COMMENTARY / HORSE RACING : Owner’s Disappearance Begs Question: Was Alydar Murdered?

J.T. Lundy has been in seclusion since he left the debris of Calumet Farm, counted the millions of dollars he is believed to have accumulated while fiscally demolishing one of thoroughbred racing’s legendary giants and disappeared from Kentucky. With him is the truth about Alydar.

There are many questions about the death of Alydar that only Lundy, wherever he is, can answer. Some of Calumet’s bloodied creditors would like to find him and, though another farm he owned near Midway, Ky., was foreclosed recently, there are personal creditors said to be holding Lundy’s markers in Lexington, where it seems almost everyone in the horse business was involved in some kind of deal with Calumet.

But people are outraged at the suggestion that a revered thoroughbred may have been murdered to collect $36.5 million in mortality insurance amidst Calumet’s last gasps, and they demand to know if the insinuations made by Sports Illustrated in its Nov. 16 issue are true.

The magazine, in a synopsis of the circumstances surrounding Alydar’s death two years ago, suggests that one of the most important stallions of the 20th century may have been murdered. It raises questions about what some consider the unlikely possibility of a horse shattering a large bone in a hind leg as a result of kicking a wall. It notes that at the time Calumet was $120 million in debt and on the brink of bankruptcy as the result of Lundy’s reckless management.

Alydar, unattended at the time he was injured, was found sweating in his stall, his right hind leg dangling from where the cannon bone was shattered, about midpoint between the hoof and hock. The magazine raises no questions that have not been raised before, but nevertheless offers a gruesome reminder that the bond between horse and human is sometimes broken by greed and desperation.

The animal is not lost in columns of figures, in depreciation schedules or earnings projections, betting totals or attendance sums. The beast transcends the mundane day-to-day routine of the racetrack or the show ring. The thoroughbred represents purity, the unsullied personification of fury and grace.

The breed is the centerpiece of huge industries and the focus of lives. The thoroughbred is a flesh-and-blood jewel coveted with equal relish by royalty of unlimited means and the most depraved scoundrels. The animal will run with determination and courage even beyond its physical limitations at the bidding of humans but, unlike those whose pleasure and purpose it serves, the horse is innocent and without ego or agenda.

For all the human devotion showered upon the blooded horse, the animal makes no demands and poses no threat. The most fierce, highly strung, thickly muscled half-ton equine--the wildest, most amazing construction of flesh, muscle and pedigree imaginable--is confined for most of its life in a stall, dependent entirely upon humans for its well-being. Some humans, sadly, are outclassed by their horses.

To lovers of the thoroughbred, many of whom labor long hours for little monetary reward, the confessions of a paid assassin provide chilling, horrific detail of profit-motivated execution of the innocent on the horse-show circuit, which is the major focus of the Sports Illustrated piece. None of this is new. Men have murdered the horses who have served them ever since insurance companies began writing mortality policies on valuable animals. No area of the horse world has resisted violation by the unscrupulous human and no one suggests it will ever cease or even subside. But that admission makes such revelations no less loathsome.

Drs. William Baker and Larry Bramlage, the veterinarians who performed surgery on Alydar in a failed attempt to save him, emphatically have dismissed suggestions that the blow to the 15-year-old horse’s leg may have been inflicted by a human. Bramlage on Wednesday called the report “ridiculous.” Baker said he would “take any witness stand in the country” and say Alydar’s injury could have resulted from kicking and wedging the leg between the stall door and wall.

“Medically, it’s the wrong kind of fracture for a high-energy blow such as from a crowbar, like was described in the Sports Illustrated article,” Bramlage said. He said a blow from a crowbar would result in the bone breaking into small pieces, which is not what he saw when he examined the injury. Alydar “had some small pieces, but basically a three-part fracture, typical for a bending force applied to the bone.”

And Nina Hahn, Lexington-based agent for Lloyds of London, which paid the claim without question shortly after Alydar’s death, said: “I feel there was nothing to be gained by killing the horse. (Calumet) couldn’t be saved by killing the horse.”

Perhaps they are right. But the definitive answer is with Lundy, who is heavily favored to take it to the grave.

Alydar’s death, because he was collateral for several large loans, hastened the demise of Calumet, which was dissolved last year and sold at auction to Henryk de Kwiatkowski for $17 million.

By that time, Lundy already had disappeared, some say with most of the millions he accumulated in a decade during which he took a 10% commission on every horse, stallion share and freeding right sold by Calumet; during which, it is said, he appropriated for himself and sold breeding rights to Alydar and other stallions.

And with the dour, surly, tight-lipped man who took over a free-and-clear legend, ran up $120 million in debt and probably made himself a millionaire in the process, lives the truth.