By Armen Antonian
The just-concluded Santa Anita/Hollywood winter/spring meet with a 99.97% safety record from 6,678 horses racing over the dirt and or turf is truly remarkable. Combine this result with the additional data released by HISA of a fatality rate of .83 per 1000 starts nationally for the first quarter of 2024 and something extraordinary is starting to occur. Thoroughbred racing can and, importantly is, becoming safe with regard to horse fatalities.
One would have been hard-pressed to make such a statement in 2019 with the many horse fatalities at Santa Anita. I never entirely bought the rain/poor track condition explanation for those fatalities. Yes, the 2019 conditions at Santa Anita were unique, but horse fatalities had been relatively high virtually everywhere in the United States. And, over time, this fact left the industry wide-open to criticism that went far beyond a few animal rights groups.
When the California state government started to get critically involved and when I was asked by several friends about the deaths of horses on the racetrack, I knew that my favorite sport/pastime was in some trouble. The perception of horse racing in the public realm had taken a blow and the reverberations quickly spread nationally.
The starting point was, however, not the horse racing deaths but the fact that so many horses raced at high speed and did not break down. Most horses did NOT break down. That is, the racing itself could not be the culprit as the critics claimed-that is not what the data showed- but something was indeed amiss.
From decades of handicapping–I saw Damascus and Buckpasser race at Santa Anita in the 1960s as a kid–I had noticed that certain horses should not be bet because of their apparent declining form or a projected decline in performance due to an excessive or difficult race schedule. In 2019, I surmised that most racing deaths could be eliminated by ascertaining and then rectifying pre-existing conditions with regard to race horses. I was not a vet or a trainer and, as a handicapper, I could only make broad conjectures, but my graduate study often involved interpreting data. What explained the data? There had to be intervening factors (pre-race) that caused a small percentage of horses to break down in a race and those factors could be identified as in any science.
HISA CEO Lisa Lazarus has recently acknowledged that many factors have now been identified that are warning signs regarding possible racing injury/fatalities for certain horses and she states pointedly, “HISA's most important goal is driving down equine fatalities.” Indeed and indeed. Reducing racing fatalities to near zero and understanding the risk factors that will prevent horses with pre-existing conditions from racing are paramount for the viability of the sport.
The news is that horse racing has come a considerable way in addressing safety issues of its equine athletes performing in the sport.
–Armen Antonian Ph.D
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