Torn tendons bind Awesome Feather, Pool Play comebacks

• Awesome Feather is unbeaten and 3-1 second choice in Friday's Ladies Classic
• Awesome Feather was sold two years ago to Frank Stronach for $2.3 million
• Pool play is a 30-1 longshot in the Classic, but won the Hawthorne Gold Cup in his last outing Oct. 12

ARCADIA, Calif. -- Gifted horses are not something you want packaged with a bow.

Bowed tendons (the tearing of tendon fibers in a leg) have ended the careers of many racehorses, particularly those competing at a high level because they often don't return to their previous quality.

Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner I'll Have Another was retired on the eve of the Belmont Stakes because of fear that a tendon problem could morph into a bow.

There's an old track saying that the only one who ever did any good with a bow was Robin Hood. But the Breeders' Cup World Championships at Santa Anita will showcase two horses who have made remarkable recoveries from bowed tendons in Awesome Feather (Ladies' Classic) and Pool Play (Classic).

Four-year-old filly Awesome Feather's perfect record goes on the line in a tough edition of Friday's $2million Ladies' Classic, for which she is the 3-1 second choice behind defending champion Royal Delta.

Awesome Feather capped a six-race 2-year-old campaign with a win in the Juvenile Fillies at Churchill Downs, which clinched her being her division's champion. Two days later, she was sold for $2.3 million to owner Frank Stronach. New trainer Chad Brown hadn't even gotten her back to the track when the left foreleg tendon injury became apparent.

"For a horse to come back with a tendon like that and run at this level — I mean, she's 10-for-10 — she's an extraordinary horse," Brown said.

Awesome Feather originally was off for 11 months, and Brown has backed off on her whenever anything seemed remotely amiss. She raced twice last year and has raced twice this year after an eight-month layoff.

Awesome Feather has not raced against the type of competition she'll face Friday, with 2011 Juvenile Fillies winner My Miss Aurelia providing a third champion in the field. Except for Love and Pride, Awesome Feather's rivals have never faced her.

"We play it safe with her in terms of her health," Brown said. "But as far as keeping her race record intact or being afraid to hurt her value, that's never been the objective."

As with Pool Play, Awesome Feather's treatments included shockwave therapy to stimulate healing. But the trainer said a lot of it is having patience and incredible patients.

"I don't think there's any recipe for fixing a tendon," Brown said. "If everyone says, 'Well, Awesome Feather came back, let's send Chad Brown 10 bowed horses,' I'm probably going to go 0-for-10 bringing them back. You have to have the horse. All of us can say, 'This worked. That worked.' What worked was having a filly who could persevere through all of it."

Though she never has run west of the Mississippi, Awesome Feather is the "house horse," with Stronach the owner of Santa Anita.

"It's been a roller coaster with her, but these are really special owners, the Stronachs," Brown said. "They've just been supportive and positive. And I think that's created a lot of good karma around the filly."

Now 7, Pool Play won the Grade I Stephen Foster in 2011 in his first start on dirt after racing on turf and synthetic surfaces at Woodbine near Toronto. When he injured the tendon training at Saratoga, owner Bill Farish assumed Pool Play's career was over. But trainer Mark Casse hatched a plan to bring him back.

"I'm quite proud of Pool Play, no matter how he runs in the Classic," said Casse, Canada's leading trainer, who has been building a sizable division at Churchill. "Just that he could get there is one of our greatest accomplishments. It's been a big effort from our training center in Florida to everybody, because he had a serious injury. He had a significant-sized hole in his tendon."

After a year's hiatus, Pool Play had two fourths and a third in three starts over a synthetic surface before capturing the 1¼-mile Hawthorne Gold Cup in his second dirt start.

While the horse is 30-1 in the Classic, he bucked far greater odds.

"We know we're going to be a long shot," said Farish, a former Breeders' Cup chairman who runs Lane's End Farm in Midway, Ky., for his father, Will. "But he's such an honest horse, and he gives it his all – even when we're running him on the wrong surface.

"What we were doing this year was trying to get him back to his peak form without running him on dirt until we were really ready to get a maximum effort. And luckily that's what we got at Hawthorne."

"I'm definitely amazed he's made it to the Breeders' Cup," said Farish. "But he just keeps surprising us."

Rees writes for The (Louisville) Courier-Journal