Churchill Downs, Inc. CEO Bill Carstanjen addressed the company's internal investigation into the deaths of 12 Thoroughbreds during this year's Spring Meet during a quarterly earnings conference call Thursday, explaining that the company “didn't find anything material” during its investigation into either the track surface or its safety protocols.
“This was a series of unfortunate circumstances that happened during the early portion of our meet,” Carstanjen said. “And to the extent that there can be good that comes out of it, everything we'll do going forward, starting in September, we'll do a little bit better and be a little bit more thorough and we'll learn what we can, but there aren't any material changes that have been made to the structure or the track or the surface of the track because bringing in some of the best to help us evaluate it. We didn't find anything fundamentally wrong or different about our track from previous years.”
On June 2, the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA) recommended to CDI that racing at the Louisville track be temporarily suspended to allow for additional comprehensive investigations into the cause of recent equine fatalities at the track. CDI agreed with and accepted recommendation, suspending racing operations at Churchill beginning June 7 and moving the remainder of the live race meeting through July 3 to its recently-purchased Ellis Park in Henderson, Ky.
KHRC chief veterinarian Dr. Nick Smith told commissioners in June that prior to switching the remainder of the Churchill spring meet to Ellis Park, the track saw 1,855 total starts and, by the commission's count, 11 highly-publicized equine fatalities. That count does not include the fatal injury of Kentucky Derby contender Wild On Ice, who suffered a fracture in training prior to the actual start of the meet, although his injury is included in year-end overall totals. (Officials track fatalities in Kentucky “per race meet” at the end of each track's meeting, so fatalities that happen outside of the dates of a meet are counted separately at the end of the year.)
That makes for a rate of 5.93 fatalities per 1,000 starts — significantly higher than the national average of 1.25 per 1,000 starts recorded by the Equine Injury Database in 2022.
Yet, according to Carstanjen, nearly two months of internal investigation have revealed that “nothing jumped out as an apparent cause of the injuries” which caused fatal breakdowns.
“So the way to think about news like that is you have to do the best you can,” Carstanjen said. “You have to take the steps that you can to make it as safe as possible, and you constantly have to challenge yourself and review everything you do.
“So that, in a sense, can sometimes be unsatisfying, but that's business and that's sports. We just have to commit to continually doing everything we can, constant incremental improvements to be as safe as we possibly can, and we've done that.”
Carstanjen suggested that new safety protocols will be implemented for Churchill Downs' upcoming September meet, with details to be announced in the coming weeks.
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