Are horses safe on racing circuit?

Just two starts into the Sonoma County Fair’s racing program this year, one of the horses became a statistic. Mr. Candy Bar, running in a lower-tier race at the fairgrounds track, seemed to complete the race fine (albeit slowly), but broke down after finishing and was euthanized.

One death is pretty typical for the 11-day program here. With several hundred horses running over three weekends, some would call that a pretty good safety record. Animals rights advocates might argue that one death is too many for a sporting event.

Whatever your views on that debate, a look at recent figures provided by the California Horse Racing Board posits a mystery. Gauged solely by horse fatalities, races at the state’s major tracks - Golden Gate Fields, Santa Anita, Los Alamitos, Del Mar and (until recently) Hollywood Park - seem to be getting safer and safer. Meanwhile, races at California’s county and state fairs appear to be growing more dangerous.

To be more specific, racetrack fatalities happened at a rate of 1 in every 373.5 horse starts in 2010-11 (the CHRB uses a fiscal calendar for its studies), and declined incrementally to 1 in every 492 starts in 2013-14 (the most recent data available). This does not include fatal injuries during training sessions. In the same time frame, fair horses went from dying at the rate of 1 in 762 starts in 2010-11 to 668 starts in 2011-12, then to 533 starts, then to 458.5.

“That’s surprising,” trainer Ed Moger Jr. said. “There’s really no reason I can think of.”

Actually, half of the equation is pretty easy to figure out, if you listen to horse trainers and race officials.

“I can tell you from my experience, I know it’s gotten better,” trainer Bill Morey said. “I can see it with my own eyes, in my own barn and in my fellow trainers’ barns.”

It’s safe to say the health of racehorses has never been more closely monitored.

“Veterinary examinations for horses pre-race have gotten stricter, as well as post-race exams for horses on the veterinarian’s list,” said Morey, who is based at Golden Gate Fields in Berkeley. “These are good things. If a horse is ailing and it is placed on the veterinarian’s list, that horse has to be approved before it can race again.”

Some of the most significant changes in horse racing concern the medications given to the animals.

“For example, horses are allowed to race on just one anti-inflammatory - and it’s at minute levels. It would be like you or I taking an aspirin before we run,” Morey said. “They’re approved to race on one, and only one can show up in a blood or urine test. And the allowable level has been more than cut in half.”

Use of corticosteroids also has been strictly curtailed.

Richard Lewis, racing director at the Sonoma County Fair and a member of the Safety and Integrity Advisory Committee of the National Thoroughbred Racing Association, noted that California’s medication rules are among the most rigid in the country.

All in all, the situation has gotten considerably safer.

“And safer for all parties - horses, jockeys, even like the starting gate crew and all that. They’re wearing safety helmets and vests now,” Lewis said. “The fact is, they’re more stringent in pre-race examinations than several years ago, and are starting to ban certain drugs that could have been part of the equation of horses breaking down, like steroids.”

The question, then, is why the horse racing at six California county fairs, plus the state fair in Sacramento, hasn’t seen the same sort of improvement lately. You might expect it to, since all racing in the state, whether at glamorous Del Mar Racetrack or the Humboldt County Fair in Ferndale, is overseen and licensed by the CHRB, using the same set of regulations.

The same jockeys ride in county fairs and sweepstakes races at Santa Anita, and the horses are trained at the same stables.

“We’ve got the same people here as at the regular tracks,” said jockey Barrington Harvey just after he rode Hub Cap to a fifth-place finish in the fourth race on Thursday. “Almost the same schedule, same management. So I think we’re pretty much safe. I feel pretty comfortable at both the fairs and the regular meets.”

One wild card, though, is the racing surface. Jockeys know what they’re getting at major tracks - especially somewhere like Golden Gate Fields, where in 2007 officials replaced the dirt with a wax-coated mixture of sand, rubber and fiber called tapeta that never turns to mud.

That’s in contrast to the fair circuit, where Santa Rosa’s inner grass oval is the only non-dirt track.

“Each track sets up differently,” jockey William Antongeorgi said before riding Barn Party to second place in the same race as Harvey. “Like Sacramento favors more, it seems like, outside closers. Whereas Pleasanton is speed-biased. You have to learn to adapt to each one of them. But as far as safety, it’s pretty good.”

That’s no surprise to Lewis, the racing director.

“Every racetrack, whether it’s a county fair or a major meet, Santa Anita or Del Mar, they all have to go through a safety inspection prior to the meet,” he said.

Usually, Lewis explained, the track safety steward and two officials from Sacramento will meet to test the surface. They use meters to measure hardness, moisture and the track’s concussive property, and they take soil samples that are tested prior to the racing. If the dirt isn’t even, they will level it. If the composition isn’t right, they’ll add more sand or organic matter.

Veteran trainer Steve Specht, who is based in Santa Rosa, brings up a couple other factors that might make county fairs problematic. One is that most horses don’t train near the fair sites. They have to be trucked in, which throws these twitchy animals off their normal rhythms. Also, while the marquee races at county fairs feature well regarded horses ridden by guys like Russell Baze and Frank Alvarado, the preliminary events look a lot different.

“You have a lot of cheaper races ridden by lower-ranked riders,” Specht said. “You’ve got boys picking up a mount on a 30-1 shot, and they get a little reckless, cut a horse off, something like that.”

But the quality of the horses and the variability of the dirt tracks shouldn’t have changed much in the past five years. They don’t really explain why safety is trending upward at the major racing facilities, downward on the fair circuit.

Alex Brown, who writes a horse racing blog at alexbrownracing.com and authored the book “Greatness and Goodness: Barbaro and his Legacy,” has a theory. It’s well known that the North American thoroughbred foal crop has been declining for a decade, to levels not seen in more than 40 years.

“With the smaller foal crops, there might be more need to keep a sore horse racing,” Brown emailed from England. “This would be exacerbated at the lower end of the racing systems. … Other than that I always thought Fair meet racing was safer because more owners are doing it for a hobby, rather than a business, so are less inclined to increasingly use drugs to mask injuries and keep running sore horses, as happens at the regular racetracks.”

Those within the horse industry didn’t say anything about a foal shortage. Rather, they questioned the validity of the numbers.

“Catastrophics per starter, that’s a very seedy number,” Lewis said. “Look at Golden Gate, which runs nine months out of the year and has a whole lot more starters. So if they have an injury once in a while, they look really good. Then you come to the Sonoma County Fair and you’re running 11 days, one injury can make it look way out of whack.”

Lewis has a point. The California racetracks offer a much larger sample size. In 2010-11, for example, they recorded a total of 93 horse deaths during races. All of the county and state fairs combined for seven deaths that year. If the latter had been six deaths, or eight, the frequency would have changed significantly.

As CHRB associate analyst Mike Marten said: “You’re looking for a trend where there might not be one.”

That would be good news for everybody. It’s fairly clear that racing at big tracks in California is getting safer, especially for the horses. It would be nice to think the troubling trend at the state’s county fairs is nothing more than a statistical anomaly.

You can reach Staff Writer Phil Barber at 521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com.