Running on Rubber

It was like a scene from a movie, but it wasn't the inspirational Seabiscuit story the horse-racing industry has been pining for. Only seconds after the finish of Saturday's Kentucky Derby, while hundreds of thousands of fans were still cheering on winner Big Brown, runner-up Eight Belles crumpled to the ground, felled by two broken front ankles. The three-year-old filly was euthanized on the spot. In the absence of jostling or existing medical problems, Eight Belles's sudden fall has left experts and spectators alike wondering how such a bone-splintering injury could have happened.

"The difficult thing to explain with her is it's so far after the wire, and she was easing down like you'd like to see a horse slow down by that point. I don't have an explanation for it," Dr. Larry Bramlage, the on-call veterinarian, told the Associated Press after the fall.

Between Eight Belles and Barbaro, the beloved Kentucky Derby winner euthanized last year due to complications from an injury sustained during the 2006 Preakness Stakes, two celebrated horses have now suffered fatal injuries on live television in Triple Crown races since 2006. As a result, questions about the sport's current breeding practices, training styles, and racetrack surfaces are bubbling up anew.

American horse races are largely run on dirt tracks—the safety of which is a subject of considerable debate. But a growing number of track owners are switching over to synthetic surfaces such as Polytrack, a blend of silica sand, rubber, and wax that is being used on tracks around the world, ostensibly to cut down on accidents. Kentucky's Turfway Park became the first American track to make the switch, adopting synthetics in September 2005. And the California Horse Racing Board mandated in 2006 that all major tracks in the state change over before 2008.

Critics say the synthetic surface levels the playing field too much, making the sport too predictable. Washington Post horse-racing columnist Andrew Beyer has slammed races held on Polytrack as "boringly homogenized." And some, like Bramlage, have doubts that the forces on a horse's legs would be any different on an artificial surface than on dirt.

"The quality of this year's Derby crop is just a transitory disappointment, but the prep races have undergone what may be a permanent change for the worse. The major reason has been the installation of synthetic surfaces at the sites of significant 3-year-old stakes—Santa Anita, Turfway Park and particularly Keeneland. Almost everyone agrees that synthetic surfaces and dirt are two different games, and that a horse is unlikely to display the same level of ability on both surfaces," Beyer wrote on April 15, just weeks before Eight Belles's fall.