestigious horse race was never beaten in a race he completed.
After Barbaro's romp at the Kentucky, the largest winning margin in the Run for the Roses in six decades, trainer Michael Matz and Edgar Prado, Barbaro's jockey, genuinely believed this would be the horse who would break through and become the first Triple Crown winner - sweeping the Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes - since Affirmed in 1978.
Instead, the enduring visual will be of a horse gallopinig along on three legs just after the start of the Preakness Stakes, the hoof of his right hind leg turned at a sickening angle after Barbaro had "catastrophically" fractured three bones around the ankle.
As it stands, Barbaro and another locally owned and trained horse, 2004 Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner Smarty Jones, are the only undefeated Kentucky Derby winners since Seattle Slew in 1977. Barbaro's success on grass, the surface where he won his first three races, added to his resume. Matz said after the Preakness that the plan had been to race Barbaro in some major grass races later on, possibly in Europe.
"He was a special horse," Edgar Prado said the day he visited Barbaro at New Bolton soon after his injury. "He doesn't have any particular track. He runs in the turf, in the dirt, on sloppy track. You don't find horses like that. They don't come too often."
Prado, who has won the Belmont Stakes twice, beating Smarty Jones on Birdstone in 2004, believed Barbaro to be the horse of his lifetime. Some of the most heartbreaking photographs from the Preakness Stakes were of Prado, bent over, his face almost unnaturally long, still holding his whip.
Eventually, the enduring images were from New Bolton, as Jacksons and Matz visited daily, through the ups and downs. But that night at the Preakness, speaking quietly to a couple of reporters about an hour after the race, Gretchen Jackson said, "You can expect being beaten. You didn't think about this."
She added, "Poor Barbaro. Nobody expects this."