I Dread Sports Reporters Today, If Rhoden's On It

Drugs and crops are date-night staples for a lot of people.

 

Hondo's all-encompassing stupidity needs to be met with a rousing round of indifference.

 

Ban human boxing, first.

 

Did you mean this?

http://select.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/sports/othersports/20rhoden.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Or something else?

 

No, I meant this:

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/05/25/sports/othersports/25rhoden.ready.html?scp=4&sq=William+Rhoden+filly&st=nyt

 

Ok, another column full of generalizations, except for a quote that says that a heart attack, not the kind of breakdown that happened to Barbaro, happens to 1 in 20,000 horses.

After saying she made it into the home-stretch he doesn't say where the breakdown/jockey dismounting happened.

"I'm not sure how many fans in the meager crowd of 3,741 paid attention to the white equine ambulance that pulled onto the track, or saw the filly being loaded in it."

Was he there? He doesn't seem to indicate one way or the other. He has quotes from the jockey in his story, but doesn't know whether the crowd was paying attention, and doesn't say if the heart attack happened where it would be readily visible for the attendees.

"Horses go down much more frequently than the general public realizes, and many in the business have noted that had Barbaro not been the winner of the Kentucky Derby, he might have been destroyed after being injured."

Where are the numbers that would drive this point home? As in his column this morning, they're not there.

 

As well as Deer Hunting.

 

Especially when they are racing against elephants.

 

Big-money horses are largely treated well while they're racing. But most of this sport is not big-money. It's small tracks and small budgets. That leads to a lot less luxury for the horses, but luxury and posh surroundings are probably not that important to horses.

But on all levels of racing, a big — and growing problem — exists even before the horses start racing. It's during breeding. Thoroughbreds are bred increasingly to have giant upper torsos (the better to sustain prolonged cardio exercise...ie. racing) and tiny little lower extremities (the better for quick movement...ie. racing). Those two factors, though, are a cause of increasing horse injuries.

Go look at photos of thoroughbreds from the days of yore (like the 70s or 60s). Their lower legs were much larger — on average — than today's horses. Those small extremities are more fragile, more prone to breaking and rupturing. But the smaller lower legs are what breeders want.

Maryjean Wall in Lexington has written some darn good stuff on this topic (and no, I'm not her).

 

If he'd wanted to do a column about how synthetic surfaces save lives, go for it.
But isn't it a little ridiculous to send somebody to the Kentucky Derby so he could turn out that?
The line "who knows who many horses die anonymously" was extremely poor.
I'm betting somebody knows, or has an idea. Shouldn't he have at least taken a crack at finding out?

 

Two ways to go with that. He had what? Maybe 4-5 hours to check that out before deadline. Not exactly the thing most horse people are going to want to talk about.
The truth is, for most of the people in the industry, the Derby, Triple Crown and Breeders' Cup are a chore. Many trainers hate/distrust the media because they disrupt their routine and they have to spend an inordinate amount of time talking to people who pay attention to the sport for 5 minutes a year.

This leads me to a brief aside that I was actually surprised when Loopy said on SR when talking about the Derby that he wasn't an expert.

Anyway, what happened on Saturday happens plenty at tracks big and small across the country, and there's always an outcry of how cruel it is when a horse goes down on live TV. I think when that happens Mr. and Mrs. Joe Average are faced with the ugly truth that the only reason horse racing exists is because you can bet on it and to watch something die while trying to help you score on a $2 exacta makes them feel guilty.

The truth is, horses careers are shorter than ever, the size of the fields has shrunk and tracks that don't offer other ways to be (i.e. slots) are struggling. Many of the horses are basically 1,200 pound graduated cylinders in which trainers (Dutrow, whose nickname is "the Chemist") experiment to see if they can squeeze another fraction of speed out of them.

The Racing Medication and Testing Consortium is trying to address the problems, and some states like Calif. have shown signs of fewer fatal injuries due to the advent of synthetic surfaces, but you can bet your life that even if they build a surface that guarantees no horse will ever be injured, Churchill Downs will be the last track in America to use it.

I actually have forgotten my point, but I think Rhoden had little chance to get a fully fleshed out column in the short time he had to get it done. You're not going to get horse people to talk about that stuff in the hours after a horse dies in the Derby. Maybe he should have addressed it another way, but this is what happens when the drive by media stops to look at the pretty horses and something tragic goes down.

 

First of all, you obviously wouldn't recognize humor if it hit you in the face.
Second, you're going to have to go a long way to find more than the few weeping willies on this thread who think horse-racing, as an industry, is cruelty to animals. No one loves the horses more than the people raising and training them.