By Doug Porter
There’s disagreement over how many horses have died at the Del Mar races this year. Animal rights advocates say it’s 18. The Union-Tribune says 16. The Daily Racing Form says 14. Some of the variance, no doubt, comes from the time frame from when it was reported.
Regardless of the final number–and it’s likely to increase by the time the summer season ends on Labor Day–more horses have died this year than last. Betting is down, and purses for the last two weeks of the season have been reduced by another 5% on top of the across the board 10% reduction from 2015.
Saturday was supposed to be the biggest day of the racing season at Del Mar, the $1 million Pacific Classic, including big name horses Beholder, California Chrome, and Dortmund. It started with another death.
From the Daily Racing Form:
Shortly after the first renovation break at 7:45 a.m., the 3-year-old filly Alicanto, trained by Eddie Truman, broke down just past the finish line after working five furlongs in 1:01.20. She was euthanized, bringing to 14 the number of horses put down after sustaining injuries while either racing or training here this summer. There were nine deaths last summer.
Her exercise rider, Manny Rotella, 65, was thrown to the ground and did not move until being placed on a backboard by paramedics, who arrived quickly and transported him to Scripps La Jolla Hospital. According to Truman, Rotella was complaining of pain in a wrist.
Alicanto’s only prior race at the track was a last-of-10, 27-lengths-back over a year ago.
From the Los Angeles Times:
The 3-year-old filly Alicanto was euthanized and became the 16th horse during this summer’s meeting to suffer a fatal injury during training or racing at Del Mar, according to Rick Arthur, equine medical director of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine and adviser to the California Horse Racing Board.
“We always monitor things very carefully,” Arthur said. “There’s no trend we can identify. We will continue to look at this well past the end of the meet. We’re obviously concerned whenever there’s a fatality. We’re aware of what’s going on.”
On Sunday morning, a 3-year-old colt named All the Marbles suffered a severe ankle fracture and had to be euthanized.
From the Union-Tribune:
“What California Chrome did was simply awesome to see,” said Joe Harper, president and CEO of the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club. “We need our heroes to be great for our sport to be great. But at the same time, we need to do everything we can to try and protect all of our horses.”
Many say that horse deaths are simply an unfortunate part of the sport itself. Thoroughbreds are born to run and sometimes no matter how hard everybody tries to prevent it, they suffer catastrophic injuries. That explanation, however, is not good enough for many others — Harper included.
“We have to keep digging around,” Harper said. “There are a lot of factors at work here. But much of the time, we discover that many of these horses that are euthanized had pre-existing injuries that simply could not be detected.”
The UT article goes on to say that the 2017 season will be starting “later than usual (July 19) so that horses will have a couple of weeks after the end of the Del Mar Fair on July 4 to get more comfortable with the track and their surroundings.”
They’re also promising to have veterinarians looking at horses more often.
Not So Cool
The 2015 season at Del Mar performed so poorly that the UT ran an article titled “Del Mar not cool as ever to everyone,” riffing on the track’s marketing efforts designed to bring a younger, hipper crowd to the track.
Going into the final weekend, overall handle is down over $13.3 million from a year ago, according to figures compiled by Roger Newell. And it’s worse compared to 2013, down nearly $51.5 million.
Attendance is off by an average of more than 2,000 a day, down over 12.6 percent compared to last summer. On-track wagering is off by more than $10 million or more than 13 percent from a year ago. The oleanders aside, the problems are much deeper for Del Mar these days, and Harper is the first to admit it. He refused to make excuses.
A State Subsidy?
Help for the ailing business of horse racing could be in the offing, should the legislature take up the Internet Poker Consumer Protection Act (AB 2863). Aficionados are hoping this bill will pass, with up to a $60 million annual subsidy for tracks for funded by on-line gaming.
Animal rights activists have been busy lobbying against the bill, and it looks like they’re getting some last minute help from the politically powerful Viejas Band of Kumeyaay Indians and Lytton Band of Pomo Indians.
AB 2863 would regulate and legalize online poker in California. In return for agreeing to stay out as operators for internet poker, the horse racing industry would receive up to $60 million per fiscal year.
From the OnLinePokerReport:
The annual income appropriated to California’s horse racing industry would fall into three categories. Purses would receive 95.4 percent of the taxes generated by online poker each fiscal year. The retirement fund for California jockeys would receive 2.3 percent. Pensions for general racing employees would also receive 2.3 percent of the funds supplied to the racing industry through online poker.
While the horse racing industry was apparently placated by the promises of support, disputes between the various Native American groups over what to do with so-called “bad actors,” (companies who accepted or facilitated wagers from American customers after Dec. 31, 2006) led to reports that Assemblyman Adam Gray had shelved his plans for bringing AB 2863 up for a vote.
Exposés in the New York Times and other publications have revealed an ugly side to the world of horse racing. Drugs and cruelty to the animals continue to exist, despite claims to the contrary. The blinders of business acumen don’t allow for backers of the sport to see its corrupt and cruel reality.
Here’s how Andrew Cohen put it in the Atlantic, a couple of years back:
There are essentially three types of people in horse racing. There are the crooks who dangerously drug or otherwise abuse their horses, or who countenance such conduct from their agents, and who then dare the industry to come catch them. Then there are the dupes who labor under the fantasy that the sport is broadly fair and honest. And there are those masses in the middle—neither naive nor cheaters but rather honorable souls—who know the industry is more crooked than it ought to be but who still don’t do all they can to fix the problem.
As is true in the case of SeaWorld, a slow but steady drumbeat of protest over the exploitation of animals for entertainment purposes is perculating its way through the American consciousness.
On many weekends this summer a handful of local activists have walked a picket line at Del Mar. They’ll be there on Labor Day for the last races of the season, remembering the horses who died this year.
It’s The Economy, Stupid
Data shows the poor are increasingly earning less money, while the rich are earning more. https://t.co/iduSMFRNGg pic.twitter.com/AQ8NSAhugq
— Vox (@voxdotcom) August 22, 2016
On This Day: 1762 – Ann Franklin became the editor of the Mercury of Newport in Rhode Island. She was the first female editor of an American newspaper. 1964 – Martha & The Vandellas’ “Dancing In The Streets” was released. 1986 – The Kerr-McGee Corp. agreed to pay the estate of the late Karen Silkwood $1.38 million, settling a 10-year-old nuclear contamination lawsuit. She was a union activist who died in 1974 under suspicious circumstances on her way to talk to a reporter about safety concerns at her plutonium fuel plant in Oklahoma.
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Martha Sullivan says
Thank you to Doug Porter and San Diego Free Press for this very useful resource! And special thanks to Ellen Ericksen, Toni Falcone for organizing the protests at the Del Mar Races, as well as all those who participate.
URGENT: Call and/or email your Assemblymember and Senator to vote NO on AB 2863 — NO Subsidy for Deadly Horse Racing!
The declining CA Horse Racing industry could get a $60 million annual subsidy if the current online poker bill is passed in the CA Legislature by 8/31/16!
Find YOURS here:
http://findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov.
John Lawrence says
“In return for agreeing to stay out as operators for internet poker, the horse racing industry would receive up to $60 million per fiscal year.” Yeah, it makes perfect sense. There is no money to house the homeless, yet there is potentially $60 million to subsidize the horse racing industry? When is horse racing even considered an industry? It’s our stupid priorities, stupid.
bob dorn says
Amen.
Wendy Lemlin says
Been saying that for years, and have been working to get Del Mar Racing shut down since I moved here in 2004. Los Alamitos was always the worst track in the state in terms of horse deaths, btw. An average of 25 horses A WEEK die on racetracks annually just in the US. (and that’s only the ones that are reported). That doesn’t count the ones that drop dead in the barn of heart attacks or other “conditions” from all the drugs they are given (really, do that many healthy 3 or 4 year old horses have heart attacks in nature???), the thousands per year that are sold to slaughterhouses just because they don’t win enough $$ for their greedy owners. Add to that all the slaughtered foals of non-racehorse mares used to nurse the more valuable foals of racehorses instead, so the racehorse mares can be re-bred faster, and there are so many layers of horror in this industry.
Martha Sullivan says
Thank You! Who’s with me to attend tomorrow morning and Comment on 19 Horses Dead in the current Del Mar Race season? “Notice is hereby given that a meeting of the California Horse Racing Board will be held on Thursday, August 25, 2016, commencing at 9:30 a.m., at the Del Mar Surfside Race Place, (Downstairs General Admission Area) 2260 Jimmy Durante Blvd., Del Mar, California. The audio portion only of the California Horse Racing Board regular meeting will be available online through a link at the CHRB website (www.chrb.ca.gov) under “Webcasts.”
The agenda for the regular meeting will consist of the following matters:
Action Items:
1. Approval of the minutes of July 14, 2016.
2. Executive Director’s Report.
3. Public Comment: Communications, reports, requests for future actions of the Board. Note: Persons addressing the Board under this item will be restricted to three (3) minutes for their presentations. …”
Martha Sullivan says
Who’s with me to attend tomorrow morning and Comment on 19 Horses Dead in the current Del Mar Race season? “Notice is hereby given that a meeting of the California Horse Racing Board will be held on Thursday, August 25, 2016, commencing at 9:30 a.m., at the Del Mar Surfside Race Place, (Downstairs General Admission Area) 2260 Jimmy Durante Blvd., Del Mar, California. The audio portion only of the California Horse Racing Board regular meeting will be available online through a link at the CHRB website (www.chrb.ca.gov) under “Webcasts.”
The agenda for the regular meeting will consist of the following matters:
Action Items:
1. Approval of the minutes of July 14, 2016.
2. Executive Director’s Report.
3. Public Comment: Communications, reports, requests for future actions of the Board. Note: Persons addressing the Board under this item will be restricted to three (3) minutes for their presentations. …”