November 4, 2009 - LD Fire, the co-winner of this year's $1 million Ed Burke Million Futurity (G1) and the beaten favorite in Friday's $1,272,750 Golden State Million Futurity (G1), was euthanized on Tuesday morning following health complications, according to part owner and trainer Jaime Gomez.
 |
LD Fire
PHOTO: AQHRJ |
Racing for Mike Abraham, Alfonso Pasquel, and Gomez, LD Fire won three of five career starts and earned $313,509. She finished in a dead-heat for first with Streakin Laquinta in the Ed Burke Million - the first dead-heat in the long history of that futurity. LD Fire was sired by Walk Thru Fire and out of the Grade 1 winning mare Prima LD.
The 2-year-old filly finished 10th in the Golden State after a rather dull effort as the heavy favorite. Upon her return to the barn, Dr. Rick Overly, a mainstay veterinarian at Los Alamitos, could see that she was uncomfortable and shifting her weight but it was apparent to him that she had not suffered a lower limb injury or that she was suffering from colic. He treated her on Friday night and Saturday and his team kept a close eye on her on Monday.
"By Monday afternoon, LD Fire had not been up all day," Dr. Overly said. "She had a fracture somewhere in her pelvic region. She had no sensation on her hind limbs and was basically suffering from paralysis. We gave her until this morning for her condition to improve but unfortunately it did not. I talked it over with (her owners) and that's when the decision was made. Unfortunately, there's no surgery that could have helped her."
"We are sad and feel terrible for the filly," said Abraham, who also bred LD Fire. "My biggest regret is that we will never know how great she could have been. I think we only scratched the surface of her talents. She was lightly raced, well taken care of, and we babied her so much, and that makes this hard to take," he added. "It's easy to say right now that she would have been a great one, but you look at her size and her potential and we really felt that there was no telling what she could have done and accomplished. We feel so terrible for her."
"Today is a bad day for all of us," Gomez said. "She was a priceless filly, one of the greatest that I've ever trained. We had to lift her because of the injury just so that she could drink water. (Jockey Alejandro) Luna felt that something was wrong right after the break. She was moving back in the gate and because she's so huge, maybe she was standing wrong when the gate opened. It's a tough thing to understand and a terrible thing to try to explain."
"It's a bizarre injury," Dr. Overly added. "This case hurts me more because I've never had a top horse go through something like this. I believe she slipped out when she left the gate, maybe she stepped so far back into the gate that she stepped over the breaking bar leaving the gate. It was a weird set of circumstances that led to the perfect storm to create this injury."
Overly began to treat LD Fire upon her return from racing in the Golden State Million. "I treated her for pain on Friday and I was hoping that she had sacrum injury, which is a soft tissue injury that a horse can live with," he said.
After further examination and treatment on Saturday, LD Fire appeared to have turned the corner and was doing well Sunday morning. "She was eating and drinking and looking okay," Dr. Overly said. "I felt good about it, and I was hopeful that at the best case it was just a ruptured a blood vessels that made her uncomfortable. On the back of my mind I was always fearful of the possibility that she had suffered a fractured vertebrae. We could have tied her up (on Friday and Saturday), however with every second that the mare was standing she would become agitated and uncomfortable. When she was lying down she was more comfortable and at ease with herself."