While my heart is still heavy with sadness over Barbaro's loss, I was so excited and happy to read this wonderful article, below. We wish La Vie Rouge and her new baby ALL the best of everything. Congratuations to the Jacksons on their new arrival.
By Mike Jensen
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
La Ville Rouge grazes with her one-day-old newborn, a full brother of Barbaro, at Mill Ridge Farm in Lexington, Ky.
LEXINGTON, Ky. - The colt took his first awkward steps away from his stall and out of the barn at Mill Ridge Farm, his back limbs nearly buckling, as a groom helped out with a firm hold on the horse's rear end. Out in the paddock, the colt, just 10 hours old, looked back to the groom with an expression of: "What now?"
Friday was one glorious day in the Bluegrass, with barely a cloud in the blue skies above Mill Ridge's rolling 1,100 acres. "It's a good day to be born and get turned out," Michael Matz said.
The trainer of last year's Kentucky Derby winner was at Mill Ridge because this was no ordinary newborn. Here was Barbaro's little brother, out to the paddock for the first time with his mother, La Ville Rouge. His foaling today on April 20 - exact time: 2:08 a.m. - had been routine. He's a big boy, 148 pounds.
After just a minute standing in the grassy paddock, the colt was loping alongside La Ville Rouge, who instinctively leaned her head in front of her son, herded him away from a fence, taking him around his first turn.
Matz - who is training his horses at nearby Keeneland Race Course, hoping that one of them, Chelokee, makes it to Churchill Downs in two weeks - took it all in and got out his cell phone. He called Gretchen Jackson, co-owner of Barbaro.
"Gretchen, I just saw him make his first gallop," Matz joked into the phone, sounding as excited as if he had just won a big stakes race. "He's all legs! He's absolutely beautiful - and the mare, she looks like you could put her in training tomorrow."
The news of the birth had reached Roy and Gretchen Jackson, who also own La Ville Rouge, by fax early Friday morning at their home in West Grove, Chester County. Barbaro's two little brothers, both sons of Dynaformer, are here at Mill Ridge, the same farm where 2005 Kentucky Derby winner Giacomo was raised. The older one is now a yearling. Matz and assistant trainer Peter Brette had stopped to see the older colt first - giving him a long admiring look outside Mill Ridge's yearling barn before going to see the newborn.
"Gretchen said she thought he looks like Barbaro at that age," Matz said as he looked at the older one.
These two young horses won't have any idea how many eyes will be on them, since their brother won the Kentucky Derby, before Barbaro's story turned into a saga, and his catastrophic injuries at the Preakness Stakes ultimately led to Barbaro's being euthanized in January.
Plenty of fans of Barbaro's were eagerly awaiting his birth and knew it was several days late.
Realistically, there is no telling what will become of the brothers on the racetrack. There are a lot of baseball Hall of Famers with brothers who never played professionally.
It's the same in horse racing. There are success stories and others who can't get out of their own way, as Matz put it.
"You don't know," said Headley Bell, the bloodstock adviser to the Jacksons, whose Nicoma Bloodstock is based at Mill Ridge, the generations-old family farm and one of the biggest breeding operations in Kentucky, with 175 mares. Bell, who originally came up with the idea to mate La Ville Rouge with Dynaformer - producing Barbaro - was out there at the fence, too.
"It would be easy if you knew, wouldn't it?" Matz said about the genetic potential, although this clearly was a day to dream a little. "Imagine," Matz said. "Three years from now, he'll be expected to win races."
As Matz said this, the two horses were at the far end of the circular paddock, a couple of hundred yards away.
"He's a high mover," Matz said to Brette. "Peter, what are you going to do with him?"
Matz was joking about Barbaro's perceived high stepping action, which attracted media attention after his Derby win.
"I wasn't going to change him," Matz said.
The new one will probably get his name from the same French lithograph of bloodhounds hanging at the Jacksons' home in West Grove. That's where Barbaro got his name.
Roy Jackson said he wasn't sure which one they'd pick out from the lithograph, but it would probably be one.
La Ville Rouge is scheduled for another date later this month with Dynaformer at nearby Three Chimneys Farm.
"Now we need a filly," Roy Jackson said by telephone this afternoon.
If the young ones make it to the racetrack, it would be surprising to see anybody but Matz training them.
When Matz first showed up at the barn today at noon, the newborn had been sleeping in the front. La Ville Rouge moved to the front, hovering over her baby. Matz looked admiringly at the mother.
"Youcan see Barbaro's shoulders in her, can't you?" he said.
Contact staff writer Mike Jensen at 215-854-4489 or mjensen@phillynews.com
