News flash: Dr. Agne, an up-and-coming two-year-old racehorse named for the late equine podiatry veterinarian Bob Agne of Rood & Riddle Equine Hospital, made his second career start on Thursday, August 28 in the Grade 3 With Anticipation Stakes at 1 1/16 miles at Saratoga.
You didn’t have to be a racing fan to want this horse to win at Saratoga today. You just had to hear his story.
On July 11, 2025, many of us watched a young two-year-old Thoroughbred win his first start at Saratoga racecourse in upstate New York. It wasn't just your average horse race; this colt has a story
His story is about his dam. His story is about his name. But mostly, his story is about laminitis and the people who fight it.
The horse world erupted with a combination of tears and cheers that day as the gutsy two-year-old colt burst on the scene with a decisive win. Dr. Agne is the namesake of the popular equine podiatry veterinarian Dr. Bob Agne of Rood & Riddle Equine Hospital, who inspired Lady Eli's team back in July 2015.
This video is a feature created by the New York Racing Association's Saratoga Live team to tell Dr. Agne's story.
Lady Eli was still in rehabilitation at the end of that summer, when Dr. Agne headed out on his bike for a long Labor Day ride in Vermont. He never returned. He was struck and killed by a car on a mountain road.
Dr. Bob Agne was a veterinarian at the Rood & Riddle Equine Hospital's podiatry clinic in Kentucky for several years but had relocated to Saratoga to work in the practice's new hospital there when Lady Eli was diagnosed with laminitis at Belmont Park. Here he is demonstrating continuous digital hypothermia (a form of prolonged distal limb ice immersion therapy) employed during laminitis treatment.
Dr. Agne, who worked on the filly with colleague Bryan Fraley, DVM of Hagyard Equine Medical Institute in Kentucky, would never know that Lady Eli fully recovered and that she would write herself a new kind of black type in the record books–the record books of laminitis, that is.
Lady Eli not only survived laminitis, she returned to racing just 13 months later and went right back to winning. She scored three post-laminitis Grade I victories (the Gamely, the Jenny Wiley, and the Diana), was a very close second in the Breeders Cup Filly and Mare Turf that year, and won the Eclipse Award as champion turf female, all after recovering from laminitis.
• • • • •
Lady Eli was hard to forget. But the thing about racemares is that their colts and fillies eventually show up at the races, and keep their stories alive. That's exactly what happened on July 11.
Drs. Agne and Fraley weren’t mentioned very much in the years after Lady Eli retired. She went to the breeding shed, and her first two foals raced in Europe, so the laminitis story was all but forgotten, at least until this summer.
An Eclipse award and 2014 Breeders Cup Juvenile Fillies Turf winner, Lady Eli ran 14 times in her career, finishing first in 10 races and second in three. (Wikimedia image)
Another key player in the Lady Eli story was Cherie DeVaux, assistant trainer to Chad Brown, Lady Eli’s trainer. Chad Brown has won five Eclipse Awards for Outstanding Trainer in the United States, and he was devoted to Lady Eli, but the day to day rehab care of the filly fell on the shoulders of Cherie DeVaux.
Over the following years, DeVaux advanced to her own training career, with considerable success. But she never forgot her ordeal with laminitis and Lady Eli. When the chance came to train Lady Eli’s first foal to run in the United States, she added him to her barn at Saratoga.
And she named Lady Eli's son, too: "Dr. Agne" was the name she chose.
Today's With Anticipation Stakes will be broadcast live on the FoxSports 2 cable network but you can watch it live on the New York Racing Association's YouTube channel. NYRA's stream is the entire day's card, so look for Race 7. Approximate post time is 4:20 pm.
Dr. Agne is not just out of one of America’s leading champion racemares; he is sired by Into Mischief, who is the six-time – and reigning – champion sire in the United States. Into Mischief is the sire of the top three-year-old this year, the mighty Sovereignty, who has been on a roll and consecutively won the Kentucky Derby, Belmont Stakes, and Travers Stakes.
The colt made his first start at Saratoga on July 11. Like his dam, he has been trained for a career as a turf runner, but the weather had other ideas that day. The turf course was closed, and the race defaulted to the dirt track; it was run at seven furlongs. That turned out to not be a problem for Dr. Agne, even though he may have had to run the race with flat turf shoes on.
He won easily, charging through traffic with his white blaze making him easy to spot. He hit the finish line with steely determination reminiscent of Lady Eli herself.
As if those storybook elements weren’t enough, when Dr. Agne strode into the winner’s circle, he was greeted by the human Dr. Agne's wife, Carrie, who was Cherie DeVaux's guest that day.
Lady Eli now lives at Coolmore America's bucolic Ashford Stud in Versailles, Kentucky. The perfect post script to this story is that the equine podiatry team from Rood & Riddle Equine Hospital, where Dr. Bob Agne worked, still care for her hooves.
Today he tried to do it all again, but on grass. And with more serious competition. And at a longer distance. And around two turns.
As if this story couldn't get any warmer or any fuzzier, consider this: Lady Eli is alive and well in Versailles, Kentucky in the deep green pastures of Coolmore America's Ashford Stud. She's busy raising more foals but, ten years after her laminitis, her hooves are cared for there by Dr. Bob Agne's colleagues from the Rood & Riddle Equine Podiatry Center.
You can bet on this horse's story to make you smile and maybe cry at the same time. And those are the best kind of bets you could ever make on any horse.
Post Script: Dr. Agne did not win the With Anticipation Stakes at Saratoga, but he did come charging late again. It just wasn't enough this time. He finished fourth. But hopefully he'll be back.
Special thanks to the New York Racing Association, publicist Christian Abdo, and Coglianese Photo for their support and assistance at the track.
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UPDATE: On January 24, the US Equestrian Federation announced that the US Department of Agriculture had indeed pushed back new rules to prevent soring in Tennessee walking horses and similar breeds until April 1, 2025. The article below describes the background to this decision.
Since then, however, sweeping changes in Washington, DC have affected many cabinet agencies, and are expected to impact the USDA. Whether these changes will impact the APHIS horse inspection program remains to be determined.
Readers in the USA may be aware that long-anticipated changes to the federal Horse Protection Act are scheduled to go into effect on February 1. These new rules change the way that Tennessee Walking horses will be inspected at horse shows, and by whom, in an effort to prevent deliberate "soring" practices to enhance gait.
A strategic collaboration between donor Nancy Link and Mississippi State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM) will facilitate the establishment of the Nancy Fair Link Laminitis Research Center at the university. The partnership will also include recruitment of top faculty charged with advancing pioneering research in the prevention and treatment of laminitis.
Researchers from the University of Edinburgh’s Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies in Scotland are seeking online input from equine veterinarians and professional farriers from the United Kingdom, USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
Rood & Riddle Equine Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky will host the third International Equine Podiatry Conference.
The doors to the forge are always open at the Rood & Riddle Equine Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. Someone is always going in or out, and the equine podiatry clinic is a favorite stop on every hospital tour. But from April 18-20 this year, the doors will open even wider to welcome attendees to the hospital's third International Podiatry Conference.
Attendees should expect to roll up their sleeves, buckle their aprons, and spend two days in a stimulating state-of-the-art treatment and diagnosis center where the highly-trained staff looks expertly -- and exclusively -- at the equine hoof. A registration at this conference guarantees that the motivated participants can and will get their hands dirty and their questions answered.
Ian Davies, DipWCF is hard at work in his new job.
The British-born and British-educated farrier has joined the University of California School of Veterinary Medicine Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital in Davis, California. The vet school welcomed Ian to his new position yesterday.
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Hoofcare Publishing will be back at work and publishing from the "real" office in town soon. In the meantime, some changes are coming to improve the delivery of your email newsletter and headline alerts.
Prince Philip's brush with danger at the 2013 Royal Windsor Horse Show has almost been forgotten but it could have ended quite differently. A quick-thinking farrier was the hero that day.
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The return of James Herriot's heart-warming "All Creatures Great and Small" stories to American television for the next six Sundays might be just what we need to get through the winter.
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This article will cover midtown landmarks -- or "hoofmarks", as I call them -- around Times Square and Central Park.
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