O'Brien Award winner Casie Coleman knows as well as anyone in the industry that with the ups come some downs when it comes to racing horses
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She notched the richest victory of her career on Saturday night winning the $1 million Metro Pace final with Sportswriter in a World Record clocking of 1:49.2, and she’s happy to say the youngster was in good spirits the next morning when she arrived at the barn to check in on the son of Artsplace-Precious Beauty.
“I came to the barn on Sunday morning expecting him to have half of his feed ate and laying down tired which a normal horse would, but this horse has never been tired and had it all gone,” said Coleman. “His groom [Michel “Tom Tom” Turgeon] turned him out in the paddock and he had his tail over his back and he was running around in the field bucking and playing. You would never know that he raced the previous night. He’s a dream come true and an amazing horse.”
The undefeated colt will shoot for his sixth win in as many tries later this weekend at Mohawk Racetrack.
“I’ll jog him today and then go to the Champlain on Saturday and then he’ll get three weeks off and go the Breeders Crown eliminiation and hopefully the final,” added Coleman. “After that he’ll be shut down for the season and we’ll get him ready for his three-year-old season.”
Art Colony, another son of Artsplace from Coleman’s barn, will be getting an early dose of down time after suffering an injury in one of this year’s marquee events.
“He hurt the tendon on his left front leg in the Meadowlands Pace, and we took him to Rood & Riddle and they thought we were going to be fine with a few weeks off,” said trainer Casie Coleman. “We were getting him ready for the Simcoe and then the Jug and everything was right on track, but then about two weeks ago he trained very good and then we checked on him the next morning and the leg was blown up a little bit more, but not bad.
“I took him in to Dr. Dan McMaster and they said ‘if the horse is a horse that needs to pace in 1:51 or 1:52 he’s going to be fine, but if he needs to pace in 1:48 he’s going to hurt himself’, so right now he’s still sound and it’s not a huge issue,” she added. “These things take time and you can’t heal them overnight. I talked to owner Tom Hill and we decided that we’re going to pull the plug and shut him down for this season. It was a hard call, but we’re going to bring him back as a four-year-old. I won’t bring him back until later as a four-year-old because it’s hard on a four-year-old to race against older horses. I’m thinking like late summer around August or September.”
Later this week, a state-of-the-art procedure will be performed on Art Colony to help nurse the pacer back to fighting form.
“I’m going to do a stem cell treatment with him,” she added. “The vets pretty much guaranteed me that if we did this surgery it will heal the injury quicker and it will heal it completely. He’s going to going into Milton Equine Hospital in the middle of this week for the procedure. Then he’ll have some down time at Darlene Hayes’ farm. He’ll be out for three or four months, but I might swim him some later on. I won’t start him back until he’s completely clean. You’ll hear from him later on, it’s unfortunate we had to change our plans this year because we were really looking at having a big year with him. He hasn’t shown everyone what he’s capable of just yet.”