Churchill Downs Goes Dark In The Wake Of A Dozen Equine Deaths In May

Churchill Downs will shut all operations on Sunday, June 4, in the wake of the unprecedented number of equine deaths at the track during its legendary spring meeting. The shutdown is meant to allow a broader investigation into the possible causes of the dozen deaths. Ten of the twelve deaths have been assessed as the results of racing or training leg injuries, but the sheer number of breakdowns and the extreme rarity of one track experiencing that number in such a short amount of time is moving the needle to this place: A shutdown is necessary.

Following an emergency summit called earlier in the week by the federal oversight agency, the Horse Racing Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA), participating Churchill Downs and Kentucky Horse Racing Authority officials seemed to agree that the measure would help. Churchill Downs’ CEO Bill Carstanjen included this statement in the June 3 press release: “What has happened at our track is deeply upsetting and absolutely unacceptable. We need to take more time to conduct a top-to-bottom review of all of the details and circumstances so that we can further strengthen our surface, safety and integrity protocols.”

That surface, the noun referring to the substance and structure of the track itself, is the first of the areas being “strengthened” — or put differently, investigated more deeply — in Mr. Carstanjen’s statement is telling. Significantly, the second recent independent review of Churchill’s track surface began on Wednesday, May 31. It’s important in this context to recall the construct of a track. Though there are many complex factors that can influence the safety of a track, it’s axiomatic in racing that, on dirt, as Churchill’s surface is, horse’s hooves cut through the cushiony, harrowed surface considerably. As he runs, a racehorse essentially creates his next stride by bouncing off a substrata of harder dirt below that harrowed surface. The irregularities in that stratum are the irregularities of nature itself, and those irregularities will also be looked at, hard, as the investigators examine the features of these shockingly bunched, multiple tragedies.

Some of those irregularities can be understood by taking a look at the larger geophysical environment in which Louisville sits. Louisville’s dirt is alluvial by virtue of its siting smack in the middle of the Ohio River valley, but that’s not the whole story. The river itself runs generally north-to-south at the city, and the river marks the axis at which the rockier Indiana plateau and what we can loosely call the Kentuckian plateau meet. Specifically, as we know, Churchill’s dirt lies just three miles and a bit inland from the riverbank, and in general all is as projected for softer alluvial soils there.

But over millennia, geology happens. Rivers wander, as the Ohio has and does still. Nothing of this earth is permanent. Little fingers of layers of rock and harder sediments flow and move, and the 149 years that horses have been racing atop that little thumbprint of dirt just a few miles east of the river are but an eyeblink in comparison to those larger movements. Those deeper movements in that spot, below Churchill’s storied track, will also be under scrutiny now.