Mike Brunker Horse racing editor • Profile • E-mail

OCEANPORT, N.J. - The accident that claimed the life of two-time European champion George Washington in the stretch of Saturday’s Breeders’ Cup Classic will go down as a bold gamble gone horribly wrong, and one that will undoubtedly be questioned and scrutinized in the days and weeks to come.

It also was a bad ending that married tragedy and irony: George Washington was bred by Lael Stables, the racing operation of Roy and Gretchen Jackson, the owners and breeders of Barbaro.

George Washington, who was purchased from the Jacksons for $2.05-million, was euthanized by injection shortly after fracturing the cannon bone in his right front leg when he took a bad step a sixteenth of a mile from the finish line in the 1 ¼ mile-Classic. His trainer, Aidan O’Brien, ordered the lethal shot after seeing the severity of the injury.

“The decision was made very quickly,” said C. Wayne McIlwraith, on-call veterinarian with the American Association of Equine Practitioners. “Aidan O’Brien was on the racetrack with the horse right after it happened and he requested euthanasia.”

As word of the colt’s death spread through the crowd at Monmouth, many fans could be heard wondering what the horse, who had spent virtually his entire racing career running on the turf, was doing in the Classic in the first place.

The answer to that question is far from clear.

The 4-year-old colt, a champion at both 2 and 3 who was viewed as Europe’s top miler, was retired last year by his owners, Mrs. John Magnier, Michael Tabor and Derrick Smith, to be bred at Ireland’s Coolmore Stud, the massive equine operation run by Magnier’s husband.  But only months after departing the racetrack, George Washington was sent back to the track because of unspecified fertility problems

In a statement at the time, Coolmore said it was consulting with veterinary experts to attempt to identify the problem and determine if it could be corrected.

When George Washington resumed racing, he didn’t appear to be the same horse.

He ran fourth in his comeback race, the Queen Anne Stakes at Ascot on June 19, then finished third in two subsequent races against competition that he once would have been expected to dominate. But despite his struggles, the colt’s owners made the surprising decision to run George Washington in the $5 million Breeders’ Cup Classic , a race in which he would meet the best American horses in training on an unfamiliar dirt surface.

Moving a horse from one racing surface to another is not a decision to be made lightly. Most horses have a definite affinity for either dirt or grass and have a much harder time running on the other.

That is especially true in longer races, like the Classic, where horses have to call on every ounce of strength and determination through the stretch.

“Typically these (catastrophic) injuries occur in the last part of the race,” McIlwraith said Saturday after the accident. “They are more fatigued so they have got less support to the joint. … And he could have had trouble with being less coordinated on that (the dirt), as he’s used to racing on grass.”

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The move to enter George Washington in the Classic was described by various racing writers as “sporting” but also puzzling. George Washington already had tried running on the dirt in last year’s Breeders’ Cup Classic, finishing a well-beaten sixth without ever threatening.

The most likely reason for running a turf champion on the dirt would be to show that he also can handle that surface, an attribute that would make him far more valuable as a sire. But given George Washington’s fertility problem, it appears that was not the motive.

Instead, it appears that his owners hoped that, despite his recent struggles on his favored surface, he could return to his former glory in the Classic, which the Magniers have been trying to win for years with horses they have owned and raced in Europe with various partners. They came within a neck of accomplishing the feat in 2000, when Giant’s Causeway was turned back by Tiznow.

Whatever the reasoning was behind the move, it unraveled in deep stretch when George Washington took his bad step. While his accomplishments on the racetrack will long be remembered, so too will the sad ending written in the footnotes of the race chart:

“George Washington (IRE) moved into contention while four wide on the first turn, raced in midpack for a half, was finished leaving the three-eighths pole, then broke down inside the furlong marker.”

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