Pray For Barbaro
January 12th, 2006by Jude T. Feld
Virtually every American sports fan is familiar with the line that made ABC’s Wide World of Sports famous – “The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.” Delivered so perfectly by Maryland’s favorite sportscaster Jim McKay, those opening words were punctuated by footage of victory celebrations and racecars crashing into walls and skiers falling and tumbling like rag dolls.
“The thrill of victory” is the easy part. Everybody loves a winner – the smiles and the sweat, the chrome and the crystal, the Cristal and the milk.
Coughing up a home run ball in the bottom of the ninth in the World Series, fumbling the football on the one-yard line with 30 seconds left on the clock in the Superbowl or missing a 10-inch putt in the Masters can all lead to “the agony of defeat,” but at least you can point to the perpetrator.
When the best hitter in baseball breaks his wrist on a freak play, a promising quarterback has his knee blown out by an unabated defensive end or an Olympic gymnast’s leg bends at an unnatural angle on the balance beam it is considered “just bad luck.”
Everybody loved Barbaro after his resounding victory in the 132nd Kentucky Derby (G1). This was no ordinary horse. He was special. The next Triple Crown winner.
Saturday’s Preakness (G1) seemed a mere formality. People were already making their flight reservations for the Belmont (G1). New York restaurants were overbooked for the night of June 10. No serious racing aficionado was gonna miss this.
Barbaro was anxious to get to Belmont too. So ready to run off the t.v. screen and into the record books that he popped the gate before the starter had sprung the latch. Gathered by his jockey Edgar Prado before going a hundred yards, Barbaro loaded right back into the gate for his run at immortality.
Ten seconds later he would never run again.
Hearts stopped. Tears fell. Silence gripped the family of horseracing as the thrill of Bernardini’s Preakness (G1) victory was lost in oblivion, all eyes on Barbaro, standing uncomfortably in the stretch.
The World Cup soccer motto never rang truer: “One game changes everything.”
Teddy Roosevelt said, “It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
His Florida Derby (G1) victory proved that Barbaro was no “cold and timid soul.” His Kentucky Derby victory was “a triumph of high achievement”. His Preakness (G1) was “just bad luck.”
Pray for him.
