Saratoga will run Sunday card, officials decide

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. – The New York Racing Association decided to go ahead with its 11-race Sunday card at Saratoga Racecourse after meeting with horsemen, track officials, maintenance workers, and jockeys and determining there were no overriding concerns about the safety of the track’s racing surfaces or the effectiveness of its safety protocols.

The decision, which was not formalized until well after Saratoga had opened its gates on Sunday, followed an overnight review of equine medical and training records and several assessments of both the dirt main track and Saratoga’s two grass courses. The reviews were conducted in consultation with officials of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority and the New York State Gaming Commission.

Those reviews turned up no abnormalities that would necessitate a shutdown of racing, said David O’Rourke, NYRA’s chief executive officer, after emerging from a closed-door meeting with riders, veterinarians, safety stewards, and the track maintenance crew at 12:30, forty minutes prior to first post.

“We had a very productive meeting,” O’Rourke said. “It was about reassessing communication, and the fact that the jocks, specifically, needed to bring up any issue that was relevant to them, anything at all that was specific to the tracks. And there was none.”

NYRA conducted the overnight reviews after two horses suffered catastrophic injuries on the Saturday Travers Stakes card and had to be euthanized on the track, including one that occurred in the deep stretch. The fatalities led to an emergency meeting involving NYRA, the New York State Gaming Commission, and the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority just after the card in which officials said that they would weigh whether to race on Sunday.

The Sunday card includes six $200,000 stakes races restricted to New York-bred horses, and is branded “New York Showcase Day.” Many of the state’s most prominent owners and breeders are expected to attend.

So far at the Saratoga meet, which began on July 13, seven horses have died of musculoskeletal injuries while racing, while an eighth died of a serious cardiac event. Six horses that suffered injuries did so after running on the turf course, including Nobel, who broke down catastrophically on the gallop-out after the fifth race on Saturday. Four horses have died while training, for a total of 12.

Two of the fatalities this meet have occurred in front of the grandstand on the dirt track while the horses were leading deep in the stretch. Maple Leaf Mel suffered fatal injuries just yards from the finish line in the Test Stakes on Saturday, Aug. 5. Yesterday, New York Thunder broke down catastrophically at the 16th-pole in the H. Allen Jerkens Memorial. Both were undefeated prior to their last starts.

The concentration of injuries on the grass has led to widespread concern over the condition of Saratoga’s two turf courses, especially after a rainy summer. However, jockeys and officials who have inspected the course have concluded that the two surfaces do not have apparent flaws https://www.drf.com/news/saratogas-turf-woes-continue-nobel-euthanized, at least according to the parameters established by racing-surface experts.

So far this meet, 57 races have been moved off the turf to the main track. Last year, 17 races were moved off the turf.

NYRA, along with most other major racetracks, continually collects data on its racing surfaces, in an effort that has grown out of years of study led by Dr. Mick Peterson, the director of the University of Kentucky’s Racing Surfaces Laboratory. David O’Rourke, NYRA’s chief executive officer, said yesterday that all of the data collected by NYRA this meet has indicated that the racing surfaces are within the safety standards established by experts.

Still, NYRA announced separately on Sunday morning that two turf races will be moved to the main track, the 1st and the 11th. The two turf stakes races for New York-breds, the West Point and the Yaddo, will remain on the turf. The weather forecast calls for party sunny conditions all day, with mild temperatures.

O’Rourke said after the meeting that turf racing would be conducted in “fresh lanes,” meaning areas of the turf course that had not yet been used extensively during the meet.

“Did we get hit with rain earlier in the season?” O’Rourke said. “Yes. Did it get a little chewed up a little earlier? Yes. So we had some conversation on rail moves. A lot of this comes down to the jocks. They are on the backs of the horses. So I need them to understand that they need to be absolutely comfortable expressing anything, anytime, anywhere, period.”

O’Rourke said that he had conversations with trainers this morning and that concerns about the safety of the track surfaces were “absolutely none.”

While outside observers are usually quick to blame racing surfaces for injuries, epidemiologists say that the causes of catastrophic injuries are multifactorial. Since 2009, when the Equine Injury Database was created as a cooperative effort between tracks and racing organizations, the industry has committed an enormous amount of resources to identify factors related to breakdowns and create interventions for at-risk horses. That effort has succeeded in cutting the fatality rate by 35 percent at U.S. racetracks over the past 13 years.

Although 12 horses have died this meet, the total is not significantly higher than in recent meets, according to data from the New York State Gaming Commission. In both 2021 and 2022, 10 horses died of musculoskeletal injuries when racing or training during Saratoga’s eight-week meet. In 2020, 12 horses died of musculoskeletal injuries, and in 2019, nine horses died.

However, in those previous years, training fatalities were usually double or more than racing fatalities, and the general public is rarely aware of those incidents. The deaths of Maple Leaf Mel and New York Thunder were impossible to miss.

“Some of it is the location, the places where the horses went down,” said Robert Williams, the executive director of the commission, on Saturday, in explaining, in part, why the deaths during this year’s meet have generated such urgency.

Counting Sunday, Saratoga’s current meet has seven racing days left. The track’s last live-race card is Sept. 4, Labor Day.

Saratoga is the second major track this year to struggle through a period in which a cluster of breakdowns has overshadowed all else. Earlier this year, a similar review was launched at Churchill Downs after 12 horses died in 30 days, generating an intense amount of media coverage at a track with higher name recognition than any other in the U.S.

While Churchill eventually elected to move the remaining month of its live race meet to Ellis Park, a track it owns in western Kentucky, a similar decision by NYRA, such as moving racing to Belmont Park downstate, would have enormous repercussions on the local economy. The Saratoga race meet is considered a major tourist draw, and many of the businesses and residents of Saratoga Springs rely heavily on the summer race meet.

When asked whether NYRA expected to devise additional standards in the future to address safety, O’Rourke said that “it will be the standard for the rest of my career.”

“Right now we’re focused on today and what we can do right now,” O’Rourke said. “A lot of the other aspects, it’s going to take some time and data aggregation … So it’s very likely you will see some modifications [to NYRA policies and protocols in the future]. This is an evolutionary process, improving safety.”