Battle of Midway (right, racing at Del Mar) was the most recognizable of horses that died at Santa Anita.Newscom
It’s a mystery.
That’s how many of horse racing’s stakeholders describe what has led to the deaths of 23 horses at Santa Anita Park in the span of a few months. Determining why may be the key to saving the oldest sport in America.
“It’s not unfair to say this has really put the sport at a tipping point,” said Jim Gagliano, president of The Jockey Club, an organization founded 125 years ago and that is dedicated to the improvement of thoroughbred breeding and racing.
The deaths have focused national and international media attention on the industry in the weeks leading up to Saturday’s Kentucky Derby and have renewed calls from animal rights activists for widespread changes to the sport — or an end to the sport altogether.
Madeline Auerbach is a horse owner and breeder who serves as vice chairman of the California Horse Racing Board. Asked if there was a possibility that California could lose horse racing, Auerbach asked for time to think before answering.
“It’s a very legitimate question,” she said. “It’s a question that before what happened I would have thought was kind of hyperbole, but it’s no longer hyperbole.”
Sport in jeopardy
Horse racing is older than America itself, as the first organized races were held in colonial upstate New York in 1665. It was once one of the country’s most popular sports, but its fan base decreased first with the legalization of state lotteries, then by an ill-fated decision not to televise races in the 1960s and further by the advent of off-track betting in the 1970s.
But horse racing could be facing a real possibility of extinction. SBJ spent several weeks interviewing multiple industry stakeholders and not one would say they were certain the sport could weather what has become a continuing storm.
Ray Paulick has covered horse racing since 1980, first as a reporter for The Daily Racing Form, then as editor of The Blood-Horse and now as editor and publisher of industry insider newsletter The Paulick Report.
“This is the most serious threat — and not just Santa Anita, but nationally — this is the biggest threat I’ve seen to horse racing in the 40 years I’ve been involved,” Paulick said.
Alex Waldrop is the president of the National Thoroughbred Racing Association, which was launched in 1997 to try to revive the popularity of horse racing. He said that the situation of horses dying at Santa Anita has to be figured out and it must be fixed for the industry’s sake.
“It serves nobody’s interest for horses to be injured or to be fatally injured on a racetrack,” Waldrop said. “As a business, we have to have safe, healthy horses to survive.”
Waldrop said Santa Anita has to not only stop the horse deaths, but figure out why they occurred in the first place. Santa Anita has produced multiple champion horses, including the last two Triple Crown winners — American Pharoah and Justify. Waldrop called it a model for health and safety for tracks around the country.
“And that’s really why this comes as such a surprise, because it was a freakish sort of thing,” he said. Waldrop noted that Santa Anita has brought in a number of track and equine experts to try to fix the problem, and adopted some of the strictest rules banning medications and use of the whip on racing days. But he added that it was imperative to get to the root cause.
“We can’t, as an industry, have our equine athletes dying on the track like this,” Waldrop said. “This is absolutely intolerable.”
But he added, “It certainly isn’t a matter of callousness or lack of concern at this point in time. It’s more of a mystery we need to solve.”
Santa Anita has responded to the crisis with several new plans to make horses safer. Some of its stricter regulations include greater veterinarian oversight, including getting permission for workouts involving high-speed training exercises 48 hours in advance.
The track also plans to invest in high-tech diagnostic equipment for horses, including an MRI or CAT scan machine, said Tim Ritvo, chief operating officer of track owner The Stronach Group. “Everyone got the wake-up call,” he said.
The deaths
Santa Anita always opens its Winter Meet the day after Christmas. On Dec. 30, a 4-year-old male horse, Psychedelicat, suffered a leg injury on the main track and was euthanized.
Serious leg injuries for thoroughbred horses almost always mean death. It’s not that the medical technology doesn’t exist to heal them. It’s that horses, being flight animals, will not tolerate their legs being immobilized to fix what’s wrong.
In January, 10 horses died at Santa Anita — seven after suffering injuries racing and three while training. In February, eight more horses died, three racing and five training, including Battle of Midway, a fan favorite who had won the 2017 $1 million Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile at odds of 14-1.
“Pretty early on — by the end of February — we began looking into it,” said Kathy Guillermo, senior vice president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
“We got in touch with them,” Guillermo said. “We said, ‘What’s going on? Can you close the track until you know what’s going on?’”
The Stronach Group closed the track for a few days, inspected it and approved it for racing. Then the deaths started again.
“We got in touch with them again and said, ‘We believe this is likely due to medications and training methods,’” Guillermo said.
The Stronach Group later announced that it was banning race-day medications, including painkillers and Lasix, a widely used anti-inflammatory and diuretic, which trainers say helps horses breathe better but is seen as performance-enhancing.
PETA then went to Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey and asked her to investigate. “We actually had a protest at the D.A.’s office because she initially said no,” Guillermo said. “We got 50 people out there. On that day [March 14], there was the 22nd breakdown.” After that death, the Los Angeles district attorney’s office announced it was opening an investigation. On April 16, it said it would form a task force to determine if any laws were broken around the horse deaths.
A spokesman for the district attorney’s office declined to comment.
Autopsies performed on horses, called necropsies, have shown that in about 90 percent of horse breakdowns, there was an existing injury on the bone that broke. “We asked the district attorney’s office to investigate the trainers and their medication records to see if there was culpability there for putting injured horses on the track,” Guillermo said.
PETA said that it believes the training methods, including medication and use of the whip, are to blame for the horse breakdowns. Others have pointed to the large amount of winter rainfall that Los Angeles experienced and its impact on the track. “I don’t believe rain had anything to do with it, personally,” Guillermo said.
Weather a factor
There is no doubt that Los Angeles’ weather this past winter was unusual. The L.A. rain season starts in October, and by Valentine’s Day the National Weather service announced that the region had surpassed its average annual total of 14.93 inches.
Santa Anita is located in Arcadia, a city about 15 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles. Located farther inland and up against the mountains, Arcadia tends to get more rain than L.A. and is warmer in the daytime and colder at night. In Los Angeles this February, not a single day broke 70 degrees, the first time that’s happened in 134 years, according to the National Weather Service.
“It’s the worst winter I can remember since I moved to California in 1984,” said Gary Stevens, a hall of fame jockey who lives near Santa Anita and now is an analyst for Fox Sports’ horse racing coverage. Stevens started racing horses at age 14 and retired last November at age 55 after winning multiple awards and graded stakes races, including three at each of the Triple Crown races.
Retired jockey Gary Stevens said Santa Anita had no choice but to seal the track after an unusual amount of rainfall this past winter. getty images
He has lifelong friendships with jockeys and trainers at Santa Anita and has a theory about the rash of horse breakdowns. And it has everything to do with the rain.
“We had so much rain this winter that they had no choice but to seal the track,” said Stevens. “When they seal a track here in California, they do it with heavy equipment and they make it as hard as the roadway.”
Stevens, who played George Woolf in the film “Seabiscuit,” suffered many injuries during his career and retired and unretired at least twice. He’s raced all over the country and all over the world.
A lot of racetracks are made of sand, but tracks in California are made of clay, which makes them particularly hard when they are sealed, a process that essentially compresses the surface and squeezes out the water.
“I got to the point towards the end of my career … if they sealed the racetrack and I felt it was too hard, I would take off my mounts,” Stevens said. “Because my knees would hurt so bad until I got them injected after racing on a sealed racetrack. And if that is going through the horse into me, what’s it doing to the horse?”
Stevens fought through pain and injury to ride horses his whole life, but said if there was one time he didn’t want to be an active rider it is right now. “I am really able to state my opinions without fear of being punished for it,” he said. “It’s a scary time.”
A widespread problem
Although the focus is on Santa Anita now, a spike in horse deaths has happened before at other premier racetracks in the country.
Over a period of about six weeks in 2016, 16 racehorses were euthanized after suffering injuries at Del Mar, the glamorous racetrack located less than a mile from the Pacific Ocean in San Diego County.
In 2017, at New York’s Saratoga — arguably the best racetrack on the East Coast with a reputation for large stakes purses, quality racehorses and some of the richest horse owners in the country — 19 horses either died or were put down, mostly due to fractured legs.
The Louisville Courier-Journal declared in a headline last month that “Churchill Downs is one of the deadliest racetracks in America.” The story reported that Churchill Downs has lost 43 thoroughbreds to racing injuries since 2016, and that only one track in the country had more racehorse deaths than Churchill Downs last year — Hawthorne Race Course just outside Chicago.
States differ on how they track horse deaths, with some reporting racing deaths and some training deaths, PETA’s Guillermo said, adding that California is among the most transparent in its record-keeping.
Of the 23 horses lost at Santa Anita since last Dec. 30, Battle of Midway was the most recognizable. Whenever a high-profile horse has been euthanized, it has gained media attention. In 1990 at Belmont Park, Go For Wand, the nation’s champion filly, broke down and had to be euthanized on the track. Filly Eight Belles also was euthanized on the track after breaking both of her ankles while finishing second in the 2008 Kentucky Derby.
Barbaro, winner of the 2006 Kentucky Derby, broke down in the Preakness Stakes but was kept alive as his owners spent millions on innovative surgeries and medical procedures. This included suspending him on a raft in a large pool of water after surgery, so he would not thrash around and reinjure his leg. Despite those efforts, Barbaro was euthanized seven months later, after contracting laminitis, an ailment that affects horses that cannot distribute their weight evenly on all four legs.
One of the most famous and tragic breakdowns in history occurred more than 40 years ago, when Ruffian, an undefeated filly who some say was the best female racehorse of all time, broke her leg in a nationally televised race with Kentucky Derby-winning colt Foolish Pleasure at Belmont Park. Her owners tried to save her, but Ruffian was euthanized after she reinjured her leg when she awoke from anesthesia after surgery.
Paulick started covering racing five years after Ruffian. Asked if there were as many breakdowns before Ruffian, Paulick said, “I don’t know. We didn’t have numbers. Now we have numbers.”
Animal rights position
Among the animal rights groups calling for change, there is division. PETA has advocated changes to horse racing, including banning the use of race-day drugs and the riding crop.
“We are against the cruelties of racing,” PETA’s Guillermo said. “So as racing is done now we oppose it.
“But if racing cleaned itself up, if it got rid of the drugs and it stopped the breakdowns, and if it took care of the horses after their racing careers, we would go away.”
Animal rights activists have called for the state to shut down horse racing at Santa Anita Park.getty images
Horseracing Wrongs wants the sport abolished. “We are the only group in America that is working to end the horse racing industry,” said Patrick Battuello, the group’s founder.
Battuello started his effort in 2013 and incorporated it as a nonprofit in 2017. While PETA would be willing to live with horse racing under certain circumstances, Horseracing Wrongs does not want it to continue under any circumstances.
And while PETA protested at the L.A. DA’s office, asking for an investigation of the horse deaths at Santa Anita, it’s been Horseracing Wrongs that has been protesting at the track itself.
The Stronach Group has been talking to and working with PETA, something that has irked some in the horse racing industry.
“We have not protested because, yes, they are changing rules,” Guillermo said.
Horseracing Wrongs’ position is that the sport should not be allowed because racing thoroughbreds at young ages at high speeds means some horses will die and that is not acceptable. “It’s not an anomaly what’s happening at Santa Anita,” Battuello said. “The only difference is the press is finally covering it.”
Industry infighting
Jockeys have resisted the call by activists and others to take away or cut back their use of the riding crop during races.
Of the 23 horses that broke down, all of them had jockeys or exercise riders aboard, but none of the riders were seriously injured, said Terry Meyocks, national manager of the Jockeys’ Guild.
The guild, a trade organization which represents the nation’s 1,000 jockeys, has asked for time to present scientific evidence showing the need for the whip prior to any move toward eliminating it. “The crop must be available to encourage and communicate with the horse during a race,” Meyocks testified before the state board.
CHRB’s Auerbach took issue with some of Meyocks’ testimony, noting that the board was trying to take into consideration the views of the people of the state of California toward whips and racing. If they didn’t take it seriously, she warned, all in horse racing would pay a big price.
“We will not be arguing about whips, we will not have the ability to have whips, because we will have destroyed our industry,” Auerbach said. “This is not going away. We need to fix our industry.”
There is similar disagreement about whether medications, such as the anti-inflammatory drug Lasix or bone density drugs such as bisphosphonates, played a role. “Is it a possibility?” Paulick asked, rhetorically, about bisphosphonates. “Yes, I think it is. And the reason I say that is not because of what I think, it’s because of what veterinarians I respect have said.”
Waldrop said he first became aware that bisphosphonates were being used about a year and a half ago, but noted that a connection between the drugs and the deaths has not been made.
“It just so happened that we, as an industry, became very acutely aware of bisphosphonates at the same time as we have seen issues arise at Santa Anita,” Waldrop said. “But, to be clear, if bisphosphonates were the issue at Santa Anita, you would see these problems across the country, to the extent that we’ve seen them at Santa Anita. And that simply isn’t the case.”
Investigation continues
At the CHRB meeting earlier this month, Executive Director Rick Baedeker said the board’s four investigators, with the help of the D.A.’s office, were still working out a reason to explain the deaths. “The CHRB has issued more than 70 subpoenas for documents,” he said. “This is a very detailed, very thorough, a very complicated process. Investigations take time. But I can assure the board and all interested parties that it remains the highest priority for the CHRB, working in conjunction with the district attorney’s office.”
At the same meeting, while animal rights activists asked the board to shut down racing at Santa Anita, officials of unions representing track workers advocated for the track to remain open.
California is one of the three major horse racing hubs in the U.S., along with New York and Kentucky. Nationwide, horse racing accounts for more than 472,000 jobs, according to a 2017 study commissioned by the American Horse Council Foundation. In California, 17,000 people, including jockeys and trainers, who work directly in the industry are licensed by the CHRB. But there are many more who depend on horse racing for their livelihoods.
Alex Solis, a hall of fame jockey who retired recently and is a member of the CHRB, said the animal rights activists who testified that horses at Santa Anita were being mistreated and forced to run did not know horses. “These are the same people who want to shut down racing but don’t know the chaos it would cause for the people that make a living out here to feed their family,” Solis said.
The day of the April meeting, the major U.S. racing organizations, including Churchill Downs and the New York Racing Association, announced they agreed to follow The Stronach Group’s lead and phase out Lasix.
Baedeker noted that it was the first time in the 20 years since the NTRA was formed that the industry had come together on a major issue.
Many in horse racing agree that the sport has to change or die, that spikes in horse deaths cannot be brushed off because society will not tolerate it.
“As a regulator, as an owner, as a breeder, as a human being, in whatever capacity we are — if we keep the horse at the prime concern, we’ll be OK,” Auerbach said. “We’ll make it.”
But, she added, “If we go into tributaries that don’t specifically deal with the care of the horse, then we are going to lose it all.”
