Jockey Club
The Invisible Industry
Several weeks ago, through a post called “The Invisible Sport,” Jennifer Wirth of the Saturday Post inspired a campaign to increase mainstream media coverage of horse racing. A worthy goal, but as the reaction to Joe Drape’s New York Times story on the the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation shows, it’s the whole industry that’s largely invisible, not just the sport.
Outside of Kentucky and New York, there aren’t many non-trade publications covering the larger stories of racing business and politics, and outside of the New York Times, almost none doing investigative work.
Vic Zast runs down the reasons for the lack of horse racing coverage in his HRI column today. All familiar (fewer reporters, reduced resources, turf writers “captured” by sources), but no less fascinating as a problem to solve.
Wirth argues that racing won’t last if people aren’t exposed to the game and its stars through news stories; it also won’t last without press oversight, exposing serious issues and compelling change. Whatever the debatable flaws in Drape’s work, his reporting is necessary, and racing needs more of it.
3:15 PM Addendum: Writing on the Atlantic, Andrew Cohen reacts to the TRF story. “No matter who is at fault, no matter what happens to the TRF from here, please, someone, take care of those poor damned horses.” It seems like there should be a mechanism, some simple way to gather small sums for retirement funds — something like the Jockey Club check-off program, made mandatory. Optional, the program isn’t attracting much support.
More to Come
Dr. Rick Arthur tells the Paulick Report:
… the next steps for the Equine Injury Database is a peer-reviewed study by [Dr. Tim Parkin] that could examine many other risk factors: class drops, pedigree, workout patterns, the distribution of injuries, the correlation between injuries and bumping or clipping heels during a race, whether or not horses injured during a race were on a vet’s list.
“We’ll be looking at a lot of the risk factors and try to figure out if there are any strategies that can make racing safer,” he said. “We have all the information that Equibase has, and all the information that the regulatory vets are collecting, including information on injuries that were not fatal. It’s going to be a very powerful tool.”
Statistically Significant
With two years of data in the Equine Injury Database, the Jockey Club is out today with updated fatality rates. The overall rate declined to 2.0 per 1000 starts from the 2.04 reported earlier this year. By surface, the rates are 2.14 on dirt (unchanged), 1.74 on turf, and 1.55 on synthetics (down from 1.78):
Parkin noted that the change in the overall fatality rate stemmed from cumulative two-year data that revealed a statistically significant difference in the prevalence of fatality on both turf and synthetic surfaces versus dirt. The difference in the prevalence of fatality between synthetic and turf surfaces was not statistically significant.
Confirms the impression that synthetic surfaces are safer (although the usual caveats apply re: uncertainty of factors such as new track bases, improved vet checks, anecdotal reports of increased non-fatal hind injuries, etc.).
12:55 PM Update: More from Thoroughbred Times: “… horses racing on a synthetic surface were 27.6% less likely to break down …“
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Jessica Chapel is a writer, editor, and web producer living in Massachusetts. Railbird is a thoroughbred horse racing blog published since June 2004. More ›
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