How to break a horse?

How can a horse break an ankle?

• Hi. I'm doing this project at school when you have to write a story about horse racing. I heard about what happend to Ruffain and Eight Belles but how did they break their ankles? I no its not a very nice thing to talk about but I knida need to know for my project. xx

• Answer:

  Eight Belles stumbled while pulling up from the Kentucky Derby, and broke both forelegs at the fetlock joints. Ruffian, on the other hand, broke her right foreleg during a Match race against Foolish Pleasure ( who died in 1994 after a MEDIOCRE career at stud) because of the tremendous strain she was under. I don't believe that she took a bad step, because BOTH jockeys reported hearing an extremely LOUD cracking noise at the instant of the filly's breakdown. That sound was the bones in Ruffian's fetlock shattering- and her forward motion and momentum did the rest of the damage. These two horses parallel each other in an ironic, eerie, sad way- both were young 3 year old fillies, both were WAY TOO TALL for their ages and genders, and both had superfine, inherently WEAK bone structures in their legs- the result of the over and inbreeding which is the hallmark of the Thoroughbred industry today. To make matters worse, Ruffian came from the Native Dancer line ( she was Native Dancer's maternal granddaughter), a family which is now and was then FAMOUS for producing horses which had and have only a limited number of races in them before they break down catastrophically and die, the way she did. Ruffian ran all her races on dirt- the Polytrack of today hadn't even been thought of yet by anyone at the time Ruffian was racing. Eight Belles, on the other hand, had NEVER BEEN ON DIRT prior to her ill fated run in the Derby last year. All of HER previous races had been on Polytrack. The fact that dirt is rather hard and unforgiving may have played a part in her breakdown, although it's hard to say that it's a certainty that it did. I think that Eight Belles was basically allowed to run herself into the ground trying to catch up with Big Brown, who had been pumped so full of steroids by his trainer that he was BOMBED out of his mind that day. If he hadn't been, chances are high that the filly might even have won the race, instead of finishing second- she clearly was better than the other 18 or 19 colts which she beat. We'll never know for sure now what might have been.