Leading OFF
Derby shows disconnect between horse racing and sports fans
Horse racing is back in the national spotlight.
And that has not been a positive thing lately.
This sport had already spent much of 2019 dealing with the crisis of equine fatalities at Santa Anita in California, leading to calls for reform to help make the sport safer for horses and jockeys.
Then there was the Kentucky Derby, the sport’s biggest and brightest showcase, arriving like an oasis — only to be overwhelmed by controversy and a race and winner that will forever carry an asterisk.
The second-place horse, Country House, was declared the winner of last weekend’s race after stewards determined that winner Maximum Security “drifted out (of his running lane) and impacted the progress” of War of Will, forcing Long Range Toddy’s jockey to check his horse.
As it turned out, a sport so often widely criticized for safety is now being widely criticized for enforcing perhaps the most significant rule in place for the safety of its horses and jockeys. Horse racing just can’t win.
No one was really to blame for what happened. It was basically the actions of a scared horse that impeded others in the race. Maximum Security was perhaps the best horse anyway, but we’ll never know because he did that. And that’s the point.
While the stewards’ decision May 4 took too long to play out, it was the right move in a brutally tough spot. To treat the Kentucky Derby as a too-big-to-fail kind of event, meaning you let a violation stand, might have been more digestible for the general public. But to let something like this go could truly endanger lives.
(You could make an argument about how those race rules are implemented in the USA. But rules, as they stand, were enforced correctly by the stewards.)
Where horse racing got it wrong here was in the same place it goes wrong a lot: Relating to the vast number of average sports fans who aren’t versed on the intricacies of this insular world.
The general public was never going to accept the winner of the Kentucky Derby being disqualified because hey, they saw him win and they didn’t see a foul when it happened.
Prior to my moving to Kentucky years ago and being introduced to horse racing, I would have shaken my head about the Derby’s reversal, too. But as someone who now has seen fouls and the inquiry process play out in person before, I did notice the foul trackside when it happened (so did many in the crowd — there was a tangible response to it). After the race, I immediately said to a co-worker, “You think they’ll overturn a Kentucky Derby?” And I wasn’t surprised when they did.
To that end, the stewards did a regrettably poor job explaining this to the public, taking hours to show up in a media setting and then declining to take questions and only reading a brief statement when they did. Basically, the only difference between this and referees in other sports was that these officials showed up to read the statement other than emailing it.
But this was insufficient. It deserved way more than that, again, because the average sports fan can’t be expected to know or understand this process.
Trainer Kenny McPeek, who didn’t have a horse in the race, actually did a better job explaining it after the race than pretty much anyone else at Churchill Downs, tweeting: “For those that don’t understand the rules of racing, a Jockey is responsible for staying in his lane. The Stewards @ChurchillDowns made the correct decision today in @KentuckyDerby”
In a video accompanying his tweet, McPeek emphasizes the safety risks for all involved if horses were allowed to float out of their lanes.
For a lot of reasons and a lot of problems that continue to exist and will continue to threaten horse racing, the sport desperately needs some type of centralized leadership that is equipped and willing to be in charge, able to handle situations that continue to fall on the various states and fiefdoms.
That goes for all issues, but especially ones that people who are not close followers of the sport care about.
Horse racing doesn’t get more than a few opportunities anymore on the national sports stage. For all of this to have been a step back and not forward, it was unfortunate, even if it was the right thing to do.