Flatter: This could be positive, lasting legacy of Art Collector

We are in the midst of my 47th annual campaign to stamp outAugust. Most of that time it was an irreverent way to whine about a month that hastoo much heat, too many back-to-school sales and too few holidays.

Got a birthday right now? It is not Aug. 18. It is July 49.

Along came this August. Now this campaign has gottenserious.

As if the Test Stakes were not bad enough, then we were hitwith what happened Thursday. For me that was when a phone call brought the newsthat Art Collector was euthanized after being diagnosed with laminitis.

If the Inuit language has 50 words for snow, how many doesracing have for the tragedies we have experienced this month?

We barely got to know Maple Leaf Mel. By the time werealized she had built a perfect record, and before we could memorize thedetails of her roan features, she was taken away from us in the Test.

Art Collector was different. Much different. Before westopped calling it the coronavirus and started calling it COVID, Art Collector wasthere for us. Remember?

Around the time we would have been sharpening our focus onthe Kentucky Derby winner, there was no Kentucky Derby. Art Collector filledthe void with a story that kept us entertained while we were locked down.

Where to begin. There was the win at age 2 that was takenaway after he was flagged for a deworming drug. Owner Bruce Lunsford, ahigh-profile Kentucky Democrat who once made a competitive run at Mitch McConnell,moved his homebred colt from Joe Sharp to Tommy Drury, a trainer best known forhandling horses who are taking a break from racing.

Drury’s farm was supposed to be just a halfway house. Art Collector’snext move was going to be to trainer Rusty Arnold, but the pandemic and its newred tape got in the way. If it was a case of being stuck with Drury, it waslike a shelter pet getting stuck with a loving foster home.

By the time the rescheduled Blue Grass Stakes finally camearound in that ad-hoc, summer meet at Keeneland, Art Collector had become racing’snew star. Our new star. We could not wait to share the ride with BrianHernandez Jr.

The win in the Blue Grass convinced horseplayers. ArtCollector went from 30-1 to 10-1 in Las Vegas futures to win the Derby. Thatwould be the Kentucky Derby. As in the derby in Louisville, Ky. Because therewas another Kentucky derby, lower case, that Art Collector’s mere presenceturned into an event.

If there was a moment to remember during the summer of ArtCollector, it was the Ellis Park Derby, a listed stakes that was given thesudden cachet of being the last major points prep on the road to ChurchillDowns.

In a lot of ways, it really never got better than it didthat Sunday in August 2020. Art Collector never trailed at the windows or on thetrack. At 2-5, he wired that little ol’ $200,000 race out in Western Kentucky.

Thanks to an ill-timed nick on the bulb of his left heel, henever got to the Kentucky Derby, where he would have been the second choice behindTiz the Law. He raced in the Preakness and the Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile, but hewould not win again for Drury.

By the time Art Collector was sent to Bill Mott in thesummer of ’21, it was different. We were coming out of lockdown and easing backinto whatever normal was going to be. That son of Bernardini who felt like anoverachiever had turned into a legitimate player.

With Luis Sáez and later Júnior Alvarado doing the riding, ArtCollector won six times in 11 starts for Mott. He would rise to be thetop-ranked horse in America and no. 4 in the world. He got his Grade 1s in the2021 Woodward and this past winter in the Pegasus World Cup.

I was there in South Florida for that last win nearly sevenmonths ago. It felt a lot different seeing Art Collector in the flesh and beingamong a small throng to cover him and his connections face to face than it did inquarantine watching him and them on a flat screen and relying on a phone to bethe lone conduit to talk and text.

By then it felt like we were living “A Star Is Born.” ArtCollector had become the character played by Janet Gaynor and Judy Garland andBarbra Streisand and Lady Gaga. We stopped looking at him as having the blushof unexpected success and came to take his marquee-worthy triumphs for granted.

Damned if it didn’t end sadly, too.

Laminitis. Gdsobmf laminitis. I am pretty sure I do not haveto spell it out for you.

While animal-rights demagogues rail about the most visibletragedies in our game, it is left to those of us immersed in racing to reckonwith laminitis. It does not make for splashy video. It does not lure drive-bymedia to send their real-life cartoon characters to stand in front of racetrackentrances, feign knowledge and breathlessly make like chatterboxes that beginevery sentence with “now” and eventually send it “back to you.”

It takes more than a breezy, 90-second, live report toexplain laminitis. Therefore, it does not play well between fires and theweather. Years ago someone explained laminitis by comparing it with a car needsa front-end alignment. Except in the case of horses, no amount ofovercorrection can compensate for it, and there is no equivalent of a mechanicto fix it.

This might be the part in the script where we can agree onsomething for a change. In what has come to be known as horse-racing Twitter –or HRX, if we must – Parx track announcer and FanDuel TV publicist JessicaPaquette has risen above the populist cesspool to become one of its mosttrenchant posters.

“Laminitis is insidious and devastating, and a positiveoutcome can come down to luck,” she wrote Thursday. “Donate to @Grayson_JC (Grayson-JockeyClub) to support research to help continue to find ways to help horses get tothe other side of it.”

If there is something us racing lovers and those racinghaters can get behind as one, why can’t this be it? Go to the Grayson-JockeyClub website and learn just what laminitis is and, more important, the deepdive into the science that could get rid of it. Since 1999 the researchfoundation has spent more than $2 million to pay for 23 projects, all in searchof cures.

While we rue the fate of Art Collector, maybe a heightenedawareness of laminitis and, in turn, an infusion of research dollars can be thegood that comes out of all this.

The better to stamp out laminitis than to waste timefretting about August.