A sport under scrutiny: Why are horses dying at Santa Anita?
LOS ANGELES - It was more than a decade ago that thoroughbred racing thought it had found a surefire way to reduce injuries - and fatalities - among its horses.
California and Kentucky helped spearhead a movement to rip up traditional dirt tracks and replace them with synthetic compounds designed to prevent 1,000-pound animals from breaking their legs as they thundered down the homestretch.
"These surfaces, in theory, had certain cushioning," says Jose Garcia-Lopez, director of equine sports medicine at Tufts University in Massachusetts. "But one of the things we saw, it's not that simple ... where you put in synthetic and the problem goes away."
The 23 horses that have died at Santa Anita Park over the last three months have again shown that
