Requiem for the 7 Dead Horses of Kentucky Derby Week
1. Freezing Point (nicknamed Snowball)
Her voice catches and tears threaten to follow, but Randy Gootzeit wants you to know about how a strapping gray colt nicknamed Snowball brought a couple of horse lovers back to the track, and how they got their hearts broken.
Snowball, known on the track as Freezing Point, suffered a fatal breakdown during an undercard race at Churchill Downs on May 6, becoming the seventh horse to die in an agonizing eight days leading up to the Kentucky Derby. The deaths, as yet unexplained, have cast a pall over this year’s Triple Crown and renewed questions about the safety of the animals as the sport prepares for Saturday’s Preakness Stakes in Baltimore.
But for Gootzeit and her trainer Joe Lejzerowicz, the troubles in horse racing are just a backdrop to their private grief.
“We’d have done anything to save him, but we could not,” Gootzeit said. “We miss him desperately.”
Gootzeit, 71, lives near Phoenix. She galloped and trained horses in the 1970s and ’80s at Belmont Park, but left the racetrack to return to school and become a physical therapist. She works on humans, but has also applied what she learned to horses.
Source: The New York Times
