The surface at Turfway is so forgiving that it is hard to detect soft tissue injuries in your horses. So a horse could train and race for weeks before the soft tissue injury is detected. By then the injury is far worse than it was in the beginning and there is not much you can do about it but give your horse more time off. Last year one of our horses was training beautifully. We sent him down to Mountaineer to race and the jockey was warming the horse up and then decided that he wasnt going to ride the horse because the horse wasnt "acting right." It turned out that the horse had a bruise on his foot that looked like it was 2 to 3 weeks old than we had no idea about.
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