How a legacy of black market doping and lobbying groups are killing “the sport of kings”
Twelve horses have died at Louisville, Kentucky’s Churchill Downs since April 12, 2023. As of this writing, 16 have died at Belmont Park — where the Belmont Stakes, the third and final jewel of the Triple Crown, is set to take place on Saturday, June 10. And every time another beautiful horse with terrible odds dies brutally in the dirt, bit-choked and lungs bleeding out, Americans ask “Why?”
At peak racing speed, they can thunder through the turns of Churchill Downs at 38 miles per hour. The sheer force of their thousand-pound bodies pummels the dirt track’s hazardous slings — but only after first funneling through the narrow cabling of their spindly forelimb ligaments. Unrelenting propulsion ripping through channels of deep flexor tendons and shock-absorbing fetlock ankles, every ounce of a thoroughbred racehorse’s weight is condensed into aluminum-shod hooves, bred so thin and small they average just four inches across.
Though most thoroughbred hearts are between eight and 10 lbs, the legendary Secretariat had a heart that weighed 22 lbs. The bigger the heart, the faster the horse — and the more they race in early age, the bigger their hearts will grow. A yearling’s heart is a quickly shifting landscape, its cardiac morphology sensitive to both the rigors of endurance training and long-known diseases of overbreeding. A foal’s heart can grow anywhere from 10% to 33% in size under the sting of a trainer’s crop.
It is then — in those moment of racing fury, when a horse’s every capillary is flushed wide in a 250-beat-per-minute frenzy — that a flood of pharmaceuticals meets the arterial gasp of oft-leaking valves, sending lethal numbness crashing through the animal’s veins. Some drugs are perfectly legal, some are unseen by blind-eyes turned, some are new enough they don’t show up in tests. Either way, the dope madness takes a thoroughbred deeper into its race, carried by a heart that was bred too big for life outside the track.
At least, any of us who’ve grown up around Kentucky’s horse country have known what kills horses. It’s not a mysterious plague, nor an act of a merciless god. We’re the ones killing racehorses — humans.
Specifically, the inhumane horsemen who trade their husbandry ethics for a purse, and so blight what was once called the sport of kings — ruthless trainers, greedy horse owners, shady veterinarians and track executives, paid-off sporting regulators, lawmakers greased with lobbying money and judges who slow-walk already watered-down safety laws. Humans are killing racehorses in any way that will increase profit and reduce cost, however the law will allow.
We overbreed them for fleetness at the cost of hardiness, run them far too young at punishing speeds on poorly surfaced tracks and dope them until they can’t feel the lacework of fractures sprawling across their lightweight bones nor the arrest seizing their engorged hearts. And when they fall, rather than be inconvenienced by expensive medical treatment and unprofitable recovery time, we kill them.
The particulars of the doping-related deaths change over the years, a game of Whac-a-Mole between sporting regulators (those not bought off) and black-market poison dealers.
We used to inject horses with cobra venom, sometimes venom from south American frogs. Both kill the nerve endings while the latter gets the horse high. Then, for a while, it was Viagra. We even get the fillies jacked up on Bolivian marching powder, cutting cocaine with whatever brings urine test results under legally allowable limits.
There are three main types of racehorse dope: the painkillers and steroids to keep them from slowing down; the stimulants and blood-oxygen boosters to speed them up; and the stop-gaps to hide injuries caused by the first two.
Readily available for purchase online — and often advertised with the blaring slogan “WILL NOT TEST!” — new versions of all three types of drugs appear every year on a gray market that moves faster than regulators and test-makers, mirroring the cat-and-mouse charade of the human War on Drugs. The shady horse drug industry found its best advantage in what was, until recently, a patchwork of laws across 38 states, enforced by often understaffed and underfunded local agencies.
Jockey Javier Castellano rides Mage #8 to a win in the 149th running of the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs on May 06, 2023 in Louisville, Kentucky. (Joe Robbins/Icon Sportswire via )
Take for example, the performance-enhancing drug known as Lasix (also called furosemide, a potent diuretic that prevents exercise-induced pulmonary hemorrhage, which is bleeding in the lungs.) Lasix was perfectly legal and routinely used by trainers until 2021 — but, even then, the law barring it still allowed a phase-out exemption.
