By T. D. Thornton
Bill Carstanjen, the chief executive officer of Churchill Downs, Inc. (CDI), said during a quarterly earnings conference call Thursday that nearly two months of internal investigation into the deaths of 12 Thoroughbreds during the shortened spring meet at the gaming corporation's flagship Louisville track has yielded “nothing that jumped out as the apparent cause.”
Carstanjen added that CDI will soon be announcing new safety protocols to be implemented for the scheduled September return of racing to Churchill Downs, but he did not disclose details about what to expect.
During the first week of June, CDI abandoned the final month if its spring racing season at Churchill and moved the remainder of the meet 170 miles west to Ellis Park, another Kentucky track in its corporate portfolio.
Stabling, training, and timed morning workouts continued at Churchill while only the races were moved to Ellis. At the start of July, Ellis segued into the start of its traditional summer meet.
As per his custom on the quarterly earnings conference calls, Carstanjen began by reading prepared remarks that he described as “high-level thoughts” about the gaming corporation's overall business. He spoke for 22 minutes without addressing the horse fatalities or the move to Ellis in detail. It was only when he was asked directly about the issue by an investment banking analyst during a Q & A session that is not open to journalists that he disclosed what has been going on.
Carstanjen said “the takeaway is the track is very safe. And what we needed to do was spend some of this time in the interim while we ran the rest of the race meet at Ellis, to just go soup to nuts through every single thing that we do at the racetrack. There was nothing that jumped out as the apparent cause of the injuries, of the breakdowns.
“And as we went through and rebuilt our processes from the ground up to check everything that we do to make extra sure, we didn't find anything material. So the way to think about news like that is, hey, you have to do the best that you can; you have to take the steps that you can to make it as safe as possible, and you constantly have to challenge yourself and review everything you do.
Carstanjen continued, “But this was a series of unfortunate circumstances that happened during the early portion of our meet. And to the extent that there can be good that comes out of it, everything we'll do going forward in September we'll do a little bit better and be a little bit more thorough, and we'll learn what we can.
“But there aren't any material changes that have been made to the structure of the track or the surface of the track, [and after expert outside evaluation] we didn't find anything fundamentally wrong or different about our track from previous years.
“So that, in a sense, can sometimes be unsatisfying. But that's business and that's sport. We just have to commit to continually doing everything we can, constant incremental improvement, to be as safe as we can, and we've done that,” Carstanjen said.
Outside of the CDI corporate structure, the 12 fatalities have also been investigated by the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission and the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority.
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