Continued . . .
As if they flipped a switch, U.S. racing authorities changed how they describe racing action on platforms (like Equibase) and in injury/fatality reports. Someone issued a directive, and in lockstep everyone complied.
Familiar, abbreviated industry terms morphed into “fluff” sentences — wordy but saying little — with the same reluctance in certain jurisdictions to report fatalities, substantially or at all. For example, van became “equine ambulance”; and vanned off became “the horse was loaded onto the equine ambulance and removed from the track for further evaluation” or “the horse required the assistance of the equine ambulance” or (the worst) “the horse left the track in the equine ambulance”!
The switch began in 2024, the same year that AI spread like wildfire. Is it AI? Or is it just humans trying to impress or placate the public with more words; control the narrative; appear more intelligent, consistent, or informative? Or what?
We acknowledge that some platforms and authorities outside the United States are just as opaque — for example, France, which flies under the radar all the time. And here’s how the Australian site Racenet reports its career-ending fatalities: “Virvacity has concluded its racing career, last running on 7 Apr 2012 at Oakbank.”
Who cares? What difference does it make? Well, when you track horses for many years you see every trick in the book used to avoid straightforward reporting about injuries/fatalities, and it gets old. Such avoidance and/or inability to keep up with all the deaths is why most horses go unreported, thus shielding from public view the extent of wastage in the horseracing industry. And that’s why a growing number of death-watches and memorials for the horses have emerged to fill in the gaps and bring truth to light.
Since the dawn of horseracing, results have been presented with industry lingo that people can understand — without authorities insulting our intelligence. Today, we continue to check reports for substance, not fluff.
