Horse Training Success

There they go again. Those Thoroughbreds and their 'freak accidents'. The Caulfield Cup is the lead-up race to the Melbourne Cup, the 'race that stops the nation'. The race that Melbourne has a public holiday to watch. Truly!

So what happened at the start of the Caulfield Cup to the favorite?
From 'The Age':

"The noise Maldivian made when he struck the stalls caused second favourite Eskimo Queen to lunge at the gates, slip to the ground and become caught under the stalls. She was also withdrawn."

Maldivian reared in the confusion and struck his neck on the barrier.

"...highly fancied Caulfield Cup favourite, Maldivian, was left gashed and bloodied just moments before the race's start... Maldivian... was taken from the barriers with blood pouring out of the 15-centimetre cut high on his neck. It needed up to 14 stitches."

Back to the subject of horse racing and freak accidents. Although I wasn't able to dig up any figures on the freaky ones, there is enough data about on the 'regular' ones to be rather worrying.

From Wikipedia:
"Current estimates indicate that there are 1.5 career-ending breakdowns for every 1000 horses starting a race in the United States, an average of two horses per day. The state of California reported a particularly high rate of injury; 3.5 per 1000 starts. As a ratio (of injuries with eventually fatal complications to total competitions), this is far in excess of all other legal human and animal sports, including boxing, motorsports and greyhound racing."

And from this study:
"As anticipated, the type of race had a big impact on the risk of injury. Horses in hurdle races were 4 times more likely to suffer serious injury while those competing in steeplechase races were 7.5 times more likely to sustain a serious injury, compared to races on the flat."

So that explains why horse racing 'freak injuries' really aren't freak injuries at all. They're just the more visible end of the ordinary injury rate in the sport.

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Labels: accident, Caulfield Cup, horse, horse racing, Melbourne Cup, thoroughbred