Horse racing is one of the world’s oldest sports and has evolved from a primitive contest of speed or stamina to a spectacle featuring vast fields of runners, sophisticated electronic monitoring equipment, and enormous sums of money. Yet its essential feature remains the same: The horse that crosses the finish line first is the winner.
The home stretch of a horse race is the last tiring section of track before the horses reach the finish line. This section is often compared to the end of a marathon, when athletes are close to exhaustion but can still feel that surge of energy that will get them over the finish line.
A home stretch may also refer to a period in an election cycle when the candidates are jockeying for position and trying to gain an advantage over their opponents. It may also be used to describe the final part of a competition where a team is trying to score points or a player is competing for a championship.
Until recently, the sport of horse racing was held to be above reproach. In recent years, however, it has been stung by allegations of drugs and illegal gambling. In addition, the industry has lost its luster as horse owners and race fans have come to realize that the horses are not treated with the utmost care and respect.
The sport is facing a crisis that must be dealt with if it wants to survive. It is time for a profound ideological reckoning at the macro business and industry level that prioritizes the welfare of the horses from breeding to aftercare. This must include a major restructuring of the industry’s for-profit business model and a commitment to a humane, equine-friendly lifestyle for racehorses.
While donations by industry folks and gamblers are necessary, they do not cancel out participation in the ongoing, sometimes deadly, exploitation of younger running horses who will eventually rely on those donations too. It is also time to stop allowing trainers to over-medicate and over-train horses, leading to their demise on the track or at auction where they are destined to be sold for slaughter.
It is time to make some difficult, expensive, but necessary changes if horse racing is going to survive. Eight Belles, Medina Spirit, Keepthename, Creative Plan, and thousands of other horses deserve a better future than the one they were promised.