When Everyone Knows the Risk

I have stood with trainers when the horn sounds and every horse comes off the track but theirs. I have stood with trainers when they have to give the nod to end a horse’s life. I have stood on the rail when a horse laid down in shock from a bad step that’s beyond career ending.

Spend a day at the track and you’re bound to see a lot – the good, the bad, and the unfortunate. Racing is highs of winning, lows of losing, and everything in between.

I have often picked a bone with the PETA people for their desire to shut racing down because “it’s cruel.”

I’ve always had the same answers: horses are pack animals, born to run, as competitive as they come – and injuries are a natural extension of that. We don’t ban baseball because a pitcher tears a rotator cuff or needs Tommy John surgery. We don’t ban football because a lineman twists a knee or a quarterback breaks a collarbone.

In sports: teams win, teams lose, and injuries happen. Those are inevitable truths all participants accept. If they don’t or lose their nerve, they wouldn’t compete – it’s rather simple.

Racing is a sport, with two distinct types of athletes: the horse and the jockey.

Three riders were injured at Penn National last week in two different accidents. The worst injury appears to be a broken shoulder. Tyler Baze had a horse rear up and then step on him at Del Mar. The worst injury was a broken eye socket. Mike Smith clipped heels at Belmont years ago and broke his back when the horse fell on top of him. Bill Shoemaker, Laffit Pincay, Rene Douglas, Michael Straight – the list is long and some recover better than others.

But there are safeguards to prevent as many injuries as possible: from flack jackets to safety rails to workman’s comp and disabled assistance. Every rider knows that they’re 115 pounds on a 1,200 pound animal – there is inherent risk in running 45 miles per hour when you’re just 9% of your partner’s weight.

The best comparison is the other horsepower: NASCAR. While there isn’t a set rule, they have a guideline of 200 pounds in the cockpit of the car to create equal tangibles such as height, weight, and angles. The average racecar will weigh 3,400 pounds, including loads of safety equipment along with the regular mechanics. And drivers are as protected as can be: fire retardant suit, helmet, safety harness, foam-filled doors, and so on. NASCAR has gone out of their way to limit injuries and should be lauded for the lack of life threatening ambulance trips.

When there’s (god forbid) a crash (or two) in the Daytona 500 on February 20, no one will be calling for a ban on NASCAR. In fact, the home office strategy for building up the audience several years ago was anticipation of a crash – the guys in the television booths had commentary filled with “how many crashes do you think we’ll get today?”

I love NASCAR and – like all sports – watch knowing that there is inherent risk involved. If the drivers were afraid of a fender bender, they wouldn’t drive at 200 miles per hour at 6% of the car’s weight against 41 other guys.

But there is one distinct difference between Thoroughbred racing and NASCAR: the second athlete. If a jockey goes down, most likely it’s because his horse went down too. There is no such thing as a “minor collision” among horses. If someone clips heels, or loses their footing, or blows the turn – the horse and the rider are in mutual danger.

And we as owners and trainers and members of the racing media accept that. It’s the unfortunate side of the game. But so was Stefan Johnson’s weight room accident several years ago at USC – it ended his college football career. But no one’s calling for a ban there – it happened, safeguards are now in place because of it, and the world moves on.

Every few years someone releases the same study: whipping a horse doesn’t make it go any faster. That’s probably true. Horses are pack animals with a flight response (when it comes to fight or flight, they tend to flee). Watch horses in the wild: they run! Stallions will battle for domination amongst the herd, but that’s about the extent of the fighting. Horses are by nature competitive.

Several years ago, I was standing between paddocks at Three Chimneys Farm. It was just about sundown on a crisp fall afternoon. To my left was Smarty Jones, to my right Sky Mesa. Age-wise, they were a year apart and retired under similar circumstances (age, diagnosis, etc). They looked at each other over their fences, and – as if a firing gun had sounded – took off racing down the fenceline. They stopped at about the same spot, then turned around and raced each back.

I won’t say who won out of fairness to both sets of fans, but it was an eye-opening experience: to see such beauty perform such a natural activity. It brought tears to my eyes then and does to this day.

For all the tears I’ve shed for the horses that didn’t come off the track, or who did by ambulance, or for the trainers left with an empty stall at the end of the day – I am sure of one thing: it’s worth it.

Everyone knows the physical risk, yet the emotional reward is far too great.