What happened at the Breeders’ Cup World Championships in late 2019 looked like the end of horse racing in California, maybe in America. It was the twelfth and final race of a two-day series, at Santa Anita Park, the storied track near Los Angeles. Sixty-eight thousand people packed the Art Deco grandstand, the apron, the infield, the high-priced suites. The “handle”—the total betting for the day—was a healthy hundred and seventeen million dollars, but thoroughbred racing itself was on life support. Since the beginning of the year, thirty-five horses had died at Santa Anita. Public dismay had risen to the point that Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, had told the Times that racing’s “time is up” if it did not reform. Dianne Feinstein, the state’s senior senator, had released a letter calling the Breeders’ Cup races a “critical test for the future of horseracing.”
Outside the track, animal-rights activists had been heckling racegoers under a banner that read “HORSERACING KILLS HORSES.” They had a call-and-response going, street corner to street corner: “Horses don’t want to be forced to run!” “Just like us!” “Horses feel pain!” “Just like us!” Heather Wilson, a nurse anesthetist, wore huge fake eyelashes and an absurd cocked hat. “I’m making fun of the women who think that killing horses is glamorous,” she told me. “My hat is quasi-glam.” She had been arrested at a previous protest at Santa Anita. “Right now, our focus is on California,” she said. “Just get it on the ballot.” She meant a statewide referendum, which she felt sure would result in a ban.
Santa Anita management and Breeders’ Cup officials were desperate to have their event run smoothly. Their foremost concern, they told anyone who would listen, was the safety of their “equine athletes.” They had flooded the zone with veterinarians and expensive imaging equipment, screening for preëxisting conditions. The animals were repeatedly tested for banned drugs. During morning workouts, vets used binoculars to study their gait on the track. Thoroughbreds, which can weigh twelve hundred pounds, have notoriously delicate ankles.
The Breeders’ Cup Classic, which is a mile and a quarter and offers a six-million-dollar purse, came late in the day. The sun was sinking into the palm trees west of the stables as the horses, eleven of them, were loaded into the gate. Mongolian Groom, a dark-bay four-year-old gelding, had beaten the favorite, McKinzie, just a few weeks before, right here on this track. The handicappers didn’t think he could do it again; he was a 12–1 shot. The whole group had raced together, in various combinations, at Saratoga and Churchill Downs, Belmont and Del Mar, in Pennsylvania and Louisiana. They were all campaigners, with maxed-out airline-loyalty accounts. Some seemed more enthusiastic than others.
One thing you could safely say about the horses was that they were thirsty. They had all been injected that morning with Lasix, a diuretic, noted on the racing form with a boldface “L.” The given reason for Lasix is to prevent pulmonary bleeding, which hard running causes in many horses. The bleeding can be dangerous, and can certainly be unsightly, leaving horse and jockey painted with blood—not a good look these days. But only a small minority of thoroughbreds are serious bleeders, and for decades nearly every thoroughbred in the U.S. has received race-day Lasix. The drug’s diuretic function causes horses to unload epic amounts of urine—twenty or thirty pounds’ worth. The advantage of running light is obvious, as is the reason that critics consider Lasix a performance-enhancing med. Race-day Lasix is banned in Europe, Asia, and Australia.
The activists outside, suggesting that horses don’t like to race, were half right. Running fast comes naturally to thoroughbreds, but racers need to be trained to outrun opponents. Most, it is thought, need “encouragement”—whipping—to continue going hard when they’re tired. Racehorses, especially those running on oval tracks, give their lower legs a terrible pounding, straining ligaments, tendons, joints. Mongolian Groom’s lower hind legs were wrapped in blue bandages, which is not uncommon; horses tend to kick themselves. He wore a heavy blue hood, to keep him concentrated on what’s in front of him, and a shadow roll across his nose. Horses can startle at shadows on the ground, and the roll reduces the number they see.
At the starting gate, Mongolian Groom balked. Horses who balk—are they frightened, angry? Bettors like to look at a horse’s coat in the walking ring before a race. If it’s bright, rippling with just the right amount of sweat and muscled excitement, the beast is believed to be ready to run. Was Mongolian Groom’s coat bright? It looked bright enough. His rider, Abel Cedillo, a journeyman from Guatemala, was patient, the gate staff slightly less so. The horse’s owner was there that day: Ganbaatar Dagvadorj, a Mongolian tycoon who made his first fortune in post-Communist supermarkets. He and his friends wore traditional robes, big leather belts, and velvet caps that came to a shiny point.
The eleven horses finally settled, and broke cleanly from the gate. The track was dirt, rather deep and slow. War of Will, that year’s Preakness champion, took an early lead and held it around the clubhouse turn. Mongolian Groom was just off the pace, with McKinzie, a small-framed bay, a nose behind him. Horses are prey animals, who instinctively prefer the safety of the middle of the pack. But being in the middle of this pack would have been miserable—dirt getting kicked in your face, nothing to see but horse butts.
In the backstretch, the pack started running into the last of the sun. From the shadowed grandstand, horses and riders were drenched in pinkish light, moving with huge strides and hypnotic smoothness. War of Will had the inside position, hugging the rail, but on the far turn you could see that he was tiring, despite his jockey’s whip. McKinzie and Mongolian Groom surged past, with McKinzie a half length ahead. Then, at the top of the stretch, Vino Rosso, a big chestnut colt, made a powerful move on the outside. Sixty-eight thousand humans switched from cheering to shrieking. (Betting on a horse is a known intoxicant. Also a stimulant.) The Classic turned into a two-horse race, Vino Rosso and McKinzie, and mass hysteria seemed to crackle the air. Vino Rosso pulled away and won by four lengths.
I was on my feet in the press box, along with dozens of other reporters. But I noticed a turf writer next to me, peering through binoculars at the top of the stretch. There was a commotion on the track—workers throwing up a green tarp wall, a van, a pickup, a bigger van. It took me a moment to realize that a horse was missing. Mongolian Groom had disappeared from the race, pulled up by his jockey, Cedillo. The bigger van was an equine ambulance.
The show went on, with television lights illuminating a scene of jubilation: flower wreaths, a shining horse, exultant connections. The liquored-up crowd partied on. The turf writers hustled down to get a quote from the owners, Vinnie Viola and Mike Repole, who were incoherent with joy. But the news, it seemed to me, because I’m not a beat reporter, was back on the track, in the gathering dusk.
Mongolian Groom, we eventually learned, had broken his left hind leg. A small stress fracture had propagated upward, splitting a ligament and smaller bones and shattering the cannon bone and the fetlock joint, damaging soft tissue and blood supply. That is a fatal injury. The vets who euthanized him could have fought a hopeless battle for a few days, with the horse in agony, if they had wanted to postpone this announcement for publicity reasons. That wasn’t what they did.
The day that Mongolian Groom died, Nick Alexander had a horse at Santa Anita, too. His filly Just Grazed Me, the reigning star in his stable, won the day’s first race: the Senator Ken Maddy Stakes, named for a politician from Fresno who supported racing.
Alexander grew up down the street, in Pasadena, and he knew the track in its heyday, in the fifties. “When I was growing up, horse racing was pretty much the only game in town,” he said. “No Dodgers, no Lakers, just the Rams. But I was already a Dodgers fan, because of Jackie Robinson. We were both from Pasadena.” Alexander, who is seventy-eight, lanky, and blue-eyed, with a sun-blistered nose and a white soul patch, names horses for old-time Dodgers: Johnny Podres, Pee Wee Reese. “First bet I placed here, when I was ten or eleven—two dollars on Gold Man,” he told me. “Won twenty dollars. I’ll never forget it.” As a teen-ager, he landed a job as a “get-ready boy” at a car lot. He later had his own dealership, which he advertised on the radio with the slogan “Nick can’t say no!” Old locals still greet him with that one. “KNX, everybody listened to it. Santa Anita used to advertise on there. They’d broadcast the stretch call, from the eighth pole. Really exciting—you could hear the crowd. I say we should do that again.”
Thoroughbred racing, once the most popular spectator sport in America, has been in decline since Alexander started on the car lot. Attendance at Santa Anita was bad even before covid-19. The graceful old track, now eighty-six, is smartly maintained, with striking semitropical gardens and life-size statues of Seabiscuit and Zenyatta. But only a handful of the old teller windows, which run for city blocks under the grandstand, are open on an ordinary racing day. In a dank, shadowy men’s room, I found the longest unbroken rank of urinals I’d ever seen, without a single shuffling patron. Away from the private suites and the reserved seating upstairs, the crowd is mostly working-class men, who periodically gather to stare up at banks of TVs in the bowels of the grandstand, even as beautiful horses gallop just outside in the sunshine. The TVs broadcast races from all over the country, even from Peru and Argentina, so it’s hard to tell who has bet on what. But the curses, many in Spanish and Chinese, that rise with the stretch runs and occasionally end with a triumphant hoot have the rhythm and ring of universal imprecations.
When Alexander was a kid, horse racing enjoyed a monopoly on legal gambling in nearly every part of America outside Las Vegas. Then, in 1978, the first casino opened in Atlantic City. More than a thousand casinos have opened since, many of them on Native American reservation land. State lotteries also boomed, siphoning off more of the gambler’s dollar. In the past two decades, the over-all national betting handle at racetracks has fallen by nearly fifty per cent. Dozens of tracks have closed. Racing is still a fifteen-billion-dollar industry, but the number of races and the size of the thoroughbred-foal crop are less than half what they were in 1990.
Some racetracks adapted by building casinos on their grounds—racinos—and many went to state legislatures for help. Racing commissions and legislatures were often old friends, and in many states a percentage of casino profits was directed to the tracks and the horse-breeding industry. Things went differently in California. Native American tribes have built sixty-nine casinos there, and the gaming lobby is often described as the state’s most powerful. Horse-racing subsidies did not come to pass. Racing has little cachet left in California. It’s been aeons since Bing Crosby and Spencer Tracy were track regulars and horse owners. Even Alex Trebek has left the building.
The terrible parade of dead horses at Santa Anita in 2019 drove the sport into an identity crisis, and not just in California. I heard it when I talked to horse people in Florida, Maryland, New York, and especially bluegrass Kentucky, the industry’s headquarters: the defensiveness, the virtue signalling, the pleas for understanding—but we love our horses. The opponents of racing seemed increasingly confident that it would soon go the way of circus elephants, dolphin shows, dog racing, all the discredited animal entertainments.
What went wrong at Santa Anita? The abolitionists liked to say it was just business as usual—horse torture and murder. The apologists said it was business as usual, too—racehorses have always died, even before bleeding-heart outsiders started paying attention. But it wasn’t business as usual. Horses were dying every single week. They were dying during workouts, during races, on turf and on dirt. Colts, fillies, geldings. Obscure claimers, first-time runners, a famous stakes winner during a workout. The deaths started to make the Los Angeles Times, and social media picked up the scent. More protesters appeared at the track. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals demanded that Newsom shut down Santa Anita. “Something is drastically wrong,” Art Sherman, a trainer in his eighties, told the Times. “I’ve been around a long time and have never seen this.”
In March, 2019, when the season’s death count hit twenty-one, the track’s owner, a Canadian conglomerate called the Stronach Group, halted racing for three weeks. The president, Belinda Stronach, released a public letter, “about the Future of Thoroughbred Racing in California.” The letter focussed almost entirely on drugs. “The Stronach Group will take the unprecedented step of declaring a zero tolerance for race day medication,” she wrote. Lasix and other meds, including anabolic steroids, would be banned at Santa Anita. This was a “paradigm shift”—never mind that anabolic steroids had been effectively banned a long time ago. The letter also addressed “the growing concern about use of the riding crop” and included an encomium from PETA, thanking Stronach for “standing up to all those who have used any means to force injured or unfit horses to run.” That meant trainers and owners, presumably, not her own executives.
Nick Alexander didn’t believe that the problem was Lasix, but he thought Stronach’s intervention was brilliant, in a way. “She didn’t know Lasix from a piece of gravel,” he told me, in early 2020. “But she shifted the focus away from the bad racetrack and onto the trainers who were sending out their horses. She changed the narrative, and it worked.” The first twenty-three horses who had died during the crisis of 2019 were undergoing necropsies at the University of California, Davis. The results had not yet been released, but Alexander said that he’d be surprised if they indicated any banned substances or excessive levels of permitted meds. A few weeks later, the results came out, and they showed no traces of anything chemically amiss.
Even if Lasix had nothing to do with catastrophic breakdowns, it represented, to many people, the abuses of American racing. Jeff Blea, a respected racetrack veterinarian who was a jockey until a bad spill forced a career change, believes that some horses need Lasix. “But the public doesn’t want horses medicated on race day,” he said. “So . . . we’ve got to maintain our social license to operate.” I thought that racing’s social license was probably already revoked, but this was one of the ambient ironies of its twilight predicament: the outrage about horse welfare was causing horse experts to think harder about public perception, even at the expense of horse welfare. Rick Arthur, another prominent veterinarian, said, “The fate of racing will be decided by people who’ve never been to the races, know nothing about horses, have probably never even touched a racehorse.”
“I’m the manure shoveller,” Nick Alexander says.
We’re hiking around his horse ranch, in the Santa Ynez Valley. He’s found a shovel near a hay barn and something to do with it. The valley is a wide saddle in the Coast Ranges north of Santa Barbara. The mountains are thick with chaparral and oaks, the valley full of vineyards and orchards and enough horse ranches to guarantee an adequate supply of equine veterinarians. That’s important, because Alexander’s life seems to revolve largely around vets. One of his horses has just had surgery. “Gabby Hayes, a huge two-year-old, had a big throat operation this morning for a stuck flap,” he says. “Four thousand five hundred dollars. Sure hope he can race.”
Alexander’s ranch is two hundred and eighty-five acres. Some of the land is in winter hay, now dark green. “Forage hay, it’s kind of a gamble. We need rain in the next ten days to get a decent crop.” He became a farmer out of necessity, he says. Getting feed delivered was too expensive. He grows his own oats. He also has alfalfa fields. “I’ll cut and bale that and sell the first cut to the cattle guys. Cows will eat anything. They got four stomachs. It’s too moist for horses.”
Alexander bought his first racehorse in 1978. “It was a distraction from the stress of running a dealership,” he says. “Once I started keeping mares, though, I had to get more educated.” Today, he has thirty-six broodmares and two stallions. His son runs the dealership. He has never raced outside California, but he did send one of his mares to Kentucky, to breed with a high-priced stallion named Arrogate. The resulting foal was disappointingly scrawny. “But his mama took right to him, talking to him immediately. She got him up on his feet, lifted up a leg to help him find a tit. She was so cute.”
Was raising horses less stressful than selling cars? Oh, yes. “You gotta make money three out of five years or the I.R.S. will bust you and call it a hobby. But we’ve always managed to stay ahead of that.” Alexander spends as much time at the ranch as possible. “Just working with horses is so satisfying,” he says. “They’re amazing animals. Charismatic, funny, brave. Crazy. It’s a long, arduous process, gaining their trust. But they’re right up there with dogs.”
It’s a cool, sunny February afternoon. Alexander checks in with his foreman, Frankie Rodriguez, who has been with him for sixteen years. They have a big barn full of mares in foal who need eyes on them at all times. Alexander, in an untucked old oxford shirt, sneakers, and a Dodgers cap, doesn’t cut a jefe del rancho figure. He does look like a guy who would shovel manure if needed.
At a pasture, three horses come to the fence to get their ears scratched. “Boys and girls can stay together as weanlings,” Alexander says. “Then they gotta be separated. Boys start coming into their testosterone, start picking fights. This group of boys here, new yearlings, they’re in a long, narrow field, see? So they can race each other, gallop as hard as they like.” The scene is peaceful, the yearlings handsome. “But they’re like teen-agers. One will do something to another one, they’ll start running, whole bunch will start rodeoing around, bucking and farting. They’re insane.” The hard work of breaking these colts to the saddle is still ahead. Then comes the training for racing.
Alexander gets a text with bad news. A filly, Alice Marble, stabled for a race at Santa Anita, is not well. “She’s got some fluid in one lung. It can go from a snotty nose to something serious really quickly. This sounds like pneumonia. We need to trailer her up to the clinic right now.” He texts instructions to his trainer, Phil D’Amato. “I love that horse. But this is a totally typical call. They never call about my slowest horse. It’s always my best horse, just before their first race.”
The fragility of horses is ubiquitous, not confined to the racetrack. “Something spooks them and they run, almost blindly,” Alexander says. “They can break a leg, get hung up on a fence. Their feet are delicate and problematic. Their digestive system tends to back up. A wad of hay gets stuck in their intestine. They can twist a bowel by rolling in the grass when they’re happy. You need to spot that and address it right away. They’re not rugged, like a cow.”
Alexander’s stallion Grazen, when not on duty, lives in his back yard. Grazen has sired most of his runners. He also “covers” outside mares, for six thousand dollars per live foal. “He’s like an annuity,” Alexander says. “He helps balance the books.” Like everyone else, Alexander obsesses over the breeding of his horses, sweating over how to make a fast horse that won’t break down. “You’re always puzzling about what would make a good cross—which mare, which stallion, which lines,” he says. “But then you’re always getting surprised. You’ll get a great horse out of a couple of nobodies.”
Every registered thoroughbred in the world is descended from one of three stallions: the Byerly Turk, the Darley Arabian, and the Godolphin Arabian. These “foundation sires” came to England from the Middle East around the turn of the eighteenth century, and their offspring turned out to have an unprecedented combination of speed, agility, and endurance. Thoroughbred racing was born. Of course, people have been racing horses since shortly after they were domesticated, which is thought to have occurred about six thousand years ago. How shortly? My guess is a week. They started cheating, by my guess, a week after that.
The Romans, according to the veterinarian and scholar A. J. Higgins, used a mixture called hydromel to increase their horses’ endurance. The punishment for cheating in races was reportedly crucifixion. A British prohibition on “exciting substances and methods” is said to have been introduced in 1666. A stable lad named Daniel Dawson, accused of poisoning a racehorse, was hanged on Newmarket Heath in 1812. Once thoroughbred racing crossed the Atlantic, the United States gained a reputation for the innovative use of performance aids: cocaine, heroin, strychnine, caffeine.
In 1897, the Jockey Club, the breed registry for thoroughbreds in North America, sought to “put an end to the reprehensible practice of ‘doping.’ ” The concern seemed to be less about damage to horses than about unfairness to bettors and owners. California banned wagering on racing in 1909, again not to promote horse welfare but to stamp out the attendant criminal element. The state lifted the ban only after a ballot measure passed in 1933. Santa Anita opened the next year. There are, of course, many more ways to fix a race than by juicing a horse. In England, a successful doping ring in the nineteen-sixties would bribe its way into barns and “nobble” a favorite, make it sick or woozy, and then bet heavily against it. At a 1972 congressional hearing, an ex-mobster testified that he had controlled many jockeys, who could be persuaded to lose races they were expected to win.
The advent of modern medications confused the doping picture. Powerful painkillers and anti-inflammatories designed for humans bled over, as it were, into race preparation. That was not good for horses, who might run because they could not feel the soreness warning them not to. Antipsychotics, anti-epilepsy products, growth hormones, blood doping—racing officialdom couldn’t keep up with the new drugs, and lacked the testing capacity to detect many of them. Penalties for broken rules were generally weak. A trainer punished for a dirty test in one jurisdiction could simply move to the next. In 2008, the trainer of a horse called Big Brown, who won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, boasted publicly about the powerful legal steroid that his superstar was getting. Big Brown’s fix was withheld before the Belmont Stakes. He finished dead last.
A backlash against drugs led to the founding, in 2012, of the Water Hay Oats Alliance, a group of industry insiders that advocated for a single national regulatory body and a ban on performance-enhancing drugs. The alliance, known as WHOA, grew to eighteen hundred members, and the legislation it supported slowly gathered sponsors in Congress. The era of permissive medication seemed to be waning.
Not that people ever stop looking for an edge. Every racing publication carries advertisements for supplements and gizmos to make your horse go faster. After this month’s Kentucky Derby, the winner, Medina Spirit, failed a drug test. His trainer, Bob Baffert, the most successful trainer of the modern era, has had horses fail tests thirty times. He always denies wrongdoing, and has been only lightly sanctioned. Inside the murky precincts of racing, the investigations and the appeals often drag on for months, and never come to a real resolution.
But, in March, 2020, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York indicted twenty-seven people for their roles in an alleged large-scale doping operation. The F.B.I. had tapped the phones of the principals and recorded several years’ worth of talk about how to get away with doping.
The indicted included two prominent thoroughbred trainers, Jorge Navarro and Jason Servis. Navarro and Servis had dominated racing at Monmouth Park, in New Jersey, and then began to compete successfully at higher levels. A Servis-trained horse, Maximum Security, had just won the Saudi Cup, the richest race in the world, and had come in first at the 2019 Kentucky Derby, though stewards later disqualified him for interference coming into the stretch. Navarro had earned the nickname Juice Man, and had been fined in New Jersey for conduct “extremely detrimental to racing.”
So far, three of the accused—suppliers of dubious and mislabelled performance-enhancing drugs—have pleaded guilty. Navarro and Servis, along with many others, have pleaded not guilty, and nobody has gone to trial. But transcripts of the recordings quoted by the prosecution are stomach-turning. One of the accused refers to the effects of Navarro’s drugging: “You know how much trouble he could get in . . . if they found out . . . the six horses we killed?” Indeed, two months before Navarro’s arrest, his horse X Y Jet, who had won more than three million dollars in twenty-six races, dropped dead of an apparent heart attack in Florida. Afterward, Navarro released an emotional statement: “I do not say goodbye to a horse, I say goodbye to a friend that I will carry forever in my heart.”
Sports doping is a live issue everywhere. Here comes the Russian Olympic team. There goes Robinson Canó. But doping animals is different. There is no fat contract and no consent. To critics, horse racing isn’t even a sport.
Patrick Battuello, who runs the activist group Horseracing Wrongs, calls the idea of racing-as-sport “the Big Lie.” Its athletes are drugged, whipped, trained and raced too young, pushed to the breaking point and beyond; though they’re social animals, they spend most of their work lives in solitary confinement in a stall. Among those not killed by racing, a great many—PETA estimates ten thousand American thoroughbreds annually—will ultimately be slaughtered, nearly all of them in Canada and Mexico. Q.E.D.
Peter Singer, the Australian philosopher who wrote the founding text of the modern animal-rights movement, “Animal Liberation,” in 1975, attacks animal ownership itself. “If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans?” he asks. Sentient beings should not be treated as commodities. Singer compares speciesism to sexism and racism—they are all the same mechanism, the same self-serving delusion of superiority.
There is a broader abolitionist movement, opposing “animal slavery,” meaning livestock and pets. Battuello, in a column, put the pet part succinctly: “Adopt, don’t buy. The ultimate solution, however, is sterilize to extinction. A petless society is compassionate. A petless society is rational. A petless society is progress.” He advocated the same approach, “sterilize to extinction,” for racehorses—thoroughbreds, quarter horses, standardbreds, “and everything in between.”
It is speciesist to ride a horse, to perpetuate the property status of animals. Animal-rights abolitionists look for inspiration to the methods and the eventual success of classical abolitionism in destroying chattel slavery. They are on thin ethical ice when they equate human beings and draft animals, just as they are when comparing the livestock industry to the Holocaust. But, in the nineteenth century, the movement to end cruelty to animals was on a parallel track to the abolitionist movement, with some of the same players. And it was met with incredulity, much as anti-slavery sentiment was in the American South.
Today’s abolitionists tend to scorn “welfarists”—reformers whose goals are incremental, basically meant to produce a “happy slave.” When PETA works with the horse industry to reduce whipping, the harder-line activists consider it contemptible appeasement. Battuello maintains a database of racehorse deaths, filing Freedom of Information Act requests with state racing commissions to come up with figures far higher than the Jockey Club’s. He counts training breakdowns and stall deaths, and estimates that more than two thousand racehorses are killed—they don’t die, they are killed—each year in this country, all for, as he puts it, “two-dollar bets.” Racing people are not having an identity crisis, he told me: “They know exactly what they are. They’re animal exploitation.”
Nick Alexander’s wife, Mary, doesn’t come to the ranch much. “She prefers town,” he says. It’s an old theme in their fifty-two-year marriage. When their children were small, they moved to rural Northern California, to a place called Boonville. Nick got a job shearing sheep. “I loved it. But I used to come home with my pants all covered with sheep barf, green stuff, black stuff, lanolin, blood from castrations. I wasn’t really all that welcome.” He laughs. Mary, at home with the kids, saw their children’s futures writ in the local poverty and isolation. She informed Nick that she and the kids were going back to Los Angeles. Nick, though sad to leave, followed, and returned to selling cars.
“I have this recurring nightmare,” he told me. He’s back in the Army, stuck on base. “Everybody’s got a weekend pass but me. Mary’s got the same nightmare, but she’s stuck in Boonville.”
The Alexanders’ ranch house sits at the end of a magnolia-lined drive, near several enormous live oaks, which have been there since before California was claimed by the United States. The house’s big front room has a potbellied stove, a row of filing cabinets, lots of books and magazines and Persian rugs. There’s a framed photograph of Alexander with his grandkids at a Dodgers game, and another of his daughter riding in a show-jumping event. And horses, racing thoroughbreds, everywhere, on all the walls. Here’s Sunday Rules, an Alexander horse, winning the Kalookan Queen Stakes. Here’s one of Alexander’s favorites, Pee Wee Reese, winning a stakes race at Santa Anita, beating a horse named Eddie Haskell. There’s . . . Moose Skowron? “Never name a racehorse after a slow first baseman,” Alexander says. “That’s the only race he ever won.”
Alexander lost one horse in 2019 at Santa Anita, a three-year-old named Satchel Paige. He blamed the track surface. “There’s no spring to it,” he said. “A horse’s leg works like a big spring. The flexor tendon on the back stretches and then rebounds. That’s what lets a horse run far and fast.” Satchel Paige had not broken his maiden—had not yet won a race—when he died. “You can’t relax if your horses are at Santa Anita,” Alexander said, at his kitchen table. “You just live in fear, waiting for a phone call, every time they go out to work.” He raised his hands, a helpless gesture.
Trainers fixate on track conditions, a complex interplay of surface, weather, and horse anatomy. Overly soft tracks cause damage to soft tissues. Overly hard ones cause microfractures in the many bones below the hock, which sometimes heal and sometimes, as with Mongolian Groom, burst into injuries that a horse can’t survive. Alexander had been thinking about stabling his horses at Los Alamitos, a minor track near Long Beach. It was no Santa Anita, but the surface was better. “The horses come back from workouts bouncing,” he said. “At Santa Anita these days, they come back panting.” He could ship them across town for races. Take the whole string down to Del Mar for the summer meet.
When Stronach released the letter about what went wrong at Santa Anita, there was only one sentence about track conditions. But many of the trainers and owners I talked to contended that the track was a huge part of the problem. Everyone agrees that it started with the weather. California suffered a megadrought, beginning in 2011, that included the driest years in state history. The drought finally ended in early 2019, when Pacific storms dumped eighteen inches of rain on Southern California in two months. Rain alone, a sloppy track, is not necessarily dangerous for racing. But this was more rain than Santa Anita almost ever sees. Alexander said, “If we get half an inch, we can deal with it. We’d see rain coming, seal the track. Half a day later, unseal, harrow, and we’re off.” Sealing a track means compacting its upper layer with rollers or with heavy plates called floats, pulled by tractors. Sealing prevents the surface from absorbing moisture, or, if it’s already wet, squeezes some of it out. “The problem is, if you seal a track every night, you eventually get a track that’s unforgiving,” Alexander said. That was basically what happened at Santa Anita. Stronach had recently appointed new management, and a veteran track superintendent had left. At one point, the track was sealed nine days in a row. “The preponderance of horses got hurt right where the tractors make U-turns, at the head of the lane,” Alexander said.
In 2007, after an earlier outcry about horse deaths, state officials ordered Santa Anita and others to install synthetic track. Breakdown rates plummeted, by more than a third. But the jockeys didn’t like synthetic—they said that falls on it were more dangerous—and neither did many trainers. Nor did owners whose goal in life was to win the Kentucky Derby, which was always going to be run on dirt. Santa Anita’s first synthetic track didn’t drain properly, and its replacement wasn’t much better. Within a few years, Santa Anita had gone back to dirt.
Alexander could see Stronach’s corporate perspective. “We’re an underperforming asset,” he said. “They came in here with a model developed at their Eastern tracks. They make money running a lot of races with really big fields. But it wasn’t going to work here, and then the rain ruined the track, and they decided to keep going anyway.”
Frank Stronach, a horse-mad billionaire from Toronto, bought Santa Anita in 1998, after making a fortune in auto parts. He also bought Golden Gate Fields, in the Bay Area, and two major tracks in Maryland, Pimlico and Laurel Park, as well as Gulfstream Park, in Florida. Stronach absolutely shovelled money into racing. He started a breeding farm in Kentucky, with branches in Canada and Florida, raced his own horses, won the Preakness and the Belmont. He tore down the grandstand at Gulfstream Park and turned the place into a racino. He bought and sold smaller tracks, becoming the biggest owner of racetracks in North America. He even bought a company that builds and runs the tote boards that display betting odds at tracks worldwide, as well as a major platform for wagering online and by phone. Then he steamed off to Austria, where his family was from, and in 2012 started a political party, dedicated to the ideals of classical liberalism, plus a renunciation of the euro. Because saving Austria from the welfare state was a full-time job, he handed the reins of the Stronach Group to his daughter, Belinda.
Belinda Stronach was a former Canadian M.P., with experience in the family auto-parts business and no known affection for horse racing. But, when Frank returned from his adventure in Austrian politics, she declined to hand the reins back to him. He sued her and her allies for some five hundred million dollars, claiming that they had stolen the company out from under him. She countersued, pouring scorn on his money-losing “passion projects,” which mostly meant his horse-related investments. They and their lawyers were still in court when the manure hit the fan at Santa Anita.
There had been speculation that the Stronach Group, with Frank no longer in charge, would start shedding some of its equine interests. Instead, Belinda leaned into them. Stronach sent Tim Ritvo, an executive known for knocking heads, to Gulfstream, where he helped turn a middling business into an extremely profitable one, running enormous numbers of horses. He went on to Maryland, where Stronach owned the dilapidated Pimlico Race Course, the home of the Preakness Stakes. After years of neglecting Pimlico, the company wanted to move the Preakness to Laurel Park, a track in the suburbs. Baltimore officials were aghast at losing the race, which has been running since 1873, and the state ultimately agreed to invest nearly four hundred million dollars in Pimlico and Laurel Park. Stronach committed to leaving the Preakness where it was, having offloaded the risk onto the State of Maryland.
Then Stronach sent Ritvo to Santa Anita, with an assignment to make the fabled track more profitable. Ritvo put another Stronach executive, P. J. Campo, in the racing office in late 2018. Campo had a history. Seven years before, he had been the racing secretary at Aqueduct, the track in Queens. A casino had just opened there, and race purses had been increased. Fields got bigger—there was more money for owners to win, and thus perhaps more tolerance for risk, and certainly more profit to the track—and more horses, predictably, started breaking down. Twenty-one horses died in three months. Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered an investigation and ended up seizing control of the New York Racing Association, which operates Aqueduct. A task force he appointed produced a report that cited an “inappropriate dynamic” between the racing office and track veterinarians, who sometimes wanted to scratch an injured horse but were overruled. Stronach hired Campo not long after these events. (Campo declined to comment for this story.)
At Santa Anita, the plan was to run as many races as possible, with fields as large as possible. If trainers didn’t want to run their horses, to help fill out the race card, they might have to forfeit their stalls at the track. Veterinarians inclined to scratch horses they considered unfit would have to deal with pressure from the racing office. The plan did not reckon with the shortage of race-ready horses in California. It did not anticipate a winter of unusual rain.
Five weeks into the season, with a dozen racehorses already dead, a Santa Anita trainer publicly complained that she’d had trouble scratching a horse when she considered the track unsafe. Tim Ritvo told the racing magazine BloodHorse, “I don’t want to hear the track is unsafe, because that’s untrue. We wouldn’t run if the track was unsafe.” In the next three weeks, five horses died. Then two more suffered catastrophic breakdowns within minutes of each other, during a morning workout on the main dirt track, which had recently been sealed. One of them was Just Forget It, trained by Librado Barocio. Barocio was distraught. He’d had another horse die at Santa Anita earlier that month, while racing on a track that had been sealed for three straight days. He told state investigators that he was “always afraid of a sealed track.” Soon afterward, he quit training and sold the horses he owned. “I was afraid that I might lose another horse,” he told me. Ritvo, who has since left Stronach, could not be reached for comment.
“I think he’s going to be a gray,” Nick Alexander said. “There’s a little bit of gray on his legs.”
It was 2 a.m. Alexander was crouched beside a newborn foal sprawled on bloody hay, gently stroking his lower legs. The newborn’s legs were impossibly long. He looked jet black to me, but he was still bloody and wet. His mother, one Miranda Rose, was slowly licking him clean. He had a great white blaze down the center of his face, and he looked both exhausted and intensely curious. His mother paced the spacious birthing stall, working off the pains of parturition, with half the placenta, neatly tied up by an attending stable hand, still hanging out of her. A dark bay, she had been a pretty good runner in her day, mainly at Golden Gate Fields. Her grandfather was a dashing Chilean, who had come north mid-career and immediately won the Santa Anita Handicap, back when that was a major race. This boy’s father was the sturdy Grazen, who was gray, and whose offspring also tended to end up gray.
The foal, who wouldn’t be named for a year or more, began struggling to stand. Alexander got out of the way. The project looked unlikely, if only because of the ludicrous length of the baby’s legs, but his mother encouraged him. Horses usually give birth in the middle of the night, which makes sense, since that’s when they are less likely to be disturbed by predators. But foals need to be able to move with the herd at daybreak. Hence the rush to find his feet. After a few flops and crashes, he somehow stood, and was soon staggering around the stall behind his mother.
People in horse racing, like Alexander, share the goal of winning races, and some pursue it at the horses’ expense. But all of them are close to the animals, in a way their critics rarely are. Meetings of the California Horse Racing Board, which are open to the public, had become a nightmare for horsemen, Alexander told me. Animal-rights activists dominated the public-comment period, giving speeches. They had a lot to say about how the horses suffered, although they never seemed to know much about horses. It was tempting to direct their attention to the beef and pork and chicken industries, if animal suffering was their main concern.
In racing, the tolerance for death and suffering is less than it used to be. Gregory Ferraro, the chairman of the California Horse Racing Board, began working as an equine veterinarian in 1971. “I started at Del Mar,” he told me—a jewel-box seaside track north of San Diego. “They used to put horses down in the parking lot. Just leave them there, people walking by, till the knacker man would show up and haul them away. I said no. We built an enclosure.” Still, Del Mar draws animal-rights protesters virtually every day during its summertime meet.
The old normal wasn’t confined to racetracks. In 1880, New York City had fifteen thousand horse corpses a year, lying in its streets waiting to be taken away. Ferraro has seen brutal veterinary practices—blistering, which is as it sounds, and the firing iron—vanish or become rare. Some chronic conditions have improved. “Slab fractures in the third carpal bone were a major problem,” he said. “But, once we figured out how to take an X-ray from up above a flexed knee, we could see things we never saw before. That was the late seventies, and we got those slab fractures down eighty to eighty-five per cent. We should be able to do the same with fetlock injuries.”
The biggest thing most racehorses need is rest, but prescribing rest is unpopular among trainers and unprofitable for vets. “You only get paid for treatments, for meds, which is all wrong,” Ferraro said. “A lot of trainers won’t accept a prescription of five days’ rest—‘You don’t care about my horse. I’ll get a different vet.’ ” Trainers, of course, answer to owners. “Some owners are impatient. They want success. If they have a three-year-old, they want to win the Derby.”
Racehorse ownership has undergone a sea change. When I asked Mike Smith—Big Money Mike, perhaps the most renowned jockey of the past few decades—what had changed during his career, he said, “Owners. Used to be one big guy you were riding for. Now it’s syndicates.” Syndicates are partnerships that allow investors to own a piece of a racehorse, often divvying up the shares among hundreds of people. They were unheard of a few decades ago, but now they seem to be everywhere, and their prevalence has strengthened the industry’s bottom line. Racehorse ownership has been somewhat democratized. (There are “microshares” that go for a hundred dollars a year.) The stereotypical impatient owner these days is not some toffee-nosed plutocrat but a clueless hedge funder demanding a Kentucky Derby winner, of which he might own half a hoof.
Perhaps more important to racing’s bottom line, however, have been the extraordinary investments in breeding farms and racing stables by Saudi royals, and, especially, by the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. These investments have been in Ireland, England, Europe, Australia, and Japan in addition to the United States, and have lately extended to hosting races that offer the largest purses in the world—the Saudi Cup pays twenty million dollars. Sheikh Mohammed’s operation, called Godolphin, has a couple of stunning horse farms in Kentucky. He has yet to win the Derby, though not for want of trying. Another Muslim potentate, the Aga Khan, is among the largest thoroughbred breeders and owners in France, where racing remains super populaire. His great-grandfather, also known as the Aga Khan, reportedly kept an excellent stable in nineteenth-century Bombay.
Sheikh Mohammed presented the racing world with a reputational dilemma last year. A high court in London found that he had conducted a campaign of intimidation against his sixth wife, who had fled to Britain with their two children, and that he had abducted two grown daughters from an earlier marriage, allegedly torturing one of them. Sheikh Mohammed says that the abductions were search-and-rescue missions. One of the daughters, who was taken off the street in Cambridge, has not been seen since 2000. The two women are now, at best, detained under unknown circumstances in Dubai. In the United States, Sheikh Mohammed is a member in good standing of the Jockey Club, which is by invitation only and has strict rules against cruelty to horses.
The movement to abolish horse racing—its cultural indictment as animal slavery—has been gaining momentum, particularly on social media, for years. In the U.S., things seemed to reach a breaking point with the front-page bust of Jorge Navarro, Jason Servis, and their twenty-five indicted confederates in the East Coast doping ring. The Washington Post ran an editorial that advocated abolition now. “No other accepted sport exploits defenseless animals as gambling chips,” the editors wrote. “No other accepted sport tolerates the cruelties that routinely result in the injury and death of these magnificent animals. The rot in horse racing goes deep. It is a sport that has outlived its time.”
By the second week of March, 2020, the racing industry seemed to be reeling, indefensible. By the end of that week, however, we were in a new epoch, rung in by the thunderous bell of Covid-19. Racing disappeared from the headlines. People, those speciesists, were worried about people now.
Many racetracks were shut by the pandemic. Santa Anita kept running till late March: no live fans, the jockeys living in trailers in the parking lot. Then Los Angeles County closed the track as a nonessential business, whereupon Stronach argued that, with seventeen hundred horses in stables and seven hundred people living there to care for them, the facility simply could not sit still. The horses needed daily exercise. By mid-May, the races were back on. Horse fatalities were relatively low for the year—less than half their terrible 2019 totals—and the handle, strangely, was up. Horsemen seemed happier. Aidan Butler, who replaced Tim Ritvo, told me that the old system, in which racetrack management unilaterally decided when to run, had been “antiquated.” His team was consulting with trainers and owners on all such decisions.
Thoroughbred racing generally was having a good pandemic. TVG, an all-racing channel included in many sports cable packages, found enough live racing to run 24/7—the overnights were filled by races in Japan, Hong Kong, Australia. In the U.S., with major sports leagues suspended, horse racing found a wave of new fans, all presumably locked down in front of their TV sets, where ESPN had been reduced to broadcasting cup stacking, cherry-pit spitting, and old World Series games. TVG began to provide a newcomer’s glossary of racing terms—“tout,” “weanling,” “sloppy.” First-time gamblers were offered three hundred dollars for a risk-free bet.
As sports nearly everywhere disappeared, people were betting on anything that moved. Soccer in Belarus, table tennis in Ukraine, the weather at O’Hare. Organized crime staged “ghost games” in Ukraine—a soccer tournament that never actually happened, brought to you by either the Turkish mob or one from Belarus. The level of match-fixing was infinite, and basically everybody lost. Next to this sort of shadiness, a race at Will Rogers Downs, outside Tulsa, looked wholesome.
American horse racing was bolstered by the big bettors, known as “the whales,” who came back to the game in the summer. The whales are not obese billionaires sprawled on yachts, as I originally thought, but serried ranks of high-octane computers, operated by individuals who know nothing about horses but everything about betting. They bet on high-payoff combinations like trifectas and pick-sixes, and with the rebates they get from tracks, along with the exclusive access they reportedly get to the details of the existing pool bets, they are able to analyze and exploit all the inefficiencies. The most successful known whales of this type belong to the Elite Turf Club, which apparently has only twelve members and is based in Curaçao. The Stronach Group is the club’s majority owner, which suggests that the company is on both sides of the deal. Win-win. Stronach has taken to describing itself as “a world-class technology, entertainment and real estate development company with Thoroughbred racing and pari-mutuel wagering at the core.” Belinda Stronach, whose legal battle with her father was finally settled in August, leaving her in charge, says she is determined to modernize what she calls “the last great sporting legacy platform.”
The Water Hay Oats Alliance had its dream come true in 2020: legislation passed that will establish a national regulatory body, under the aegis of the United States Anti-Doping Agency. For nearly a decade, the biggest holdout in the industry was Churchill Downs, Inc. C.D.I., despite its ownership of the famous track, makes most of its money from gaming and casinos, and its strategists apparently did not see a profit in cleaning up racing with the help of the federal government. In 2020, C.D.I., whose major shareholders include some very generous patrons of Mitch McConnell, signalled its allies, and suddenly the legislation was tucked into the year-end omnibus spending bill. What changed? My theory is that even the most hardheaded moneymen in racing began to worry. The new authority is scheduled to start work in July, 2022. The hope is that the U.S. may then finally move closer to Europe and other venues in basic horse-racing safety.
But racing is a creaky old pastime here, with few young fans. It feels like something left behind by an earlier America, a relic of the agricultural past. It assumes a relationship with horses rooted in the ancient projects of pre-modern war, transport, work, and play. It attracts old money, new money, dynastic money, even some smart money (the techies of the Elite Turf Club), but it has long depended on the common gambler, and thus been soaked in all the grift and sorrow that come with gambling. Grift at the level of the Kentucky Derby, and the trainer Bob Baffert’s career of breezy impunity, only deepen its disrepute among the general public. The governor of Pennsylvania has been talking about slashing his state’s huge subsidies to horse racing and diverting the funds to education.
In California, where alligator shoes have been banned and a ballot measure to improve the lives of farm animals passed by a huge margin, the future of horse racing is hard to see. But the state’s Native American gambling juggernaut has a new ballot measure in the works for 2022. It proposes to confine the next wave of gaming, “sports betting,” to its casinos and approved racetracks, meaning Santa Anita, Del Mar, Golden Gate Fields, and Los Alamitos. Why voters would approve the measure is an open question. Why the casinos, with their deep pockets, would extend this proposal to the tracks is another. When it was put to the outgoing chairman of the California Nations Indian Gaming Association, Steve Stallings, he said that he thought the racetracks “need some shoring up to stay competitive.” They do.
Alexander left his ranch for the track early one morning, driving a BMW sedan that his son had loaned him from the lot. There was patchy fog in the fields, no traffic on 154. Santa Ynez slipped past on the right. The town’s claim to fame these days was the Chumash Casino Resort: twelve stories, the tallest building in the valley by far. The Chumash were the indigenous people of the region—Malibu was from a Chumash word—but there were few tribe members left, and their language was lost. The Santa Ynez Band had a tiny reservation, but enough land for the casino and its parking lots. Before the pandemic, they bused in gamblers from nearby farm towns—Paso Robles, Santa Maria, Lompoc (another Chumash word). Most were working-class Latinos. Alexander was grateful that none of his ranch hands had become casino regulars.
The road climbed out of the fog into morning sunshine, then past the sandstone outcrops of San Marcos Pass. At the pass, there was suddenly an extravagant view: the ocean, the Channel Islands, the city of Santa Barbara below, the long coast south, and a series of transverse mountain ranges running off to the southeast. Down past all those mountains, at the base of the San Gabriel Range, was Santa Anita.
Alexander was thinking about Alice Marble and her breathing problems. She would probably miss both of the stakes races that he had planned to put her in this meet. He just hoped that was all.
Alexander did move his horses to Los Alamitos, but he kept racing at Santa Anita. He had a horse in the fourth today, a son of Grazen whom he had named George Herman Ruth, after some old-time ballplayer. Young Ruth had been hapless in his début, finishing a distant eighth out of nine. But that race had been only five and a half furlongs, and today’s was eight. It could be that he just needed more room to lengthen his stride. “I think he’s a two-turn horse,” Alexander said, hopefully.
Ruth would be running on race-day Lasix. Santa Anita had still not banished it, despite Belinda Stronach’s letter announcing a ban the previous March. Because Alexander was the chairman of the Thoroughbred Owners of California, he had been in subsequent negotiations with Stronach over Lasix and other meds. The sides compromised on a phased-in ban of Lasix, with older horses getting a reduced dose and the next crop of two-year-olds getting none at all. Alexander was not pleased. “Lasix is a therapeutic medication, not a drug,” he said. “It lowers blood pressure. Somewhere along the line, I guess, we’ve bred them into being bleeders. But without Lasix I think many of my horses just won’t run. I’d sure rather give them a shot of Lasix than deprive them of water. That’s cruel.”
Despite their differences, Alexander is not basically hostile toward Belinda Stronach. They at least have the same goal—to keep racing viable, and to make it safer for the horses. “I think having all the extra vets has been good,” he said. “And it’s really to Belinda’s credit that they’re spending five hundred thousand on this big fancy new standing X-ray machine. That’s going to save a lot of horses.” Still, he didn’t like the track surface.
We were zipping past Ventura on Highway 101.
“101 or 126?”
126 went up the Santa Clara River valley. Not the direct route. “It’s still little Mexican family farms. Old California. Nobody’s bought them out, and they can’t build casinos.”
We took 101. I asked Alexander if he was worried that opponents of racing might get the sport’s future on the ballot in a statewide referendum. He was not, he said. At least not yet. Getting on the ballot was expensive. You needed more than half a million signatures to start. What did worry him was that the Governor would stack the California Horse Racing Board with his “minions,” putting himself in a position to shut down racing. Newsom was erratic, reactive, politically thin-skinned.
George Herman Ruth was a big gray colt with a sharp eye. He was calm in the paddock but had his head up and turning as if he had somewhere to be. His trainer, Phil D’Amato, a beefy tan guy with a racing program sticking out of a pocket, saddled Ruth and gave Alexander a quiet thumbs-up. The oddsmakers were sending Ruth off at 10–1. That was good. Abel Cedillo, the jockey, swung aboard in the walking ring. Mary Alexander was there, all smiles. This was the fun part. Nick hurried off to a betting window. He had a stack of cash to bet for the guys on the ranch who liked this horse. The track was turf, listed as firm.
Ruth broke well and took a place in the middle of the pack, running easily. On the first turn and the backstretch, Cedillo kept him within two, three lengths of the lead. Then, on the far turn, Ruth and Cedillo swung wide, running three deep. The pack seemed to drift out, and they had to swerve wider, now four deep, to find a clear lane. This was the hard way, more ground to cover, but Ruth didn’t falter. He began to gain ground rapidly at the top of the stretch, with Cedillo whipping non-stop. Slipping back inside, they edged ahead of a gelding called Tropical Terror, and Ruth took the lead. The outcome was uncertain, at least to my eye, until the last few strides. But Ruth crossed the finish line first, and it felt like you could hear the vatos cheering all the way up in Santa Ynez. ♦
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the Laurel Park racetrack and misstated the year that the Stronach Group halted racing at Santa Anita.
