This is the second in a series of posts, corresponding with horse racing’s Triple Crown, examining safety issues facing the sport. Part one appears here.

When nine horses leave the gates at Pimlico in the second leg of horse racing’s Triple Crown Saturday afternoon, they will mark the end of a sporting era. For the last time, the Preakness Stakes will be run under medical and drug testing rules that are set solely by the state of Maryland, thanks to an agreement among eight mid-Atlantic and northeastern states that will set uniform medication and drug testing standards beginning in 2014.

The compact, agreed to by New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and Massachusetts, is the result of push to bring some uniformity to horse racing’s medication and drug rules that has lasted for nearly a decade, years in which the sport has faced questions about both performance-enhancing drugs and therapeutic medications used to treat horses both in the days leading up to races and on race days themselves.

Horse racing banned the use of anabolic steroids in 2008, when Kentucky Derby winner Big Brown tested positive for Winstrol, a performance enhancing drug, and runner-up Eight Belles collapsed shortly after the finish line and was euthanized on the track. But other drugs, mostly therapeutic in nature and used to treat routine injuries, are still wildly prevalent, raising questions in an American industry that is dealing with higher rates of catastrophic breakdowns and fatalities among its horses than its foreign counterparts — and a general lack of data and research into how to improve it.

“Racing fatality rates in the U.S. are two- to three-times higher than other major racing countries that don’t allow phenylbutazone and other drugs,” Dr. Rick M. Arthur, the equine medical director at the University of California-Davis and the California Horse Racing Board, said at The Jockey Club’s annual meeting last year. “My international colleagues have no doubt our medication policies, especially in phenylbutazone, are the cause of this disparity. I’m not convinced it is that simple, but there is no question medication regulation is the most glaring difference between U.S. and other major racing countries.”

The eight-state compact is not the first major step toward addressing and improving the medication of horses in the United States — in a business regulated on a state-by-state basis, states have made their own adjustments to which drugs can be used and when they can be administered. But the compact is the biggest step in streamlining the process and standardizing medical practices and drug testing across state lines. With the help of scientists and experts across the industry, the eight states identified 24 drugs that are “appropriate for therapeutic use in racehorses to treat illness or injury” and set standards for when they can be administered and how much of the drugs can be present in a horse’s body on race day. It also identified other drugs that cannot be present in a horse on race day under any circumstances.

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(Credit: Associated Press)

This is the first in a series of posts, corresponding with horse racing’s Triple Crown, examining safety issues facing the sport.

Saturday will mark the 139th running of the Kentucky Derby, when the top three-year-old horses from around the world will compete for the garland of roses in America’s oldest continuous sporting event. The Derby has gone off on the first Saturday in May uninterrupted since 1875, and as the years have worn on, the crowds and ceremonies have only grown.

The Sport of Kings may not hold the prominent place in American culture it once did, but it hasn’t been immunized from the debates that have enthralled the sports that have taken its place. Like baseball, it has battled the spread of performance-enhancing drugs. Like football, it has faced its own existential crisis, a question about whether it is too dangerous and whether it can be made safe for its participants.

Like both sports, those battles have featured prominently in the national media — perhaps never more so than they did in 2008, when the Derby champion, Big Brown, was linked to steroids and runner-up, Eight Belles, collapsed in a heap after crossing the finish line and was euthanized on the Churchill Downs dirt. The sport was already facing questions — and asking them of itself — before that Saturday, and the questions have only grown stronger since.

American racetracks have one of the highest collective breakdown rates in the world, and even though horses here have more opportunities to enter the starting gates, they do so far less often than many of their foreign competitors. A New York Times analysis found that American race horses had an on-track incident rate of 5.2 per 1,000 starts; by comparison, a Toronto racetrack the Times studied had a rate of just 1.4 per 1,000 starts. The average number of starts for American horses plunged to an all-time low — 6.1 — in 2010; by comparison, foreign horses average as many as 18 starts in their careers.

The question, of course, is why America’s racing industry is more dangerous than others, and the search for an answer has led to more scrutiny over the way horses are bred and trained, the drugs administered to them on training and race days, and the types of surfaces on which they race. The solution, however, won’t be found until the industry has more data about what causes catastrophic breakdowns, doctors and industry experts said.

“That’s the ultimate question we want to answer, but the data we have is very limited,” Dr. Stephanie Preston-Meuser from the University of Kentucky’s Gluck Equine Research Center told ThinkProgress.

And so the search for more data is underway, at the Gluck Center and throughout the industry. “All of us are trying to figure out ways to make racing safer for riders and horses,” Dr. Rick M. Arthur, the equine medical director at the University of California-Davis and the California Horse Racing Board said. “It is an ongoing effort. It’s an industry that doesn’t necessarily handle change well, but we have to pay closer attention to the welfare of our horses.”

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Last night, HBO aired the pilot for Luck, its new horse racing and casino show from David Milch, ahead of the show’s actual run in January. There’s no question that the pilot immediately establishes Luck as a serious contender for the most gorgeous show on television, and I’m really glad to see someone else step up to Breaking Bad and do all sorts of gorgeous, vertiginous things with color and light. And it’s nice to know that Carrie and Saul from Homeland have a little competition in the category of best mentor-mentee relationship on television, that competition being Sad Nick Nolte and a potentially champion horse. Saul got a decent, if misguided, soliloquy last night, but nothing quite as juicy as: “You don’t know how special you are, do you? How you can run. Who your daddy was. How they killed him.”

This being a David Milch show, though, after my marination in Deadwood, I’m curious to see what he’ll do in another framework where women generally are marginal but individual women have the capability to be tremendously powerful. After all, it’s not just that the Old Man notices the potential in a horse, it’s that he sees the potential in Lizzy, a female jockey (played by Chantal Sutherland, a jockey in real life), remarking, “I guess I still know a peach when I see one,” as he checks his stopwatch. “Who’s gonna ride it?” one character asks Joey, the stuttery agent who caught the miracle horse’s workout. “Some exercise girl or something,” Joey replies. The ability to see human as well as horseflesh matters. And it’s women who treat horses when they’re healthy, as well as easing them on when, as happens in a final, climatic race in the pilot, they snap a leg.

There’s going to be a lot of wrangling about the economy in Luck: the pilot already has references to payday loans and the dismal state of the city’s tax base. I imagine we’ll rise far above individual horses, individual owners, and individual races. But I hope the beating, high-strung heart of Luck remains its horses and the people who own them, ride them, and care for them. There’s a nice bit when Gus (Dennis Farina), who has bought a horse as a front for Chester (Dustin Hoffman) who is recently out of jail and preoccupying himself with larger concerns, anxiously feeds that horse a carrot for the first time. There’s a jittery delight in the proximity to the velvet of those noses, to the muscle force behind the enamel that chews up those carrots. You could do worse on a metaphor for the power, randomness and seductive appeal of capitalism.