still holding

Finally did manage to get a firm diagnosis for Veiled Reference. No, not a foot bruise, I'm afraid, which would have been cool. Instead, she's got the beginnings of what you would call a small shin splint in a human, only it's in her ankle (inside sesamoid), not her leg. All she needs is time, around 30 days, for the bone to recast itself and harden up. Nautical Agent bucked shins as a two-year old before ever racing and did well with the time off, so I'm hopeful that Veiled Reference will take the time in similar fashion and come back nicely. She was due a break, really, having been in training for a long stretch dating back to the spring of 2007, but we were of the mind to have one or two more races before letting her chill out. I feel kind of silly about the whole thing given how January and February played out, but what are you going to do? Thought we might hit up the Busher or one of those overnight stakes at Aqueduct, which we nearly did. Things just didn't break our way. All in all, even though it wasn't ideal to train w/o racing and put on that wear and tear, it was probably a good thing that she never wound up running. Sure, if I had stopped on her after that race in December, I'm a genius, but, man, NY was primed for a raid (did you catch slim pickings in the Busher on Sunday?), so that was the thinking coming out of her last.

Veiled Reference is a May foal and the time off should be good for her to do some maturing. Every horse with talent in her family got better with age, too, which is promising. And though we've only seen her out the three times, she does have some measure of talent with which to work. It will just have to be the few months before we unleash it again on her poor, unsuspecting competition. We'll see how she is in 30 days and schedule things from there.