The unkindest cut of all

Today, at Long Island’s Belmont Raceway, 100,000 people, plus a TV audience of many more millions, will inevitably be focused upon a subject which the mere mention of causes all of us males psychological discomfort, or even pain:

Castration.

For the first time in the history of horse racing, the Triple Crown may be won by a gelding named Funny Cide.

If he wins at Belmont today, he will be only the 12th horse in history to win the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes.

Funny Cide is the first gelding ever to reach this final challenge for the Triple Crown. It was not until 1956 that geldings were even made eligible – and they are still ineligible in the English, Irish and French derbies.

The inevitable question is why was Funny Cide (as Joe Drape of the New York Times put it so dramatically) “deprived of a love life”?

Well, reports Drape – with a term with which I was totally unfamiliar: “he was a ridgling, or a horse with one undescended testicle.”

Dr. Larry Bramlage, an on-call veterinarian for the American Association of Equine Practitioners, notes:

“Sometimes this causes discomfort during training. The castration of a horse, once it is decided that it will not be a stallion, makes them much more tractable in training and a much more effective athlete.”

But Funny Cide, if he wins at Belmont, will not enjoy the retirement of the Kentucky Derby winner in 2000, Fusaichi Pegasus. This stallion earned nearly $2-million racing. He is now at stud having been sold to the mating farm, Ashford Studs for $60-million.

Here, he mates with up to 100 different mares a season – for $125,000 a mount. (There is no proof that this sexually spectacular retirement is often dreamed about by one prominent Arkansas and Washington politician.)

The New York Times racing reporter Drape notes that among the 72,825 individual thoroughbred starters in 2002, 25 percent of them – 18,796 – have been castrated. But these gonad-deprived steeds won $282-million, or 23 percent of all the purse money.

Funny Cide has a thoroughly undistinguished ancestry. His father was named Distorted Humor and his mother, a mare named Belle’s Good Cide, raced 26 times, won only twice, and earned only $26,000.

Funny Cide was purchased for a mere $75,000 by trainer Barclay Tagg, who told the Times:

“When you castrate horses they don’t quite get that heavy growth up front. The front end is usually 65 percent of their weight and then you put a jockey on, and there is a lot of pounding on their front legs. Castrating a horse tends to distribute the weight a little more.”

All of this leads to remembrances of some of the world’s most powerful sopranos- the famed Castrates, young boys who were castrated in order to retain their soprano voices in Rome’s church choirs.

Hopefully, no one will see if that effect can be produced for human male track teams.