[Previous sermon: "White Fire and Silence - April 21, 2006"] [Next sermon: "June 16, 2006 - Be'ha'alotecha"]
May 26, 2006
I happened to be in the bar of a restaurant waiting for my table when I caught the Preakness. What a disastrous turn of events for Ketucky Derby winner Barbaro, first with the gate malfunction and then the devastating fracture of his leg. It was hard to feel good that night even for the winner, whose name, shamefully, most of us probably don’t remember. Situated on the Chesapeake Bay and host of the second leg of the triple crown, it is hard to think of Maryland without conjuring crabs with Old Bay and horse racing. Admittedly, my own family roots go back here in Maryland. In fact, one of the first stories I remember sharing with this congregation was about a dear family friend from Hagerstown Maryland, who used to ask my father, his rabbi, to rub his bald head for good luck at the track. And yet, even as the pseudo-insider I am to Maryland, I find it hard to love horse racing. And I guess its because I love horses and I love people.
It can’t be a secret to many of us that racehorses lead short and unimpressive lives, even when they are winners. In truth, the pastoral scene of the horse that is sent to retire in a beautiful field somewhere, cared for by doting and loving owners, is extremely rare even for the biggest purse earners. The more common experience of racing horses is a brief career on the track. Injury is a common and ever looming fate, because owners and industry experts select and breed racehorses to maximize on muscle mass that cannot be supported by the delicate bone structure which makes the horse light and agile enough to attain running speeds of forty miles an hour. If a race horse is injured on the track, it is oftentimes euthanized on the spot to save the expense of the risky surgery we’ve been hearing Barbaro underwent this past week. And to further complicate matters, even when surgery is chosen for a particular horse because it is deemed valuable enough for its breeding potential, it is nearly impossible to expect that horse to endure a long period of convalescence for an injured leg due its inbred desire to run. If a horse is lucky enough to escape major injury, its career on the competitive track only lasts a couple or three years typically, when they become worth more to a slaughterhouse or a glue factory than to an owner.
One hundred thousand horses are slaughtered in America for a foreign meat industry. And we are not talking about feeding poor needy people. Japanese, Belgian and French gourmands typically pay fifteen dollars a pound for quality horsemeat. But because they are “flight animals” horses are not led to slaughter as effortlessly as cows, and yet are treated to the same stressful conditions of slaughter.
If we are uncomfortable hearing these things, we should be. It should affect us that the racehorse industry and we, the public who supports it, asks these animals to fulfill impossible expectations, so that we can take pleasure from their failed attempts, and then allow them to be quietly disposed of, as we would a used car, as we move on to the next drama, the next big winner, the next exciting race. In a sport that is supposed to showcase the best in the equine world, instead the industry has simply and scientifically objectified horses purely for their entertainment value to a paying public. Spoken by a true horse lover, to be sure.
About 2 years ago, I was invited to speak to a young adults group at the JCC. It was through that experience that I got an additional, disturbing glimpse into the horse racing industry. I was asked to review and discuss the HBO documentary Jockey, by Kate Davis. This film should be mandatory watching for communities that house racetracks for the awareness it brings to this subject. Brilliantly, the film captures life on and off the track for three jockeys: Chris Rosier, a young hopeful, trying to break into the jockeying world, superstar Shane Sellers, in training to return to the track after a major knee blowout, and Randy Romero, a retired jockey fighting for his life with health complications caused by a long career of racing. Through that film, viewers are invited in to the dirty secrets of the tracks. In fact, filmmaker Davis’ biggest challenge in making this movie was finding riders who had the courage speak frankly about what was actually going on. She had to visit Belmont and Santa Anita before settling on shooting at Churchill Downs in Kentucky. The interesting thing one learns from the movie is that if there is a hierarchy of importance, believe it or not the horses rate either above or at the same level as the jockeys.
If the careers of the horses are life threatening, short lived with limited ability for a happy ending, the career of a jockey is equally life threatening, short lived, and abusive on many levels. It is a fact that there are a few jockeys who make millions of dollars a year riding the most exclusive horses. However, most jockeys struggle to earn a living. Few are lucky enough to have contracts which provide some job stability. If there are 20 horses in a high stakes race, the first, second and third place winners each get paid decently, with the first place jockey earning about $60,000. But the other seventeen riders are paid on average just $56 dollars, after paying their own way to get to the race, often canceling out any earnings at all. Moreover, tracks are only required to offer jockeys $100,000 in reimbursement for medical bills if they are catastrophically injured at a race. And while the Jockey’s Guild has tried to advocate for better regular health coverage for jockeys and their families, most riders spend their earnings covering medical expenses. This was the case for Randy Romero in the film, who spent his millions in purses on 23 riding related surgeries. Throughout the documentary, we follow him from doctor to doctor as he awaits a kidney and liver transplant.
And when the other two jockeys in the movie weren’t telling their stories, they were organizing benefits to raise money for Randy to pay for the transplants. From what I understood, Romero needed a kidney transplant because of all the starving, purging, and sweating he did to make weight. Anyone with children who wrestle know what it takes to make weight. So as not to place unnecessary weight on a horse so that he is free to run faster, and supposedly to decrease the chance of the horse getting injured, racetracks set unbelievable weight minimums for jockeys. The owners play into these minimums by only employing jockeys who will make and maintain these weights of 106-108 pounds. Tracks even have a special bowl in the bathroom for bulimic jockeys. The only advance the minimum weight requirements of today is that within the past year, most tracks have decided not to count safety vests and helmets as part of a jockey’s weight. Romero’s liver failure was caused by hepatitis A which he contracted from a blood transfusion he received to treat third degree burns over most of his body when a hot box for sweating pounds exploded and he caught fire prior to making weight for a race. Its not uncommon for jockeys to sweat six to eleven pounds in a session to make weight.
And in this dehydrated weakened state, they are asked to maneuver a 1200 pound animal to run over 40 miles an hour around 19 other horses to the finish line. The sprightly frail look of the jockeys you see is not natural and due to the unhealthy demands their sport currently requires of them. The bright spot in the film is that due to heightened awareness, some tracks are considering raising their weight minimums. Ultimately it will come down to whether owners will then let their horses race at those tracks. At the time I reviewed the film, Pimlico’s jockey weight minimum was still at 108.
So horseracing is just like any other sport today, where the athletes, both human and equine, are being forced reach standards and levels of performance they cannot sustain in healthy or natural ways. For horses, its in the way they are bred and kept disposable, for jockeys it’s the extraordinary weight minimums. For baseball and football players, gymnasts and runners, its steroids and other performance enhancers. And we simply look away. But ignoring these abuses violates ourselves as Jews. Even as Jewish tradition was shaped and evolved from the Torah to the Rabbinic understanding expressed in Judaism today, our sages always ruled in ways that Jews would be able to “live by” our standards, not die trying. That ethic was both counter cultural and counter intuitive, because, as humans, we either love to believe we are the one who can beat the odds, or love watching someone else die trying. Its our fascination with Mount Everest, the Titanic, and the Olympics. We still have something to learn from our Rabbis’ strong belief that Jewish tradition was never to get so impossible that people would be forced to endanger themselves to fulfill our mission as Jews. Let us so live as to reflect the best that is in us, and not to expect more, either from ourselves, or worse, from others.
Rabbi Batsheva Meiri
