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As a scientist who studies why horses break their legs, Dr. Wayne McIlwraith is glad to see industry groups meeting to study what can be done to improve racehorse safety.
The National Thoroughbred Racing Association's board of directors will meet Friday, and The Jockey Club's newly formed Thoroughbred Safety Committee will meet Wednesday.
But, if horse racing is going to talk a better game, in McIlwraith's view the industry needs to walk the walk.
"I just feel like, some areas of the industry, they're not living it," said McIlwraith, a professor and director of the Orthopedic Research Center at Colorado State University.
On Thursday, McIlwraith became the second internationally known equine orthopedic surgeon to comment on racehorse safety.
• Recent losses turn horse fans away (Published May 6)
• Debate on track surface revived (Published May 6)
• Photo slide show: Eight Belles sudden loss
Dr. Larry Bramlage of Lexington told the Wall Street Journal: "We are at a crisis state. ... Pretty soon we won't have the animals that can go in more than one race."
"I just sent him an e-mail," McIlwraith said Thursday, telling how he congratulated Bramlage on his bold stand.
"We've got to get bold," McIlwraith added.
McIlwraith has seen a good number of broken horse bones in his veterinary career. He travels to California every other week to perform orthopedic surgery on racehorses. He also participates with an engineer from the University of Maine, Mick Peterson, in studies on the safety of racing surfaces.
Like other scientists who study fractures and racehorse safety, McIlwraith contends the industry has come far in the two years since Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro broke a hind leg in the 2006 Preakness.
He said it is his hope that the body of knowledge scientists have been accumulating will help Thoroughbred racing make great strides forward in safety in the next few years.
Regardless of the scientific knowledge becoming available, people still need to select racehorses for durability and not so much for speed, according to McIlwraith.
"People are buying the fastest horse and we're at the critical stage of effectiveness of racing versus makeup of the body," he said. "We may have gone too far evolving to the fastest, lightest animal."
McIlwraith's research with Peterson looks at the way track surfaces perform and how they hold up under ambient conditions, including moisture content.
Their research method employs a robotic hoof tester to measure the vertical stiffness of both dirt and synthetic racetracks. Vertical stiffness of a track has been linked to the likelihood of fractures, according to The Blood-Horse magazine.
The robotic tester also measures horizontal shear strength, which has been linked to the likelihood of soft-tissue injuries such as ligament and tendon ruptures.
Peterson said they are also measuring moisture content, which has been most helpful on dirt tracks. For this, they use a GPS system.
"Eventually, I see this going into the data base (begun last year by The Jockey Club) to see what it is we need to control," Peterson said.
On synthetic tracks, they measure the wax content to try to determine when and when not to add wax to the fibers that form the surface material.
Peterson cited numbers produced in a database being compiled from 60 tracks by a veterinarian in Florida, Dr. Mary Scollay, for the Grayson-Jockey Club Research Foundation in Lexington.
"We're seeing a 25 percent reduction" of catastrophic fractures on synthetic tracks, Peterson said.
Those figures, frequently cited recently in the wake of Eight Belles' breakdown after the Derby, show 1.47 deaths per 1,000 starts on synthetics and 2.07 deaths per 1,000 races on dirt tracks. The Derby is run on a dirt track.
"But it's not all the track," said Peterson, speaking in generalities about track surfaces. Researchers have found a number of other factors contributing to fractured horse bones.
McIlwraith agreed.
"Surfaces are obviously an issue," he said. "Synthetics were initially pushed as a panacea but people have to learn how to maintain them. Properly maintained, they lower the injury rate."
Other factors contributing to breakdowns include the height of the toe grab and the traction mechanism on the front horseshoes. This information has been widely disseminated within the industry.
Researchers have also learned that major leg fractures are the end result of microfractures that could have begun quite some time before the main event.
Dr. Sue Stover at the University of California, Davis, led researchers in making these two major discoveries.
As a result of her work, California has a rule limiting the height of the toe grab to 4 millimeters or less. In many states, there is no such limit.
Stover's work was groundbreaking. More recently, she has begun to demonstrate that horses are returning to racing too soon after injuries or time away from the track, exposing them to greater risk of injury.
In her lab at UC Davis, "we're trying to work synergistically (with other research efforts), taking the material properties of track surfaces and applying them to a computer model of the forelimb, to simulate racing across the track surface," she said.
She said she hopes to test an infinite number of possibilities of track surface composition this way, so that engineers can design a model track.
Ed Bowen, president of the Grayson-Jockey Club Research Foundation, also agreed that research is showing the synthetic tracks to be a step forward -- although the synthetics appear to be only one part of the puzzle researchers have been solving.
When combined with Stover's discovery that many injuries are the result of pre-existing conditions -- and that toe grabs also play a role in breakdowns -- racing has something to work with.
McIlwraith said he and others hope to have a kit available commercially in the next couple of years that veterinarians can use in the field to detect the micro-injuries.
But he says the industry is also going to have to change, and to begin to reward durability more than speed.
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