O'Neil Refuses to Put Horses in Detention

[RolloTomasi]

Originally Posted by Rupert Pupkin

He did send a small string back east. I think he sent about 8 horses back there. It is possible that one of the reasons he did it was to show them that he can start sending horses other places if needs be. If he was trying to intimidate them, I think it worked.

I still think that it is extremely unlikely that he is going to send all or most of his horses somewhere else. He has somewhere between 150-200 horses out here. As much as he hates the detention barn, it would still be much easier for him to stay here than to ship all his horses somewhere else. It's over $8,000 per horse round-trip to go back east. It's not worth $8,000 per horse to ship back east for 60 days.

The interesting sub-story is that when announcing the shift eastward, O'Neill hinted that perhaps he's not as pro-synthetic as he seems ("This is a little experiment with horses that maybe we want to try on the dirt," he said. "Don't get me wrong. I love synthetic tracks, but I want to have the option."). If both he and Bob Baffert were to basically abandon CA racing, would it be a shot over the bough that would have the CHRB second-guessing the synthetic mandate? Is this part of the reason why both the track and the CHRB are willing to be buffaloed by him?