Opinion: A Former Track Worker Speaks Out

It is with considerable interest that I read these words. As you perhaps remember, I used to ride race horses in my 20s, just as an “exercise boy,” and I know quite a bit about the sport. The sport has degenerated in significant ways since I was riding. Even back in the 1970s when I was working at a race horse training farm in Ohio, there was an aspect to the sport that was little spoken of but was apparent to all of us on the inside. One of the dark sides of the racing world is that horses die in the races each week. If this was ever uncommon, it is completely common occurrence now. They die because they break their legs running and then have to be destroyed. There was an old green wagon at the Fairgrounds race track in New Orleans where I spent some time, and that wagon collected dead horses. This is happening at many major and minor race tracks around the country presently, and there is a major outcry about it and a movement to have racing banned in many states. Santa Anita race track in Los Angeles, one of the biggest and better race tracks in the country historically, has an increasingly public outcry now gaining steam coming from horse lovers everywhere because of the sheer quantity of destroyed horses at the end of any given racing season. The numbers are actually shocking. According to the Jockey Club’s Equine Injury Database, nearly 10 horses died every week at American racetracks in 2018. At Santa Anita Park in Arcadia, California, 37 horses died within a year, causing the Los Angeles District Attorney to conduct the first-ever criminal investigation into the culpability of trainers and veterinarians who medicate horses for soreness and injury and then put them back on the track.

Track workers treat Mongolian Groom after the Breeders' Cup Classic horse race at Santa Anita Park, Saturday, Nov. 2, 2019, in Arcadia, California. The death was the third at the track in nine days, following the euthanizing of 2-year-old filly Bye Bye Beautiful and 5-year-old mare G Q Covergirl before that.

Thoroughbreds are bred for speed which means that they are light boned and yet have huge strides. An average race horse is 16 hands tall at the withers or more, and weighs upwards of 1000 pounds. In full stride at full gallop, they are literally leaping through space, all four feet off the ground at a certain key moment in every stride, and then coming down with all those pounds AND all that speed on a single front leg. These front legs are long and light-boned and they can snap all too easily.

So, in addition to the gambling aspect, the crowds, the out-of-town element and the major infrastructure impact, Hardwick will also be inadvertently supporting a sport that is enjoying itself at the expense of horses in an occupation of “forced labor” that is clearly very hard on the animals. Many thoroughbreds, and other breeds of horses too, love to run in their natural state. If you look at a horse’s structure, it is made to run. But horses running in nature get to run when they want and stop when they want. They also can adjust as needed to harder or softer ground. Modern race tracks, because of the truly stupid and unnecessary obsession with track records and speed accomplishments are designed and built to be “fast.” This does NOT translate into being designed with the welfare of the animals in mind. On the contrary, they are designed for speed and this DOES translate into being too hard and ‘unnatural’ for a horse’s safety. Anyone in the biz who denies this is in denial themselves and I can get you many articles about this subject. Further, and obviously, in the racing world horses are made to run and if they're tired and feel like their bodies are telling them to stop or ease up due to pain, they don’t get to make that decision. Worse, modern “medicine” (drugs) keeps them medicated to the point where the drugs do not allow them to feel the pain that would ordinarily tell them to stop running. Having the big hearts that they do, they run hard and give it all they have but this leads to injury, breakdown and death far too often. Just as in human sports, the fact that drugging with certain drugs is illegal doesn’t stop it from happening. It happens all the time.

My boss on the track, my trainer, used to say, “Show me a gambler and I’ll show you a loser.” That’s another issue entirely, and it’s not fair to make generalizations, but there is, undoubtedly, and I know this well, an “element” who follows the horses who also drink, gamble, and in other ways play pretty fast and loose. Racing also invites cheating because of the amount of money that can be made. It is not uncommon at race tracks for mafia to be involved. This is not dramatic, nor inaccurate, just part of that shadow side of racing. Big fast money, even the possibility of it, attracts certain people. And “big” gets bigger when cheating allows for odds to build up on a given horse who is held back from winning for a number of races on purpose, then allowed to run full out on the given “green light” day when a lot of money is laid down. In short, though at its heart it was originally about the inevitable joy horse owners have when they race their horses with each other, the industry of organized horse racing was long ago corrupted and corrupted badly. Now, it is dirty, cruel, and infiltrated by many problems ordinary people would never even guess at.

In short, bringing a serious race track into peaceful and beautiful Hardwick is, from my view and for what it’s worth, a really bad idea.

Lloyd T. Williams