Don't Buy the Kentucky Derby Hype

The Sport of Kings Is an Animal Cruelty Racket

This weekend will mark the running of the 150th Annual Kentucky Derby, an event once heralded as the “Greatest Two Minutes in Sports.” To my way of thinking, horse racing is like smoking in the back of a bus, or leaded gas, or segregation; something once thought of as acceptable is revealed to be vile.

It remains, to an increasingly smaller set of people, cause for celebration. Women wearing hats are showcased. A special drink made with a noxious weed is feted for people who can’t stand the taste of bourbon. And NBC Sports will feature coverage of everything and every notable human at Churchill Downs in Louisville Kentucky–but only for those willing to pony up for the Peacock streamer.

The big news about this year’s Derby is that no horses have died at the track. Yet. Two horses that fell and unseated their riders in the second race at Churchill Downs on Thursday are being “evaluated” at local hospitals

Last year, seven horses died –including two on race day. Another five horses died at the track before it was closed down and races were transferred to Ellis Park.

Here’s the thing: all the king’s men have no clue as to what’s causing all these equine deaths. Post death reports by the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA) all end up with words to the effect of there being no singular cause for track deaths. Facilities have redone their courses with new dirt (a ton for Churchill Downs), and trainers are hooking up telemetric devices to horses, hoping to detect early signs of trouble via slight changes in their biometrics. They won’t work.

These equine deaths have no singular cause– it’s the whole horse racing system that’s at fault.

Patrick Battuello, founder and president of the nonprofit Horseracing Wrongs, gives his insight following research showing roughly 2000 horses dying annually at US tracks at Katie Couric media::

• And to be clear, death at the track is neither clean nor tranquil. Death at the track is cardiovascular collapse, or a failed heart — this happening, mind you, to animals who are mostly under the age of six. Death at the track is pulmonary hemorrhage, or bleeding out from the lungs. Death at the track is blunt-force head trauma from collisions with other horses or the track itself. Death at the track is broken necks, severed spines, ruptured ligaments, and shattered legs — occasionally shattered so severely that the limb remains attached to the rest of the body by skin or tendons only.

• Death at the track is also things like: Colic, a painful, terrifying abdominal affliction; laminitis, excruciating inflammation in the feet; respiratory infections; neurological disorders; parasitic infestations; and the proverbial “barn accidents.” Sometimes, FOIA documents simply read that horses are “found dead in the morning” — with no other explanation.

When you hear about two (or three) year old horses on a track, keep in mind the animals don’t reach full musculoskeletal maturity till the age of six. A two year old horse is roughly equivalent to a six year old human child.

Think of a child who’s kept locked in a 4x4 (it’s 12x12 for horses) pen 23 hours a day, denied social contact with its peers, whipped and “broken.” Is this hyperbole? Sort of–I’m making a point. The King of Sports is a long way from horses running for the joy of it in an open field.

Battuello, again:

• Those in the racing business effect control over the horses through force and intimidation: Pushing, shoving, pulling, yanking, yelling, screaming. And also through the tools of the trade: cribbing collars, nose chains, lip chains, tongue ties, eye blinders, and mouth “bits” — which, says Dr. Robert Cook, an expert on equine physiology, make the horses feel like they’re suffocating when being forced to run at breakneck speeds. As for the whip, consider this: The public flogging administered to racehorses would land a person in jail if done to his dog in the park. But at the track, it’s simply part of the tradition.

Just in time for the Derby, U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced they have seized eight shipments of illegal, performance-enhancing drugs designed for horses at the Port of Cincinnati.

Also just in time for the Derby, the New York Times has wrapped up its year-long investigation of horse track deaths:

• Over the past 12 months, The New York Times analyzed confidential documents and covert recordings made by law enforcement, and obtained exclusive interviews as part of an investigation into why so many horses, supposedly in peak physical condition, were breaking down so frequently. In the documentary “The New York Times Presents: Broken Horses,” now streaming on Hulu, The Times found that reckless breeding and doping practices, compromised veterinarians and trainers, and decades-long resistance to changes that could save horses lives have placed a multibillion-dollar ecosystem in peril and put the social acceptability of one of America’s oldest sports at risk.

I’ve been to a few horse races at Del Mar, and while a family outing is always a worthwhile endeavor, the races themselves were only interesting as markers for the blind bets we made. The magnificence of the animal, the grace of its stride, the stories of the jockeys in white atop those thoroughbred horses all paled to the anticipation of the dopamine rush felt when one of us “won.”

I have nothing against sports in general, but we should be past the point of cheering for gladiators that survive. I have nothing against gambling; I’ll play for the entertainment value. But this whole world that’s been built up around those activities and the pumped up desire to convince spectators it’s all in good fun needs rethinking.

The “pro” in professional sports comes from cheating. Governments get cheated to build facilities and infrastructure. Automobile-dependent facilities are cheating us out of holding off climate change.

Participants get cheated as their bodies in the final analysis are merely fodder. From the National Institutes of Health:

• Blows to the head during contact sports like football, boxing, and soccer can cause injury to the brain, called traumatic brain injury. Studies of American football players have identified a serious consequence of repeated traumatic brain injuries. In a condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, tangles of a protein called tau build up in the brain after repeated head impacts. The resulting brain damage is similar to that seen in Alzheimer’s disease. CTE can lead to dementia and eventually death.

In San Diego the “nonprofit” groups working concessions have been shown to be fraudulent fronts, paying their workers sometimes less than minimum wage, and winking at health and safety requirements. 

You’ll know when things might be improving when the district attorney can take time off from public service award shows to announce charges against malfeasance and worker exploitation at local stadiums. Don’t bet on it.

Fans get cheated with inflated prices and service charges. You wanna watch the Padres on TV? Sorry, you’ll have to fork over dough to whatever pay channel willing to pay owners enough.

Here’s a list of all the race track-related deaths in 2023. Go ahead, look. Surely you’ve got better things to do than watch a gussied up propaganda event for a corrupt and vile sport.

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Friday’s Other Stories of Note

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Union plans strike vote over crackdown on University of California Gaza protests via The Guardian

• The largest union of academic workers, which represents more than 48,000 graduate student workers throughout the University of California system, will hold a strike authorization vote as early as next week in response to how universities have cracked down on students’ Gaza protests.

• “The use and sanction of violent force to curtail peaceful protest is an attack on free speech and the right to demand change, and the university must sit down with students, unions, and campus organizations to negotiate, rather than escalate,” read an announcement of the strike vote from UAW local 4811.

• Earlier this year, the union voted by a margin of more than nine to one in favor of supporting a ceasefire, according to the announcement.

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Union Election Date Set for Workers at Better Buzz Coffee's Hillcrest Location (Press Release)

• The workers at Better Buzz Coffee's Hillcrest location have made the decision to form a union. In an open letter addressed to the San Diego community, the baristas, trainers, and shift supervisors of Better Buzz Hillcrest, under the name Better Buzz United, have announced their intent to join the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 135. 

• With a majority of union cards signed, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has set the date of the union representation election for May 17, 2024. On this day, the workers at Better Buzz Hillcrest will have the opportunity to decide whether to join UFCW Local 135. 

• In the letter, the workers express their commitment to seeking fair treatment and improved working conditions. They highlight concerns about wages, benefits, scheduling, and overall workplace safety that have not been adequately addressed by Better Buzz management.

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An Oil Price-Fixing Conspiracy Caused 27% of All Inflation Increases in 2021 by Matt Stoller at The BIG Newsletter

• So what happens now? Well fortunately there already is a private antitrust price-fixing suit, and it just got a huge boost from the FTC’s release of its complaint. That means years of litigation against not just Pioneer but seven different shale oil producers. Additionally, the FTC could bring actual monopolization claims against the shale producers, but that’s probably contingent upon a second Biden term, an uncertain proposition. And even with that possibility, we’re going to run into the same problem we see with all of antitrust, which is that it takes forever.

• Finally, there’s also likely to be some sort of political reaction, considering it’s an election year, and this is pretty good evidence that oil firms helped collude with Saudi Arabia to steal thousands of dollars from each American family. I can see Congressional proposals to fund oil-specific antitrust investigations, special rules proposed to prohibit communications with OPEC, or even pushing the Federal Reserve to start looking into the relationship between price-fixing and inflation. In 2022, the Biden administration pleaded with oil firms to invest in drilling more to bring down the price of oil, but they refused, claiming it was Biden environmental policies that were the cause of their low investment.

• The environmental constraints bit was in retrospect an obvious lie. And even the war in Ukraine, it turns out, was likely just an excuse for what was really going on, which was price-fixing. Americans were skeptical of big oil, and their instincts were correct. It really was a conspiracy against us by a small group.