![]() “We should have had federal authority in place by now for testing horses and making sure the race day anti-doping provisions and other provisions of the law were being enforced,” Pacelle said. Sadly, those regulations won’t be implemented until after the first two legs of this year’s Triple Crown. Part of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act (HISA) took effect last summer, but new antidoping rules have been delayed by court challenges that seemed largely designed to maintain the status quo. In the wake of the Santa Anita deaths, new rules were written to address track safety, the health of the horses, and a hodge-podge of doping rules that varied from state to state. It’s so incredibly unusual that it speaks to something the trainer did to put them at some risk.” It’s just a sudden-death circumstance - and two horses with that end-of-life circumstance. “It wasn’t like they broke a leg and had to be euthanized. “The sort of people who know something about the sport find it incredibly unusual that 4-year-old and 5-year-old horses dropped dead after their races,” he said. The risk of paying the ultimate price can never be removed from such a perilous sport.īut five deaths so close to the Derby - and two more on Derby day - have rocked the industry, much like more than 40 deaths during the 2019 racing season at California’s Santa Anita track forced a reckoning over health and safety issues. There’s no getting around that some horses will break down on the track, and many of those will be catastrophic injuries that require them to be euthanized. “God, it’s depressing as you can get,” Repole said. Four were due to injuries another trainer didn’t think his horse was fit enough. “There’s a lot less injuries here with legs than there are in other sports, but here it means your life is over,” said Mike Repole, co-owner of early Derby favorite Forte, who was among five horses scratched before the race. According to a database kept by the Jockey Club, which oversees the breed registry for thoroughbreds in the United States and Canada, more than 7,200 horses died in races from 2009-21.
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