Quantum’s Accident

 

On Saturday, July 3^rd, 2010 our jumper, Quantum Leap, was competing in the middle height Schooling Jumper division, ridden by Bethany S, his regular show rider for 2010. Bethany had already shown her own horse, Joc-A-Bee, in all three classes, scoring clean rounds and the fastest times in all three classes. She eventually would get all three firsts and the Championship for Joc-A-Bee.

 

She had shown Quantum in his first class already. The fences were set at 2’9”, a very modest height for this horse. He looked great in the first class, jumping comfortably with his ears forward towards the jumps, as he always jumped. He did pull one rail jumping a fence at an angle, and did not go on to that first jump-off.

 

Quantum went in the second class and again looked wonderful. He finished the first round effortlessly with no faults. He began the jump-off looking just as he always did. (As a point of interest, up until the fence right before he broke his leg, Quantum was tied with Joc-A-Bee right down to the tenth of a second. Both horses took exactly 18.6 seconds from the starting line to the top of the jump right before the accident. Bethany rode both horses to the same plan and they both gave her exactly what she asked.)

 

I posted on this website right after the accident that Quantum landed wrong from a jump and broke his leg. This is not accurate. I have now reviewed a very clear video tape of the accident multiple times (not fun, but I am a curious person), and Quantum took both of his final two fences effortlessly, landed normally, and cantered smoothly off of each fence. After the last fence in his career, it was an 8 or nine stride bending line to the Butterfly jump. Quantum was doing a modest hand gallop to make it in 8 and he put in 4 strides that appeared completely normal. He was leaning slightly into the turn normally.

 

After the fourth or fifth stride, a bone in his right front leg (the radius bone, the large bone in the upper part of the front leg) broke catastrophically. It was instantly clear to me that it was a fatal injury and that the horse would have to be put down. The part of the leg below the break was swinging limply with no apparent connection to the upper leg but skin and muscle. It is a tribute to the good condition of this horse and his great strength that the muscle tissue surrounding the bone was strong enough to keep both ends of the completely broken and displaced bone from coming through the skin. This would have made an already tragic situation even more difficult.

 

This horse has almost never been off his feet. He was one of the most surefooted horses I’ve ever known on grass. We never use studs on his shoes because he knows the footing so well. True to form, he kept his feet right to the end, nearly going down when he first broke the leg, but catching himself on the good leg and dancing on three legs to keep his weight off the rider who had landed in front of and then under him. She ended up with a good bruise on her hip area, but no serious injury. Another tribute to the last moments of a great horse.

 

After hopping for a couple of steps to get off his rider, Quantum then just stood there waiting for human help. All the professionals at the show, and there were many on this day, gathered to keep him quiet and comfortable. The horse had to wait about 35 to 40 minutes for the nearest vet to respond. During that time he never once panicked. He occasionally would rock back on his rear legs almost as though he thought his broken leg was stuck in something. But her never fully reared and never struggled.

 

A Springville Animal Hospital vet we know well was the closest vet to the show grounds after we called four or five, and she responded and put Quantum to sleep. We immediately moved him to the far side of the field out of view of the kids, and within an hour to Jumper Hill, where he was buried the next morning.

 

Anything We Could Have Done Differently?

You always ask yourself that after an accident. Quantum had suffered three minor injuries that had kept him from showing for the two shows prior to his final show. He bumped his head in his stall and got a goose egg a week before that took several days to go down. He had a shot of antibiotic to make sure that wasn’t infected, and he had swollen lymph glands on his chest where he was given the injection until not long before the final show. But it wasn’t bothering him. He was full of piss and vinegar from sitting around the day before the show and actually tossed Bethany while schooling the night before (hard to toss Bethany!) He had bruised something in the fetlock area of his left front two weeks before, but that quickly resolved itself with a couple of days of rest. He had a minor cut on one leg during this time, which was treated superficially. He had not had much work the two weeks before his final show, but he was probably in the best shape in a long time for this time of year, since he spent the winter with a girl who rode him several times a week even in the middle of the winter. He was well muscled and had won 5 out of the 8 or so jumper classes he’d been in this spring. I do not think his condition was a factor in this accident.

 

Why did it happen with no apparent unusual incident we could see? Performance horses just sometimes break down. They are asked to put all their effort into active events. Show horses break down unexpectedly sometimes. Race horses a lot more often. Like Barbaro, a race horse can come out of the gate looking like everything is going fine and suddenly a bone gives way. There is often no explaining what happened. There was certainly nothing obvious that caused Quantum’s injury, and we have crystal clear HD video of the whole thing and his two previous jumping rounds.

 

We have to accept that bad things sometimes happen for no logical reason. We do our best to condition our horses well and give them good care after they work for us. That’s all we can do. A great horse’s time had simply come and he is now with other great horses buried on Longacres’ Jumper Hill.

 

Tom Kranz