Safety at Santa Anita under the spotlight after Breeders’ Cup casualty
It was no surprise to find demonstrators lined up outside Santa Anita before the Breeders’ Cup on Saturday morning. They could be heard from a long way off on the walk to the track. Nothing attracts attention quite like a mariachi band.
What was unexpected was the discovery that this was a pro-racing protest. Workers at the track, including some whose families had been employed there for generations, joined other supporters of the sport to make the point that they spend their lives, and make a living, looking after racehorses and doing all they can to keep them fit, happy and healthy. There was a sense that after a grim first six months of the year, when 30 horses died either racing or training in an unrelenting media glare, Santa Anita was starting to push back.
It survived until the final furlong of the last race of the meeting. One hundred and forty-two horses had gone to post and returned without incident or injury by the time the last 11 set off for the Classic at Santa Anita on Saturday. Three minutes later, the only horse on anyone’s mind was the one that didn’t cross the line. Mongolian Groom, making his ninth start of a Grade One-winning campaign, had sustained a fatal injury a furlong from home. All the optimism that had been building from Friday evaporated in a moment.
It was the worst possible way to conclude the meeting, at the worst possible time: prime time on NBC, to be precise, the kind of media showcase that US racing receives on only a handful of days all year. The network managed to snip the moment when Mongolian
Groom suffered his injury out of its replay of the Classic but that, in effect, made it only more difficult to ignore. The takeaway for millions of viewers will be that horses die daily at Santa Anita, even though it is not within shouting distance of the truth.
In a state where the governor, Gavin Newsom, was recently quoted suggesting that racing is “sport whose time is up unless they reform”, the death of
Mongolian Groom was a disaster.
The early signs in the second part of Santa Anita’s season were that the rate of fatal injuries, recorded as the number of fatalities per 1,000 starts, had started to return towards the 2.04 recorded in 2018. That is a long way from being the worst rate in the US. At Churchill Downs, the home of the Kentucky Derby, it was 2.73 per 1,000 starts last year, well above the average of 2.4 at
Santa Anita in the eight years since dirt was re-installed in 2011.
The decision to replace a synthetic track with old-fashioned dirt is, quite possibly, where Santa Anita’s problems started. The fatality rate in its last full season on synthetics was 0.84. Rare and random events can still appear in clusters, but with a synthetic surface in place, the likelihood of there having been 30 deaths at Santa Anita in the first half of this year is vanishingly small.
Evidence suggests a synthetic track at Santa Anita would cut the number of fatal injuries by at least 50% overnight. What the track will fear, as it did 10 years ago, is that owners who have invested in dirt-bred bloodstock will take their horses elsewhere.
But it would take only 600,000 or so signatures in a state with 20m registered voters to put a ban on horse racing in California to a ballot. Perhaps, if the sport here is faced with that existential threat and a choice between racing on synthetics or not racing at all, the dirt may be consigned to history. Whether the vested interests will allow it to happen, or happen in time to make any difference, is another question entirely.