Horse racing is in serious trouble

This was supposed to be the year when things finally began to improve in one of the world’s worst-operated — and most beautiful — sports.

The recently enacted Horse Racing Integrity and Safety Act promises to bring uniform standards for the care and training of racehorses to the United States for the first time. One of the critical problems facing the sport of kings would finally be tamed: the hodgepodge of regulations and athlete protections from one state to another, one track to another, even one stable to another.

Instead of renewal, horse racing is stuck in a very bad place. While industry leaders resist reform, the biggest event on the horse racing calendar, the Kentucky Derby, is shadowed by the specter of premature death among the magnificent creatures known as thoroughbreds. Churchill Downs in Louisville, scene of the venerable Run for the Roses, saw at least four seemingly healthy horses either die or be euthanized after life-ending injuries in the fortnight leading up to this year’s race.

Though Churchill Downs on Friday suspended the trainer of the two euthanized horses, not all the specifics of the deaths have been determined. But the root causes are widely understood: Follow the money, as the saying goes.

Audiences for horse racing have shrunk steadily across the decades as Americans have drifted away from rural pastimes and gained more options for gambling their money away. A day at the track, once the only legal game in town, lost luster compared with garish casinos, online poker, professional sports books, meme stocks, crypto investing — you name it, just pay your money and take your chances on the boardwalk of the 21st century.

Faced with such competition, and offering the obscurities of pari-mutuel betting on mute beasts at half-hour intervals, racing seasons shortened. Prize money stagnated. Fields dwindled. Tracks closed.

The last remaining thrill in horse racing, for folks with a lot of money to burn, became the all-or-nothing bid to win a glamor race or two — then retire the animal swiftly to a lifetime of highly paid breeding.

Brief weeks of running in pursuit of years at stud: How different this is from the glory days of horse racing as painted by author Laura Hillenbrand in her runaway bestseller, “Seabiscuit.” The story of a plodder that became a champion, the book tracked the career of a little hero of the Great Depression. Seabiscuit ran and ran and ran until he outran even War Admiral, a Triple Crown winner, and only retired after 89 races in his thoroughbred career.

Compare that story with today’s pallid narrative. The eight most recent winners of the Kentucky Derby, from 2015 until last year, ran a total of 79 races combined. Imagine football if a promising quarterback retired after winning three games.

Horses bred to run a handful of races, then retire, are different animals compared with the hardy Seabiscuit. They might be bigger and more statuesque, but they are less dense, more attenuated, with leg bones as slender as matchsticks. They are porcelain, with no future to grow into. No one cares how fast they might become at age four, or five, or six — because horses still running after age three, the Triple Crown year, are failures by definition. They ought to be grazing between visits to the mating shed.

Incoherent regulations on top of a screwed-up profit model inside a badly stressed industry: Naturally, horse racing produces bad outcomes — like four dead horses at Churchill Downs. No one will be surprised if word comes out that some or all of those dead horses were put down after snapping their reedy cannon bones in training while juiced on painkillers. Or because their hearts and lungs were overstressed by doses of dehydrating chemicals. Thoroughbred horse racing is to drug abuse as the Fourth of July is to beer and hot dogs.

Win or die.

The best-known living horse trainer is also No. 1 in deaths-per-racing-start, according to a 2021 analysis by The Post. Exactly what the incentive structure would seem to predict.

In desperate need of reform, the industry has hunkered down, instead. Like the proverbial frog slowly dying as water comes to a boil, the racing industry has resisted the new law. Evidently, it would rather squeeze another year or two from a sick and broken model than create a new pastime around healthy animals running for the love of it. The rash of deaths at Churchill Downs is like Marley’s Ghost confronting Scrooge: It offers a final chance to reform. Embrace the new law, regardless of imperfections — or embrace oblivion.

The brief season of premier 3-year-old thoroughbred racing that starts on Saturday in Louisville this year is all that remains of the former glamor and excitement of horse racing. If the sport can’t be purged of animal abuse even on that level, it is probably doomed everywhere.