Donna Brothers helps champion OTTBs
She was a mere eighth of a mile away when the gallant gray filly snapped her ankle after crossing the finish line at Churchill Downs. And then she snapped her other one.
Riding toward Eight Belles on her way to interview the winner of the 134th Kentucky Derby, NBC Sports broadcaster Donna Brothers had to avert her eyes as she came upon the beautiful horse.
“I could see out of my peripheral vision that she’d broken her ankles, and I never looked again,” says Brothers. She couldn’t. To do so would have reduced her to tears.
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Excitement builds for retired racehorse show
This week, three ex-racehorses will prance into the spotlight of the Pennsylvania Horse World Expo as remade creatures.
Their heads will reach down into the bridles for connection. They will move up slowly into the trot, and will canter into a pretty frame, just weeks after running their last competitive races.
In proving how malleable their minds and willing their spirits, horses with names like Four X The Trouble, Brazilian Wedding, Solidify, an alternate, and High Level, will advance the pioneering work of The Retired Racehorse Training Project.
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Donna Brothers thinks fast in the irons
Dirt stung her face and bounced off her goggles like gravel on a windshield from a speeding truck.
She flinched, and crouched lower in the saddle.
Beneath her, the striving, rushing Thoroughbred waited for a signal: where did she want him to go? They’d rocketed from the gait and had surged only a few paces when, in her peripheral vision, a solid wall of galloping horses squeezed from the right toward the rail; and, horses to her left struggled to hold their position.
In the thick of her first race, the petite, 21-year-old “girl jockey” had mere seconds to make a plan.
“There’s nothing in the world that could have prepared me,” says NBC Sports broadcaster and former jockey Donna Barton Brothers.
