March 27, 2012
Four years ago, after a horse running in the Kentucky Derby broke two ankles on national television and was euthanized, New York Times investigative reporter Walt Bogdanich told his editors that it was time probe the horse racing industry. But that didn’t happen. So two years later, Bogdanich, who teaches the Investigative Reporting Workshop at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, told his class to take on the story. And they did.
On Sunday, March 25, The New York Times ran “Death and Disarray in American Racetracks” on the front page. The story, which took off from the research Bogdanich’s class did, was written by Bogdanich, New York Times reporters Joe Drape and Griffin Palmer, and Journalism School alumna Dara Miles '10, who was Bogdanich’s student. Miles continued working on the story after graduation, with support from the Stabile Center.
“One semester wasn’t enough to find the right focus for the story, so we suspended our reporting,” said Bogdanich. “At some point, Dara (who did not have a job) offered to keep working on the topic. I said ok, but I made no promises. It wasn’t until I figured out a way to quantify the breakdown rate by using race results that we decided to go forward.”
The investigation found that 24 horses die each week at racetracks across America. The deaths are seldom examined, with the corpses ending up in landfills or rendering plants. As The Times reported:
[I]ndustry practices continue to put animal and rider at risk. A computer analysis of data from more than 150,000 races, along with injury reports, drug test results and interviews, shows an industry still mired in a culture of drugs and lax regulation and a fatal breakdown rate that remains far worse than in most of the world.
If anything, the new economics of racing are making an always-dangerous game even more so. Faced with a steep loss of customers, racetracks have increasingly added casino gambling to their operations, resulting in higher purses but also providing an incentive for trainers to race unfit horses. At Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, the number of dead and injured horses has risen sharply since a casino opened there late last year.
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