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FRANKLIN, Ky.— The 6-year-old gelding Charcoal has six career victories, but the bigger win is just being alive to run in Saturday’s $1 million FanDuel Turf Sprint at the FanDuel Meet at Kentucky Downs. Charcoal is 20-1 in the Global Tote morning line.

Owner-breeder Ron Dowdy shipped the 2-year-old Charcoal to the Fair Grounds in New Orleans. “He bled one day for no reason at all after galloping,” Dowdy said.

Charcoal kept experiencing several severe hemorrhaging, to the point that at least one veterinarian suggested the youngster be euthanized.

“I said, ‘I’m not going to put this horse down. He’s not in pain,’” Dowdy said. “But nobody could tell me what was wrong with him.”

Finally, he said Lexington’s famed Hagyard Equine Medical Institute sent him an article about guttural pouch mycosis, a rare but serious disease in horses. Guttural pouches are the sacs of air positioned beneath a horse’s ears.

“I said, ‘That’s what my horse has,’” Dowdy said. “It’s a fungus that gets in their guttural pouch and it gets onto the arteries. The aorta goes right through there. And that’s what happens: they bleed out and die.”

Charcoal was sent to trainer Tracey Wisner’s farm in Michigan, where he was turned out. Shane Spiess, Wisner’s partner in life and training, treated Charcoal with procaine penicillin for 20 days.

Even so, Dowdy said he thought Charcoal was going to require surgery and sent him to the clinic.

“The surgeon called me and said, ‘He doesn’t need surgery. It’s all gone. What did you do?’” the owner recalled. “I told him about the penicillin. I said, ‘Can he go back to the track?’ He said ‘yeah, but no rush.’ and I kept him off another six months. So he missed his whole 3-year-old year and most of his 4-year-old year.”

Wisner said there were serious doubts whether Charcoal would ever recover from the bleeding episodes.

“It looked like a massacre in our barn,” she said of one incident when the gelding was in Michigan. “It was an amazing amount of blood, and it was scary.

“We’re just old farm people, old school, and Shane just went ahead and put this horse on high doses of old-fashioned procaine penicillin and got him some fresh air and turned him out and basically forgot about him. We brought him back slow and easy. He hadn’t run in so long that it was taking him a while to get it back together. And he just kept improving and improving, and he turned into what he is today. He became a racehorse.”

With 1 1/2 years between races, Charcoal unsuccessfully tried five times to win a $16,000 maiden-claiming race in Indiana before winning a maiden special weight at West Virginia’s Mountaineer Park. He’s kept improving ever since, including winning Horseshoe Indianapolis’ William Garrett Stakes last year and finishing second in the same race this year. Charcoal earned a shot at the Grade 2 Turf Sprint by finishing second by a neck to the 3-year-old All in Sync in Ellis Park’s $100,000 TwinSpires Turf Sprint.

Charcoal has paid back Dowdy by earning $203,218 in purses.

“He figured out what he was,” Dowdy said. “I always knew he had speed. And the rest is history. He never bled again. He’s as sound as sound can be. He tries every time he gets on the track.”

Now the team is in its first $1 million stakes.

“It’s just an honor to be in the race,” the Indiana-based Wisner said. “But I have a nice horse, a happy horse, a healthy horse. So we’re going to do our best… You have to have a little luck, have to have the horse and you have to have the racing gods smile on you.”

By Jennie Rees – Kentucky Downs Press Release

Photo: Charcoal wins the William Garrett Stakes at Horseshoe Indianapolis (Coady Photography)

@AmWager @jontahnstettin @GulfstreamPark And starts off the daywith a winner.

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