Flatter: Football joins racing in blaming the ground for injuries

Sometimes horse racing is ahead of other sports. It is just that we do not always know it at the time.

Take Monday night, when Aaron Rodgers got hurt. Before we knew he had a torn Achilles tendon, the Xsphere, formerly the Twittersphere, had spun out of control with seemingly one whirling dervish of a thought.

“Blow up MetLife Stadium and build a new one in New York with grass and not injury turf.”

“I genuinely think the NFL should ban turf fields. MetLife has taken too many bodies, man.”

“They can grow vegetables on the (bleeping) Space Station, but they can’t grow grass in MetLife.”

And on it went, the posts lighting up the night like torches accompanying the pitchfork orchestra.

We have been there and done that, right? Except when Santa Anita four years ago and Churchill Downs four months ago and Saratoga four weeks ago were in the crosshairs, we already had moved past grass.

“Tapeta for Saratoga. No excuses.”

“Overall, synthetic surfaces are safer.”

“All the statistics (say) that turf and synthetic are substantially safer than dirt.”

There you go. Rip out fake turf and real dirt, roll in the real grass and fake dirt, and all our problems are solved. We all will live happily and injury-free ever after, because the Xsphere said so.

Of course we know how ridiculous that conclusion is, unless it were to be brandished several thousand times on a handheld form of instant gratification. For expressing thoughts, that is.

Football being football, the chorus is louder and more popular than it is with our game. So the drumbeat for changing the surface there is louder and more familiar. Yet its conventional wisdom goes in circles much as ours did when we celebrated Polytrack in the ’00s and ridded ourselves of it in the ’10s.

In the ’60s Monsanto trumpeted its multi-sport invention by saying, “AstroTurf makes the game safer, too. Cleats can’t penetrate AstroTurf, so a player’s foot moves with a blow instead of locking into the turf. Knee and ankle injuries are reduced, and fans can worry less about accidents hampering their team’s chances.”

Pull snit. Sorry. A couple of those letters did not fully form there. Those corporate truisms were dispelled in due time, but the generational toggle continues to go back and forth between science leading to sturdier grass and laboratories inventing better plastic turf.

No one has built the perfect mousetrap. Last time I checked all the analytical and empirical evidence, players still get hurt playing football. No one will convince me that they know with metaphysical certitude that Rodgers’s season was ended by FieldTurf Core, which is not a product of Monsanto.

But enough of Football Nation. This is Horse Racing Nation.

Whether it was Saratoga or Churchill or Santa Anita or wherever, not one horse death can be blamed for certain on the racing surface. In the case of this summer at Saratoga, the two most visible and most sickening fatalities were on the main track. Those served as the fuse to promulgate the stamping out of dirt racing.

So, too, do statistics saying synthetics are safer that dirt. The latest report from The Jockey Club’s equine-injury database covering 2009-2022 showed that for every 1,000 starts, fatal racing injuries happened 1.86 times on dirt, 1.42 on turf and 1.11 on artificial courses.

Case closed, right? Well, not so fast.

There were nine times as many dirt starts as there were on synthetic tracks, which have yet to be installed at smaller tracks with less money and even less of a reputation for safety coming first. Let me know when they roll out Tapeta in New Mexico.

That same database says there were 1.93 deaths per 1,000 starts in races shorter than six furlongs and only 1.54 when horses go longer than a mile. It also says 2-year-olds died 1.32 times out of 1,000, 3-year-olds 1.71 and older horses 1.75.

So based on statistics, the solution is simple. Just race 2-year-olds at a mile or more on Tapeta. Now we can move on to bigger things, like making dinner plans.

This glib tone is my way of channeling what Einstein said. “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.”

Regular readers of this column will be stunned to read what is next, but the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority is to be praised for its report this week on the 12 deaths during the spring at Churchill Downs. Not necessarily for the final answers but for showing us its work.

Being the breezy consumers we are, most of us zeroed in on the part that said, “Despite extensive investigation and analysis, HISA did not identify any singular explanation for the fatalities at Churchill Downs. The absence of a singular explanation underscores the urgent need for further action and analysis to mitigate risk stemming from several factors potentially contributing to equine fatalities.”

Other than “singular” being used more than was at the end of A Chorus Line, there was a lot more to the HISA report, and it was worth examining and certainly debating.

Led by its track-maintenance guru Dennis Moore from Del Mar, HISA made eight recommendations to make sure the Churchill Downs racecourses were in top condition and stayed there. They ranged from new equipment to examining the material in the tracks to making sure the amount of water added is just right.

Some of the fine print of the report pointed a finger of blame at regulators for not being forthcoming. “HISA,” it said, “has not been reliably and consistently receiving fatality notices or necropsy reports as outlined in racetrack safety rules from many jurisdictions, including Kentucky.”

True that. The Kentucky Horse Racing Commission, which its chairperson Jonathan Rabinowitz declared in 2022 to be “committed to transparency,” has been derelict in updating its mortality reviews at Churchill Downs. There never was one posted on the KHRC website for Wild On Ice, the first horse to die in training for the Kentucky Derby, or for Code of Kings, who broke his neck flipping in the paddock on opening night of the spring meet, or for the unraced filly who died in training June 29. HISA finally made the first two public in its report.

“The KHRC’s mortality review process pre-dates HISA’s requirements, but it has been limited historically to racing fatalities,” the report said. “Going forward, mortality reviews should be conducted for training fatalities as required by HISA racetrack safety rule 2121.”

This is where the rubber meets the road when it comes to the KHRC’s public support of HISA. It might be selective.

Some 148 pages of the HISA report were devoted to charts and graphs from the office of UC Davis veterinarian Dr. Susan Stover. They painstakingly plotted the exercise, training and racing patterns for nine of the dead horses and laid them against samples of their peers in age and gender.

“Injured case horses had more races per year in their career and more days between last high-speed event and date of death. The two factors observed are consistent with our knowledge of repetitive, overuse (fatigue) injuries in racehorses,” Stover wrote, later concluding, “Increased time between the last high-speed event and date of death may be associated with trainers’ sense that the horse needs more time before the next race.”

How HISA came to its conclusions about the training of the horses who died during the spring and its passing grade on the track surfaces at Churchill Downs demand debate. Critics undoubtedly will be emboldened in their belief HISA too easily points its finger of blame at horsemen while it is reluctant to take aim at racetrack operators who have been among the authority’s most ardent supporters.

Isn’t that the point, though, of bringing this information into the light of day? Somewhere between the one extreme of taking the HISA report completely at its word and the other of saying it was not worth the PDF it was printed on is the basis for a discussion of what to do next.

Unfortunately, the 207 pages that were submitted for the racing industry’s approval or disapproval did not fit conveniently into 240 alphanumeric characters.

As for the Aaron Rodgers situation? I say forget about grass vs. turf. My solution is to rip out the Jets.