racehorse breakdowns

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....

After the TDN published two opinion pieces which recommended a return to synthetic surfaces, one by Earle Mack in the May 31 TDN and one by Bill Finley in this Monday's TDN, we have been inundated by comments, questions, and opinions about the relative safety of one surface versus another. Some of the questions asked for a year-by-year comparison, while other comments cited statistics that were not correct. Courtesy of The Jockey Club's Equine Injury database, here are the figures of racing fatalities per thousand starters, year by year for...