I was flipping through the newspaper this morning, and I was legitimately shocked to find a three-page article on horse trainer Todd Pletcher. In a way I feel that it is silly that an article about a man who trains racehorses actually challenged and altered my thinking, but this article really made me think. Since 2004, I have followed horse racing to an extent, and while I don’t necessarily agree with the ethics of the sport, I tend to know some of what’s going on in the horseracing world.
Trainer Todd Pletcher has never been a man I particularly liked. Every year on the Kentucky Derby (and the rest of the Triple Crown races and Breeder’ Cup, for that matter) Pletcher seems to have at least two horses racing, and a very non-nonsense, uncaring attitude about him. To me, Pletcher has always seemed to only see the business aspects of horseracing (much like the owners to whom it’s usually just about the money), and not the beauty of the horses, or care about the animals he trains.
This article, though, proved me wrong. It detailed how Pletcher arrives at his Saratoga stable at 4:30 every morning, and makes rounds, checking each horse’s temperature and well being, as well as checking how sound each horse is before heading out to the track. He spends the day going between working with his horses, dealing with owners, sending horses out to races and attending many, and teaching his twelve year old son the trade, just as his father taught him. The article showed a man with a heart, in a way that the television coverage of Triple Crown races never does.
On the surface, this was an article that challenged my opinion of a horse trainer, but it also got me thinking. How much do we base on what we gather from a few small glimpses of a person? How can we justify such harsh judgments, when truly we hardly know a person? It’s something that everybody does on a near daily basis, but we really do need to change.
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