(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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I sat down with The New Republic’s Marc Tracy to talk about his article arguing that blogging is dying, and my response that blogging actually won, and it’s now serving interests other than those of people who wanted an easy way to publish independently. One of the most interesting parts of the discussion for me was the idea that blogging is changing in part because, to make it emotionally and logistically sustainable long-term, people have to embed themselves in larger organizations and to franchise, making blogs mini-publications with a united vision rather than a singular voice:

We also talked about Jason Collins’ public coming out, and how sports, which were a leader in civil rights when it came to race, have fallen behind the rest of society when it comes to sexual orientation.

Jason Collins may be the first man to come out of the closet not just to people in his immediate circle, but to the country as a whole, while still actively pursuing a professional career in Major League Sports, but he wasn’t the first man out in baseball. That was Glenn Burke, who in the seventies was out to both Dodgers management and his teammates, and who came out nationally after his retirement. And apparently, Jamie Lee Curtis and her production company have been trying to get an adaptation of Burke’s autobiography into production, and are hoping the momentum of Collins’ announcement might help them make it happen. As Deadline summarizes the story:

Drafted by the Dodgers and touted as a potential star, Burke got off to a flying start when he became the only rookie to start in the 1977 World Series. Burke also took credit for inventing the high-five in 1977. Waiting on-deck at Dodger Stadium, he was first to congratulate teammate Dusty Baker with that up-high slap, after Baker hit his 30th home run in the last game of the season. While his adversity was nothing compared to what Dodger predecessor Jackie Robinson faced when he broke baseball’s color barrier, Burke’s decision to come out of the closet probably hastened his demise. In his autobiography, Burke wrote about how Dodgers GM Al Campanis offered to pay for a pricey honeymoon if Burke would get married in a Rock Hudson-like charade, but the ballplayer wasn’t going along with the sham. Campanis later was fired for appearing on Nightline and making outlandish racist remarks. Burke’s stats show he did not live up to the potential expected of him, but he seemed at peace with his decision to not hide his off the diamond life. “They can’t ever say now that a gay man can’t play in the majors, because I’m a gay man and I made it,” he said. He was diagnosed with AIDS in 1994 and died a year later at age 42.

One of the most important things movies can do is get under-acknowledged history to a mass audience. Milk, for example, mattered so much precisely because it introduced a mass audience to the idea that the gay rights movement was, in fact, a long-standing effort, and one that involved heroes and martyrs who fit into conventional narratives about sacrifices for social progress. A biopic of Burke could similarly help combat the idea that sports were a previously heterosexual zone that was somehow colonized by gay people, reminding mass audiences that there have always been gay athletes, even if they didn’t choose to share that fact with fans, or if fans weren’t astute enough to pick up on it.

And I’m also excited about the possibilities of a Burke biopic precisely because the audience would come to it with few assumptions and expectations. One of the things that I found deadening about 42, and what ultimately would have sucked the air out of any Jackie Robinson biopic was how familiar everyone was with the story. It’s mandatory to have set-pieces like Pee Wee Reese’s public embrace of Robinson or Leo Durocher’s dressing-down of the Dodgers who didn’t want to play with a black man, no matter how well or how human each of those moments has the potential to be. But with a story about Burke, nothing will be mandatory. Everything will be new. And as a result, the movie can be more human and relaxed, less stiffly conscious of history, something that serves good art, as well as humane arguments for equality.

When the National Basketball Association’s Jason Collins came out as gay in a Sports Illustrated article Monday, he became the first active publicly gay male athlete in major American sports. That he was the first publicly out man is important to note, since female athletes have been open about their sexuality since at least 1981, when pro tennis player Billie Jean King was outed in a court case and another pro tennis player, Martina Navritilova, came out on her own. Since then, a number of female athletes — the WNBA’s Sheryl Swoopes, Chamique Holdsclaw, and Seimone Augustus, soccer player Megan Rapinoe, and U.S. Women’s National soccer coach Pia Sundhage, to name a few — have come out of the closet.

Brittney Griner, the top pick in the WNBA Draft, joined that list last week in an announcement that was as nonchalant as Collins’ was bold. Griner had already been open about her sexuality, she said, and it seemed that the reason the public didn’t know that was because nobody had bothered to ask. The separate comings out of Griner and Collins were telling for their differences, both in how they were received but in how they were covered in the media. That Brittney Griner was gay didn’t seem to shock anyone — as far as we’ve come in questioning gender roles, if a woman is interested in sports, tall and physically powerful, or both, those are considered indicators that she might be a lesbian. But when Collins came out, people were shocked, and they likely would have been shocked by any other male athlete coming out, even as we’ve become more accustomed to the idea that there must be gay men in professional sports.

The reason for those differences says a great deal about the way society views sports, masculinity, and sexuality. A man who excels at professional sports and has relationships with women has his work, his body, and his sexuality in alignment with norms of traditional masculinity. He’s seen as physically strong, heterosexual, and athletically gifted. A man who is physically strong and athletically gifted but is sexually attracted to men challenges the notion that there’s a relationship between traditional masculinity and heterosexuality. Being gay, it turns out, doesn’t make a man physically weak and passive.

That assumed relationship between masculinity and athletic ability is precisely what changes the equation for women. It isn’t feminine, in society’s eyes, to excel at sports. Where a man who pursues athletics as a career is conforming to gender norms, a woman—straight, gay, or bi—who goes into sports is defying them. And because heterosexual women are assumed to be feminine, women who excel in male-dominated fields, or who exhibit strength normally associated with men, find themselves subject to having assumptions about their sexuality made on the basis of their bodies or their skills. And the ways in which they diverge from gender norms risk becoming more important to the public than the things those divergences let them accomplish.
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Jason Collins, a 12-year National Basketball Association veteran who played the 2013 season for the Boston Celtics and Washington Wizards, became the first active openly gay male in the four major American professional sports today, when he came out in a self-written article that will appear in the May 6 issue of Sports Illustrated.

“I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black. And I’m gay,” the first sentence, one that may go down as momentous as any written about sports before, reads. It is triumphant, a declaration the world of sports has been anticipating from someone — anyone — for months if not years. There have been gay pioneers in sports before — Billie Jean King was outed in 1981 and Martina Navritilova came out that same year — but in men’s sports, the only open athletes were those who had already finished their careers.

But behind the simple declaration that began the piece is a more telling story about where that movement still stands. Jason Collins was not open to any of the hundreds of men he’s called teammates, and he spent months debating the decision. In Washington, he wrote, he watched the Supreme Court debate the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act, pained that he couldn’t speak openly about who he really was. By then he had determined he needed to be open, but he waited until after the season so as to keep his personal life from becoming a “distraction” for his team and his colleagues:

Loyalty to my team is the real reason I didn’t come out sooner. When I signed a free-agent contract with Boston last July, I decided to commit myself to the Celtics and not let my personal life become a distraction. When I was traded to the Wizards, the political significance of coming out sunk in. I was ready to open up to the press, but I had to wait until the season was over.

A free agent who has become a journeyman in recent years, Collins played just nine minutes per game in six appearances after being traded to the Wizards. Now in search of a new team, Collins used the piece not just to describe why he came out now — “I want to do the right thing and not hide anymore. I want to march for tolerance, acceptance and understanding. I want to take a stand and say, ‘Me, too,’” he wrote — but also to let future teammates and perhaps executives know that he wouldn’t be gawking at them in the showers either:

I’ve been asked how other players will respond to my announcement. The simple answer is, I have no idea. I’m a pragmatist. I hope for the best, but plan for the worst. The biggest concern seems to be that gay players will behave unprofessionally in the locker room. Believe me, I’ve taken plenty of showers in 12 seasons. My behavior wasn’t an issue before, and it won’t be one now. My conduct won’t change. I still abide by the adage, “What happens in the locker room stays in the locker room.” I’m still a model of discretion.

This is the true shame of the in-the-closet culture of sexuality in sports, where athletes like Collins and Robbie Rogers, the soccer player who came out as gay and promptly retired in February, feel a tinge of selfishness and guilt when they finally open up about who they really are. In March, Rogers told the Guardian and the New York Times that he felt healthier since coming out; friends and former teammates told reporters that they had never seen him “more at ease.” Collins is no different: “I’m much happier since coming out to my friends and family. Being genuine and honest makes me happy,” he wrote.

Minutes after the story went live on Sports Illustrated’s site, Knicks guard Baron Davis — who never played with Collins but has played against him both in college and the NBA — tweeted that he was “so proud of my bro (Jason Collins) for being real. #FTheHaters.” The Wizards took the same view. “We are extremely proud of Jason and support his decision to live his life proudly and openly,” team president Ernie Grunfeld said in a statement. The hope is that the rest of the NBA, including the executives and coaches who Collins will meet with to find a team and continue his NBA career this offseason, will see it the same way. Reality tells us that not all them will share Davis’ view, and that’s why athletes like Collins and Rogers have to spend so much time convincing themselves that being a gay player is something they not only are but that they deserve to be.

Perhaps that isn’t shocking. In team sports, the “distraction” label can be a career-killer for anyone, much less a 34-year-old center whose value has never shown up on a stat sheet. It’s only natural to avoid anything that could lead to that diagnosis, especially since Collins is still looking for a job. But sexuality isn’t a poor attitude, an outsized ego, or a flawed character trait that makes somebody like Jason Collins a bad teammate, a locker room cancer, or a distraction. It is a part of who Jason Collins is — part of who an untold number of American athletes, both male and female, are, and being open about it can only make them healthier and more focused on doing the job they are in sports to do. When those athletes no longer have to hide that, when they no longer feel the need to preemptively convince teammates that they won’t stare or coaches that they won’t distract, sports will have truly changed. We haven’t reached that point, but thanks to Jason Collins, we’re one major step closer.