This was the billboard you didn't see in Louisville during Derby week last year..
And this is the video horseracing power brokers didn't want you to see this week...
Coming Home is the granddaughter of 1990 Kentucky Derby winner Unbridled and the cousin of Eight Belles, who suffered a catastrophic breakdown in the 2008 Kentucky Derby. Coming Home raced 16 times without winning a race and was then purchased by a "killer" for meat for $200. Peta rescued her just hours before being shipped to slaughter.
As Churchill Downs prepares for the 137th "Run for the Roses", such hard cold data would be a distraction from the pagentry, the celebrity, the mint juleps, the hats and the sanitized singing of an old racist song.
But take a closer look...
U.S. thoroughbred racing is an industry of numbers. Consider the projected statistics for 2011 alone.The number of horses running in the Kentucky Derby: no more than 20. The number of thoroughbred foals born: 24,900. The number of thoroughbreds who will die on the track: 1,000. The number of thoroughbreds cast off by the racing industry: 21,000. The number of thoroughbreds sent to slaughter in Canada and Mexico: 10,000.
The glamour of this one day of horseracing belies a brutal "sport". Horseracing is the USA is not the "sport of kings" but rather a marginalized meat-grinder industry which chews up both young and old horses at an alarming rate. It is a loosely regulated association of state "gaming" commissions with little federal oversight, an industry where serial dopers are Eclipse Award winners and multi-millionaire breeders may neglect and starve their horses.
Mostly, it is an industry that kills off its' athletes. For obvious reasons, there is little transparency here. The industry only recently began to collect and does still not regularly publish national fatality data, but at least two independent studies indicate that more than three racehorses die each day at the track. Many observers agree this death toll is certainly an undercount as training deaths are not systematically recorded and many injured horses linger only to be euthanized later or otherwise disposed of.
Some of the dead are famous like the ill-fated Barbaro, Eight Belles who died in the dirt with two broken ankles after finishing second in the 2008 Kentucky Derby, and Go For Wand, whose breakdown in the 1990 Breeder's Cup Distaff was one racing's most gruesome nationally televised moments.
Most of the dead are lesser known - some former stakes horses, like Inesperado. that have fallen down through the claiming ranks, others are mere 2 year olds, and many are old geldings raced endlessly long past their prime. The majority of horses die in low level claiming races or during training with little fanfare and perhaps less remorse. They have inelegant names and ignominious ends like Private Details whose breakdown caused a 5 horse pile-up at Aqueduct or Mr. Smee, a five year old gelding who broke a hind leg, went through the rail and drown in the in-field lake at Lone Star Park..
Why do we tolerate such a grisly toll? Laura Hillenbrand, award-winning author of Seabiscuit, asks us to consider this:
A comparison to the National Football League puts this death rate into perspective. Every week, each of 32 teams fields between 40 and 47 players; at minimum, 1,280 players produce 20,480 performances per 16-game regular season. Even if every team fielded only the minimum number of men, if football players died at the same rate as racehorses, 33 players -- more than two per week -- would die in the regular season alone. That the NFL would tolerate such a thing is inconceivable, yet racing does just that.
While the racing industry likes to explain away break-downs as anomalous "bad steps" or bad luck, the issue is endemic and systemic. A host of factors are cited as contributors -- track surfaces, breeding for speed versus stamina, the rigors of extensive two-year old training/racing, and especially "medications". US horseracing is awash in drugs - both legal and otherwise. Lasix, steroids, clenblutenol, cortisone, lidocaine, mevipacaine, EPO, cobra venom, "milk-shaking"/TCO2, amphetamines and vodka injections are just a partial listing of licit and banned substances used regularly in racing.
The short answer to the issue of breakdowns is, of course, quite simply greed.
Surviving the race track is still no assurance of retirement to some proverbial greener pastures. More than two-thirds of the approximately 25,000 new thoroughbred foals bred every year by the racing industry in the U.S. will be rejected as losers. Equine rescue organizations can only save a minuscule percentage of them..As many of 30% of the 130,000+ horses annually shipped to slaughter in Canada and Mexico are throroughbred racehorses - some loaded up by the "meat-man" right at the track. HBO recently documented this practice at Mountaineer Park while following the fate of a horse ironically named, No Day Off...
No amount earnings or fame is a guarantee of salvation here. The 1986 Kentucky Derby winner Ferdinand died in a Japanese slaughter house in 2002. Despite being ranked as one of the top 100 US racing throroughbreds of all time, a similar fate was met by Exceller in Sweden in 1997, and Lava Man, the richest claiming horse in history with more than $5 million in earnings was finally re-retired with ankles so dehabilitated that stem cell therapy was required.
On this first Saturday in May, let us finally confront the questions that must be asked. Following the death of Eight Belles, William Rhoden of the New York Times put it to us this way:
Within the racing industry, Eight Belles was a tragic but glorious casualty. The industry is in denial: racing grinds up horses, and we dress up the sport with large hats, mint juleps and string bands.
Why do we refuse to put the brutal game of racing in the realm of mistreatment of animals? At what point do we at least raise the question about the efficacy of thousand-pound horses racing at full throttle on spindly legs?
This is bullfighting......
I saw Eight Belles in a heap. Thoroughbred racing is a brutal sport.
Why do we keep giving it a pass?
If you happen to see the Derby today and they ceremoniously ring a bell eight times for a fallen horse, pretending to mourn, pretending to care --- please remember the words of Gandhi --
“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated”..
Ask not then for whom the bell tolls -- it tolls for the tens of thousands who have fallen in obscurity.
It tolls for 3+ dead per day.
And yes -- it tolls for thee.
A revised and updated version of the diary originally posted May 1, 2010