Shortly after Lava Man finished last in the 2008 Eddie Read Handicap at Del Mar, his owners decided to retire him. It seemed like the prudent thing to do at the time. Then 7, he had lost six straight races and had not won in more than a year. Age and infirmities seemed to have caught up to him.
But nearly 17 months after his last race, Lava Man, a gelding who has earned more than $5.2 million in his career, will return to competition Saturday at Hollywood Park in the Native Diver Handicap. Under normal circumstances, expectations would be low. How could a horse about to turn 9 possibly return to top form after a long layoff that was precipitated by an injury?
But these are not normal circumstances. During his hiatus, Lava Man, a former claimer who went on to become one of the top horses in the country, underwent stem celltreatments. The veterinarian who treated him says they have not only solved his physical problems but have made him stronger than ever.
“The trainer is the only one who can tell you how he’s going to run Saturday, but as far as the way he looks and based on our experience with other horses, theoretically, he should be much better than he was,” said Dr. Doug Herthel, who treated Lava Man at the Alamo Pintado Equine Medical Center in Los Olivos, Calif.
The owners Jason Wood, Steve Kenly and his father, Dave, originally had no intention of bringing Lava Man back. Instead, they sent him to Herthel hoping that he could fix Lava Man’s problems, which included arthritis in the joints in his ankles and a small fracture in his left front leg, so that he would be more comfortable in retirement and could be used as a riding horse.
Herthel went to work, taking healthy stem cells from other parts of Lava Man’s body and injecting them into the areas that had been injured.
“We think of those stem cells as little paramedics,” Herthel said. “They go in and they help; they enhance the health of the cartilage.”
According to Herthel, before-and-after tests taken on Lava Man showed significant improvement in what had been the injured areas. Whatever had been troubling him as his racing career was winding down had been cured. Herthel told the owners there was no reason the horse could not race again.
“We keep looking for a reason to say no, and we haven’t found one yet,” Herthel said.
Lava Man’s treatment has been billed as experimental, but Herthel said that is not necessarily the case. He said he had done similar procedures on “thousands of horses.” Yet his work had largely gone unnoticed in thoroughbred racing. That seems to be because most of his patients were not racehorses and the ones that were are not nearly as famous as Lava Man.
Herthel can point to at least one other racetrack success story. A now 6-year-old gelding named Ever A Friend, who was injured in May 2008, had virtually the same procedure as Lava Man and returned to win an allowance race and finish second in the Grade I Citation Handicap.
Herthel may make a convincing case for a Lava Man comeback, but his arguments have not swayed everyone. The owners and the trainer Doug O’Neill have been accused of being greedy and taking unnecessary risks with a horse that made them a lot of money. O’Neill has said he has received “lots of hate mail and hate e-mail.”
“We’re not doing this for the money,” Steve Kenly said. “We’re doing it for the excitement, for the horse and for the game. Being who he is, we’ve done everything we can for him. We go over him with a fine-toothed comb.”
Herthel argued that a horse like Lava Man, who is used to life around the racetrack, is actually happiest when competing.
“Being turned out to pasture isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, especially in a horse that is used to major care every day,” he said. “If he enjoys this and does well, I’m sure they will keep going. If it doesn’t seem like he has the will and doesn’t want to do it, I am sure they will let him be a riding horse.”
Whether the comeback will be successful is now up to Lava Man. Should he return to peak form, he should not have any problem winning the Native Diver, a race with a modest $100,000 purse. A victory would quiet the critics and perhaps pave the way for Lava Man to compete in the biggest races in Southern California.
