With Laurel Park conducting testing on its track Wednesday, following the suspension of its racing last Friday, we're breaking down the numbers of horse fatalities at the race track over the years.
According to the Equine Injury Database, a safety initiative of The Jockey Club, 214 horses have died between the start of 2009 and the end of 2022.
The year with the most during that time period was 2013, when 25 horses died at the track. That year also had the highest rate of deaths per thousand starts, with more than 3 horse fatalities for every thousand starts.
Each horse that starts in a race is a "start," so in 2013 there were 7,860 starts on 109 race days.
In 2022, ten race horses died according to the Equine Injury Database, resulting in a 1.03 fatality rate per thousand starts. There were 9,664 starts last year.
While the Equine Injury Database doesn't yet have numbers for 2023, the Maryland Department of Labor, which oversees the Maryland Racing Commission, told us that so far this year, 13 horses have died at Laurel Park.
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That means already, more horses have died at the race track in less than four months than did the entirety of last year.
Of those 13 deaths since the beginning of 2023, 4 were racing-related fatalities, 6 were training-related fatalities and 3 were non-racing and non-training related fatalities.
We've reached out to the Department of Labor for additional data on the numbers of horse deaths racing and non-racing related over the last few years and also for more detailed information on the deaths from this year, but are still awaiting that information.
