Stronach sent Tim Ritvo, an executive known for knocking heads, to Gulfstream, where he helped turn a middling business into an extremely profitable one, running enormous numbers of horses. After years of neglecting Pimlico, the company wanted to move the Preakness to Laurel Park, a track in the suburbs. Baltimore officials were aghast at losing the race, which has been running since , and the state ultimately agreed to invest nearly four hundred million dollars in Pimlico and Laurel Park.
Stronach committed to leaving the Preakness where it was, having offloaded the risk onto the State of Maryland. Then Stronach sent Ritvo to Santa Anita, with an assignment to make the fabled track more profitable. Ritvo put another Stronach executive, P. Campo, in the racing office in late Campo had a history.
Seven years before, he had been the racing secretary at Aqueduct, the track in Queens. A casino had just opened there, and race purses had been increased.
Fields got bigger—there was more money for owners to win, and thus perhaps more tolerance for risk, and certainly more profit to the track—and more horses, predictably, started breaking down. Twenty-one horses died in three months. Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered an investigation and ended up seizing control of the New York Racing Association, which operates Aqueduct.
Stronach hired Campo not long after these events. Campo declined to comment for this story. At Santa Anita, the plan was to run as many races as possible, with fields as large as possible.
Veterinarians inclined to scratch horses they considered unfit would have to deal with pressure from the racing office. The plan did not reckon with the shortage of race-ready horses in California. It did not anticipate a winter of unusual rain. Then two more suffered catastrophic breakdowns within minutes of each other, during a morning workout on the main dirt track, which had recently been sealed.
Barocio was distraught. Ritvo, who has since left Stronach, could not be reached for comment. It was 2 a. Alexander was crouched beside a newborn foal sprawled on bloody hay, gently stroking his lower legs. He looked jet black to me, but he was still bloody and wet.
His mother, one Miranda Rose, was slowly licking him clean. He had a great white blaze down the center of his face, and he looked both exhausted and intensely curious. His mother paced the spacious birthing stall, working off the pains of parturition, with half the placenta, neatly tied up by an attending stable hand, still hanging out of her. A dark bay, she had been a pretty good runner in her day, mainly at Golden Gate Fields. Her grandfather was a dashing Chilean, who had come north mid-career and immediately won the Santa Anita Handicap, back when that was a major race.
Alexander got out of the way. But foals need to be able to move with the herd at daybreak. Hence the rush to find his feet. After a few flops and crashes, he somehow stood, and was soon staggering around the stall behind his mother. But all of them are close to the animals, in a way their critics rarely are. Meetings of the California Horse Racing Board, which are open to the public, had become a nightmare for horsemen, Alexander told me.
Animal-rights activists dominated the public-comment period, giving speeches. They had a lot to say about how the horses suffered, although they never seemed to know much about horses. It was tempting to direct their attention to the beef and pork and chicken industries, if animal suffering was their main concern.
In racing, the tolerance for death and suffering is less than it used to be. Gregory Ferraro, the chairman of the California Horse Racing Board, began working as an equine veterinarian in Just leave them there, people walking by, till the knacker man would show up and haul them away. I said no. We built an enclosure. In , New York City had fifteen thousand horse corpses a year, lying in its streets waiting to be taken away.
Ferraro has seen brutal veterinary practices—blistering, which is as it sounds, and the firing iron—vanish or become rare.
Some chronic conditions have improved. That was the late seventies, and we got those slab fractures down eighty to eighty-five per cent. We should be able to do the same with fetlock injuries.
The biggest thing most racehorses need is rest, but prescribing rest is unpopular among trainers and unprofitable for vets. They want success. If they have a three-year-old, they want to win the Derby. Racehorse ownership has undergone a sea change. Used to be one big guy you were riding for. Racehorse ownership has been somewhat democratized. The stereotypical impatient owner these days is not some toffee-nosed plutocrat but a clueless hedge funder demanding a Kentucky Derby winner, of which he might own half a hoof.
These investments have been in Ireland, England, Europe, Australia, and Japan in addition to the United States, and have lately extended to hosting races that offer the largest purses in the world—the Saudi Cup pays twenty million dollars. He has yet to win the Derby, though not for want of trying.
Another Muslim potentate, the Aga Khan, is among the largest thoroughbred breeders and owners in France, where racing remains super populaire.
His great-grandfather, also known as the Aga Khan, reportedly kept an excellent stable in nineteenth-century Bombay. Sheikh Mohammed presented the racing world with a reputational dilemma last year. A high court in London found that he had conducted a campaign of intimidation against his sixth wife, who had fled to Britain with their two children, and that he had abducted two grown daughters from an earlier marriage, allegedly torturing one of them. Sheikh Mohammed says that the abductions were search-and-rescue missions.
One of the daughters, who was taken off the street in Cambridge, has not been seen since The two women are now, at best, detained under unknown circumstances in Dubai. In the United States, Sheikh Mohammed is a member in good standing of the Jockey Club, which is by invitation only and has strict rules against cruelty to horses.
The movement to abolish horse racing—its cultural indictment as animal slavery—has been gaining momentum, particularly on social media, for years. In the U. The Washington Post ran an editorial that advocated abolition now. The rot in horse racing goes deep. It is a sport that has outlived its time. By the second week of March, , the racing industry seemed to be reeling, indefensible. By the end of that week, however, we were in a new epoch, rung in by the thunderous bell of Covid Racing disappeared from the headlines.
People, those speciesists, were worried about people now. Many racetracks were shut by the pandemic. Santa Anita kept running till late March: no live fans, the jockeys living in trailers in the parking lot. Then Los Angeles County closed the track as a nonessential business, whereupon Stronach argued that, with seventeen hundred horses in stables and seven hundred people living there to care for them, the facility simply could not sit still.
The horses needed daily exercise. By mid-May, the races were back on. Horse fatalities were relatively low for the year—less than half their terrible totals—and the handle, strangely, was up. Horsemen seemed happier. Thoroughbred racing generally was having a good pandemic. As sports nearly everywhere disappeared, people were betting on anything that moved. The level of match-fixing was infinite, and basically everybody lost. Next to this sort of shadiness, a race at Will Rogers Downs, outside Tulsa, looked wholesome.
The whales are not obese billionaires sprawled on yachts, as I originally thought, but serried ranks of high-octane computers, operated by individuals who know nothing about horses but everything about betting. They bet on high-payoff combinations like trifectas and pick-sixes, and with the rebates they get from tracks, along with the exclusive access they reportedly get to the details of the existing pool bets, they are able to analyze and exploit all the inefficiencies.
The Water Hay Oats Alliance had its dream come true in legislation passed that will establish a national regulatory body, under the aegis of the United States Anti-Doping Agency.
For nearly a decade, the biggest holdout in the industry was Churchill Downs, Inc. In , C. What changed? My theory is that even the most hardheaded moneymen in racing began to worry. The new authority is scheduled to start work in July, The hope is that the U.
The pandemic, however, has made armchair pharmacists of us all: once obscure medications such as hydroxychloroquine and remdesivir have become household names.
Only sheeple listen to doctors and experts! Independent thinkers take farmyard medicine after listening to Fox News and Facebook. Humans have successfully used it to treat diseases caused by parasitic worms. There is scant evidence , however, that the animal or human formulations of ivermectin can treat or prevent Covid.
Ivermectin is flying off shelves: it is sold out in agricultural supply stores across Oklahoma and Las Vegas ; pharmacies in Idaho are reporting shortages; in the US as a whole, prescriptions have jumped to almost 90, a week in mid-August from a pre-pandemic level of 3, a week.
But we have vaccines! This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you. From to , at least 76 horses have died as a result of participating in jumps racing.
The true toll is believed to be higher as industry statistics on deaths occurring in training and trials are not publicly available.
Despite attempts by the industry to improve safety, injury and deaths continue. There are no mandatory welfare standards for racehorses. Therefore, legal protection is limited to the minimal requirements under State based animal welfare legislation.
Other areas, where animals are used such as farming and animal research, have specified welfare standards which must be adhered to. The RSPCA believes that the implementation of legal welfare standards for racehorses, to eliminate practices that cause injury, pain, suffering or distress, is an urgent government priority. The horse racing industry largely governs itself in terms of animal welfare through state based racing authorities.
Self-regulation, particularly in the absence of appropriate standards, raises concerns regarding adequacy of monitoring and enforcement. Unfortunately, without independent inspections, significant welfare issues can continue undetected. In addition, incentives such as increasing prize money for two-year-old races can encourage more rigorous training of immature horses, thus potentially leading to more injuries.
The RSPCA advocates the comprehensive regulation of all horse racing by an independent body with a formal and complete separation between the integrity and regulatory functions from the commercial functions. It is essential that the racing industry collate and publish relevant data that affect the welfare of horses.
Until such data are available, the industry is not motivated or compelled to take action to improve welfare in these specific areas. Equine Veterinary Journal 52 2. Animals 10 11 , Australian Veterinary Journal Oversupply of racehorses To increase the chances of finding the winning champion, the racing industry depends on breeding a high number of horses and a high turn-over rate.
Use of painful devices The RSPCA is opposed to the use of whips due to their potential to inflict pain and injury and believes that the use of whips cannot be justified given that performance is influenced more by genetics, preparation and rider skill.
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