Seriously injured filly makes recovery, but won't race

Where The Art Is, a 3-year-old filly trained in New Jersey by Jim Porter and owned by Eugene Landy of Rumson, NJ, has made a remarkable recovery from a very serious injury she suffered in a race at Freehold Raceway last October, and the subsequent complications that nearly took her life.

“She got into a wreck and was impaled by a race bike shaft that penetrated her left shoulder,” said her blacksmith Bob Fine Jr.  “The injury was serious enough to cause her to founder in the right front foot.  She wasn’t putting any weight on that right front foot because of the constant pain in her left shoulder and she developed laminitis.

“The shoulder injury led to a sequence of events that put the mare’s career, or perhaps even her life in jeopardy” Fine continued. “From where I stand now it looks like she’s going to be all right but her racing career is ended.  If you’d asked me about her chances when this first happened, I would have told you they weren’t good.  I always assumed that her chances of returning to the races were slim to none, but had it not been for a chip in her sesamoid that she probably got in the accident, she may have made it back to the races.”

After receiving veterinary care for her shoulder injury, attention was then focused on her degenerating right front foot.

“If she didn’t respond to the veterinary treatments, her coffin bone was rotated enough that she probably wouldn’t have survived,” explained Fine. “The coffin bone was almost through the sole of her foot, but she responded to the anti-inflammatory medications and other medical care enough that I was able to shoe her with a shoe called a heart-bar.  That shoe serves to support her coffin joint.  We kept her shod that way until she was sound enough to be turned out in a paddock. Currently she is totally weight-bearing on that foot and she shows no signs of discomfort.”

Where The Art Is, who was sold as a yearling for $30,000, is a daughter of Artiscape out of the Jenna’s Beach Boy mare Bringeron Ohm p,3, 1:55.1z. Landy plans to bred Where The Art Is to the gray Laag stallion Admiral’s Galley, who is the sire of the $1.6 million earner Admiral’s Express. Landy once campaigned the popular gray pacer The Porter Gray.--By David Mattia

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