Scratching the surface: US racing looks to track conditions to lower injury rates
On Friday, after a summer of US racing blighted by horse fatalities, Santa Anita’s fall meet will begin on a new dirt track. Trainers, superintendents and scientists will be watching closely
Tuesday 23 September 2014 14.00 BST
When Santa Anita’s fall meet kicks off on Friday, course management will be holding its collected breath, waiting to find out how a new dirt track stands up to the rigours of race-day competition. Installed in a frenzy of night-and-day action over the summer, the sandy, sunset-colored track is the latest installment in a long saga concerning Santa Anita’s racing surface. It is a torrid tale, and one that stretches back years.
In 2006, in an attempt to bring a halt to high race-day fatality rates on its existing dirt, the California Horse Racing Board mandated the installation of synthetic surfaces at the state’s major tracks. A number of other racetracks around the US made the switch. Santa Anita installed its Cushion Track, a mix of natural and artificial materials, at the end of 2007.
In 2008, drainage issues saw the Cushion Track replaced by a Pro-Ride synthetic surface. But problems with maintenance of the Pro-Ride track, as well as a rash of career-ending injuries and fatalities bookending 2009, meant that by 2010 its days were numbered. That year, Santa Anita returned to dirt. That surface was replaced during this summer’s costume change, as race-day fatality numbers were still too high and injuries sustained in morning training still too frequent.
Del Mar, also in southern California, plans to follow Santa Anita’s lead and replace its Polytrack synthetic surface with dirt – as Keeneland did earlier this year, after its Polytrack reached its eighth birthday.
Santa Anita’s problems are consistent with a much wider discussion regarding the role racetrack surfaces play in racehorse injuries and fatalities – a debate that reached fever pitch when, in the first two weeks of Del Mar’s annual summer meet, four horses were fatally injured on a turf course that had been replaced only months before. Saratoga was similarly blighted this summer, experiencing three race-related deaths in five days. And while any number of factors accounted for those deaths, the state of the courses were held by many to be one of if not the most significant – especially in the case of Del Mar.
Taking into consideration a racehorse’s inherent fragility – and that they can reach speeds of 38mph, their hooves hitting the track approximately 150 times a minute – a sound racing surface is obviously paramount in ensuring safety. But what constitutes a sound racing surface? And what factors are tied to race-related fatalities? Much research is yet to be done but in the US, enormous strides have been made in recent years.
‘We’re probably undercapturing fatalities’
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For too long in the US, there had been a lack of hard figures on the number of horses fatally injured in race-related accidents each year. The Jockey Club began collecting equine injury data in 2008, and went public with its first batch of statistics in 2010. Earlier this year, it released its Equine Injury Database, a collection of race-related fatality statistics for a five-year period between 2009 and 2013.
The database examines a range of factors in race-related fatalities, including race distance and racehorse age, as well as the effect of racetrack surfaces.
It is not a comprehensive study. Racetrack participation was not mandated, and of the 92 racecourses that did participate only 31 have included a detailed picture of the numbers they supplied – though fatality figures submitted by all participating racecourses are aggregated in the database.
What’s more, while the Jockey Club collects data on all injuries suffered at the racetrack, the database only compiles stats from horses fatally injured within 72 hours of a race. As such, the figures do not necessarily reflect the exact number of horses catastrophically injured in race-related incidents, said Dr Mary Scollay, equine medical director of the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission and one of the principal figures behind the study.
“We’re probably under-capturing fatalities,” said Scollay, pointing to how Barbaro was injured at the 2006 Preakness Stakes, but wasn’t euthanised until many months later.
However, as part of the ongoing effort to capture data related to race-day injuries both equine and human, the database paints a revealing picture.
From a total of 1,871,522 starts in the five-year timeframe, 1.91 racehorses per 1,000 starts were fatally injured through a race-related incident. Races over distances shorter than six furlongs saw a slightly higher injury rate than middle-distance and distance races. The study also found that “the injury rate was higher in older horses, with two-year-olds continuing a five-year trend of the lowest rate of catastrophic injuries”.
When it comes to surfaces, fatality occurrence on synthetic surfaces was lower than that on turf or dirt. Between 2009 and 2013, there were 1.22 fatal injuries per 1,000 synthetic starts and 1.63 fatal injuries per 1,000 turf starts. Dirt tracks had the worst record: 2.08 fatal injuries per 1,000 starts.
Take Santa Anita. In 2009, when the Pro-Ride surface was in its last full year of competitive use, there were 0.90 fatalities per 1,000 starts. In 2010, on the newly installed dirt surface, there were 3.45 fatalities per 1,000 starts.
It would be wrong to assume that all race-related injuries are the result of bone breakages. The database collects statistics on all race-day fatalities, including horses that die, for example, of sudden cardiac arrest. The injury database tells just part of a much larger, more nuanced story.
“From a public perception standpoint and from the data gathered thus far, synthetic surfaces are associated with lower risk of fatal injury,” said Scollay. “But from the horsemen’s perspective, it isn’t nearly as clear cut.”
‘This is not just about helping one track’
A large piece of the puzzle exists in the manner in which American racetracks operate – which is as punishingly rigorous as anywhere around the world. European racetracks, for example, are by and large used almost exclusively for racing, with days and often weeks between meetings in which the track can recover. Take a look at any American racetrack, and it’s an entirely different story.
On any given morning, as many as 1,800 horses can descend upon Santa Anita’s mile-long, oval track. On race days, a narrow window of hours separates the end of training and the first race, leaving little room for staff to iron out any kinks in the surface. From January 2015 – as was the case this year – Santa Anita will host racing every week for the first six months of the year, with up to four or five race-days a week.
With American racetracks suffering such intense usage, Mick Peterson, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Maine, has sought to introduce science and uniformity into the mix of racetrack maintenance, to help reduce the variability of many factors affecting the safety of a racing surface.
“If you look at it that a track superintendent’s job is not to make the surface a better track but to prevent musculoskeletal injuries of a horse, and because horses are moved from track to track, then suddenly you’ve got a very broad picture of what this job is,” said Peterson.
This job is not just about helping one track but about developing the techniques so that every track in the country is safer for horses.
In 2011, Peterson was one of the experts who published a paper looking into a correlation between racetrack surfaces and racehorse injuries. The Racing Surfaces White Paper, the most comprehensive study of its kind done in the US, identified a slew of factors that play into the safety or otherwise of a racetrack. But there is one that Peterson believes is paramount.
“Consistency,” he said. “Absolutely consistency. The consistency of the racetrack changes from day to day as well as around the track. You can hear all sorts of controversy surrounding the biomechanics of horses, about different types of surfaces, about horses adapting to different surfaces, but I’ve never found anyone who could argue that horses aren’t looking for a consistent or even surface.”
One of the variables Peterson believes is integral to a consistent racetrack is the amount of moisture in its surface. Climate-related factors, ranging from wind to temperature and sunlight, as well as how much daily maintenance a track is given, dictate the amount of water distributed. This is a factor too reliant on human estimation, Peterson believes.
Pushing for a more systematic approach to watering, Peterson is pioneering an “evaporation model” with Kentucky’s Keeneland track. “The idea is to figure out how much moisture is being lost from the surface under different conditions,” he said. He is also working with the maintenance crew at Santa Anita to install a computerised system that calculates exactly how much water is being deposited on the track each day – data Peterson believes that can bring about uniformity in the way US racetracks are watered:
Bingo – you’ve suddenly closed the loop. What we’re doing is the same with precision farming in the 1970s. You can control the moisture going into the track as they did with their farms to maximise their potential.
Peterson says systematic watering systems would represent a relatively inexpensive step towards improving racetrack safety.
“They can use what we’re doing to improve their own facilities with only a modest financial investment”, he said. “This isn’t going to affect just Santa Anita and Keeneland, this is going to affect every small casino track all over the country. They can use what we’re doing to improve their own facilities.”
A reduction, if not an elimination, of the risk of human error would be welcomed by those responsible for everyday racetrack maintenance.
Dennis Moore is track superintendent at Santa Anita. He was drafted last year, having held the same position at Hollywood Park prior to its closure. At Hollywood Park, Moore oversaw what was in terms of popularity among horsemen one of the more successful synthetic surfaces – despite Hollywood Park generally having a higher fatality rate per start than synthetic tracks at the likes of Santa Anita and Keeneland.
“We need an instrument that I can take out daily before races,” Moore said. “One that I can do in about 20, 30 minutes, and that will give me compaction readings, gives me moisture readings, gives me the sheer strength of the track.”
“If that data is printed out every day,” Moore added, “then if a trainer comes to me today and says, ‘The track’s great, Dennis, it’s the best it’s ever been,’ and then in three weeks that trainer’s horses are going bad and they go, ‘This track’s terrible, what did you do?’ I can go: ‘Here’s my data, the track’s the same as it was three weeks ago. Maybe the problem’s on you? Maybe your horses are getting worn out and tired?’”
The role of pre-existing injuries
Tired horses bring another layer to the debate. According to Dr Tim Parkin, senior lecturer in clinical epidemiology at the University of Glasgow School of Veterinary Medicine, who helped assemble the Equine Injury Database, the matter of racehorses competing with pre-existing injuries overrides many of the questions surrounding racetrack safety.
“Some of the [non-epidemiological] work done looking at bones of horses that have suffered fractures has indicated that it is clearly where pre-catastrophic fracture change, adaptation or pathology occurs – though no one really knows which one of those it is – that are the most common types of catastrophic fracture we see in a racehorse,” said Parkin.
Indeed, the California Horse Racing Board has found that pre-existing pathology at the site of a fatal injury “is a reoccurring finding at necropsy, with nearly 90% of musculoskeletal racing and training fatalities showing pre-existing pathology associated with the fatal injury”.
The potentially fatal consequences of pre-existing injuries can be mitigated by the types of surface horses race on. “If you had a horse with a certain level of pre-existing pathology in a limb, it might do better on synthetic than it would on dirt,” Parkin said.
Indeed, the risk of fatal injury on synthetic tracks is about 40% lower than the risk on dirt tracks.
Parkin, however, added that while synthetic surfaces have been proven to lessen the potential for fatal race-injuries, they don’t eliminate the risk altogether – rather, the types of injuries seen on synthetic surfaces differ from those encountered on dirt.
For example, horses racing on synthetic tracks are more predisposed to fractures at the lower end of the cannon bone – what might resemble the shin bone in a human, but what anatomically is closer to the middle bone of the middle finger – than horses racing on dirt.
In comparison, horses that race on dirt tend to suffer with greater frequency fractures of the sesamoid bones – much smaller bones at the back of a fetlock joint, or ankle. This disparity can be accounted for by the biomechanical differences of a horse’s stride on synthetic as compared to dirt, Parkin said.
“There’s clearly reason to believe that the hoof-surface interaction is very different on the dirt compared to the turf and synthetic,” he said. The nature and composition of dirt surfaces, Parkin said, over time or at a particular stride tend to place increased strain on the fetlock joint, and by consequence the sesamoid bones.
Because of a reduced risk of catastrophic injury to horses, Parkin said synthetic surfaces were, by extension, safer for humans – a topic that would likely produce a different conclusion in the jock’s room.
“People talk about synthetic being that much stickier,” said Parkin. “So if we’re talking about jockeys falling off, they feel they’re at greater risk because they stop that much more quickly. But they may be at a reduced risk because they’re less likely to be on a horse that ends up with a fracture. And they’re less likely to fall off.”
Despite the findings of the paper, however, as well as those of the five-year injury database, Mick Peterson believes that dirt could be made as safe as synthetic surfaces – as long as the science of quantifiable data is used to underpin efforts to improve such surfaces.
“My problem with synthetics is that it solves the track’s immediate problems,” he said, “but if we look at it from an industry’s standpoint and a health of a horse’s standpoint, it doesn’t fix all of them.”
‘When synthetic tracks are done right, they’re great’
The final race at Hollywood Park
The final race at Hollywood Park, in December 2013. Photograph: Jae C. Hong/AP
Much of the opprobrium aimed at synthetic surfaces by horsemen revolves around an increase in the number of hind-end injuries – especially musculoskeletal injuries of the hind end – sustained by horses trained and raced on synthetic surfaces. That assessment was substantiated by a preliminary post-mortem report put out by the California Horse Racing Board and the University of California-Davis in 2009, the year before Santa Anita switched back to dirt.
The report found that in the year prior, a little more than 17% of horses that died on synthetic tracks in the state succumbed to catastrophic hind-end leg injuries. In comparison, approximately 1.5% of horses that died on dirt tracks in the state succumbed to the same sorts of problems. Furthermore, said Mary Scollay, a horse with a substantial soft tissue injury may require retirement but not will not die, and that will still represent a permanent loss from the racing population.
Not all horsemen have celebrated the curtain-call on synthetic tracks in California. Ron Ellis is a California-based trainer who is considered one of the more conservative handlers in the business, with a handsome catch of big-race trophies on his mantelpiece after more than 30 years in the business. He is also one of those who would have preferred that synthetic surfaces were given a longer shake of the stick.
“I think when synthetic tracks are done right, I think they’re great,” he said. “I love them. Horses’ feet and legs stay cooler. There’s probably less concussion on their joints.
I was stabled at Hollywood Park for 10 years and I was a big fan of the cushion track there – I was really impressed with it. I didn’t really want to leave it. I thought we went through it with a minimal amount of injuries. Overall I was pretty happy at Hollywood … and I think that was the same for most trainers there.
Ellis agrees with the assessment about hind-end injuries: “[Horses] would get problems all over behind, up high, lower down. But I’d take that over a bunch of problems in front any day.” But he has noticed an increase in other injuries, sometimes fatal, that he wouldn’t ordinarily find on dirt.
Every once in a while you would come up with some horrific injuries that you just can’t explain.
Ellis singled out two horses that suffered leg fractures in places he had never seen before. The reason, he believes, is that synthetic surfaces tend to be stickier, and therefore don’t allow for the same slide as other surfaces.
“I had one that break a leg who was winning by six,” he said. “The rider reached up to hit him and the horse ducked sideways. And I think what happened when he jumped sideways, his foot stuck and the weight of the horse kept the bone going.”
‘Horsemen are very demanding’
According to Ellis, the synthetic experiment was flawed from the start. “I don’t think the Del Mar surface was installed as well as the one at Hollywood Park,” he said. “Santa Anita definitely wasn’t installed properly.” He also believes that some of the larger trainers with better quality horses – and as a consequence those trainers with greater sway in the debate – became more vocally opposed to synthetics as their dominance on those particular surfaces was curbed.
“You can take a horse that’s not quite as talented and get close to a horse that is talented on synthetic surfaces. That’s not the case with dirt,” he said. “I think synthetic racing mirrors turf racing, where two lengths separates six horses. Two lengths is nothing. A bobble at the start can reduce that margin in a flash. So can traffic trouble. And I think there was a tendency for the not best horse to win all the time. And I think some of the bigger trainers didn’t like that.”
Dennis Moore is of the same opinion. “I think we went about synthetic surfaces completely wrong,” he said. At the top of his list of reasons why the synthetic experiment failed is the issue of climate: “The weather over here is so much more drastic than it is in England, where synthetic surfaces are a natural fit.”
Under California’s sunshine, Moore found that the synthetic materials cooked. “Unlike with dirt, when it’s 106F, that track’s going to be 106F. If that was a synthetic track and it’s 106F outside, that track’s going to be 160F.” And as the mercury rose, the composition of the material changed.
When it gets to 160F, it’s not the same track at all. But my contention was this: what happened between 80 and 160F? Because as it’s climbing, it’s changing at each level. How does that affect horses?
Moore compensated for the difference in climate at Hollywood Park compared to the European homes of other cushion tracks, discovering through trial and error ways to manage his track that went against recommendations from the track manufacturers – such as routinely watering it, and allowing the wax coating the track material to wear out significantly.
Sold as being maintenance free, the synthetic surface at Hollywood Park did not live up to the pitch. Moore found that it required maintenance on a daily basis, especially before the sun rose.
“In the morning, we found that the track stiffened up over night. So, a lot of the injuries we saw early on, which were hind-end injuries and hind-ankle injuries which we’d never seen before, is because we weren’t working the track before the horses got out there,” he said. “Once we started doing that simple thing, all those injuries in the morning went away.
I think the problem stems from them selling the tracks in the first place as being maintenance free. There’s no such thing as maintenance free. They should have sold them instead as simply being safer racetracks.
As track superintendent, Moore is in the firing line when things go wrong; trainers looking for an explanation for why their horses get hurt are perhaps the loudest of his critics. He wonders how much notice should be paid to such suggestions and complaints.
“Horsemen are very demanding,” he said, “but they’re only looking at what’s underneath their shed-row, and that doesn’t always mean it’s always best for the racetrack. They’re not looking at the overall picture, whereas I’ve got to look at the overall picture. I’ve got to find the happy medium. I don’t go to their barn and tell them how to train racehorses. But I don’t think that many of them could get on a tractor and blade a racetrack.”
Nevertheless, when Friday 26 September rolls around, marking the resumption of racing at Santa Anita, it won’t be just the trainers watching with trepidation. All eyes, from those of the weekend punter with 100 bucks in his pocket to those of the grooms holding the empty head-collars, will be trained on the results of each race, anxious that the catastrophic events of the summer do not spill over into the fall.
Moore understands this, that the pressures of his job bear the closest scrutiny. As a result, he is keen to acknowledge another facet of racehorse fatalities that is sometimes overlooked – that he has a responsibility to both the horse and the rider.
“That guy on top of a horse is a human life,” he said. “That horse breaks down, the jockey’s life is also in jeopardy. When one goes, they go hand-in-hand.
“You’re making it safe for the horses but you’re actually making it safe for the riders, too. And I wonder whether sometimes people forget about that.”
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