On Feb. 25, following a long winter of rain and 19 catastrophic injuries on Santa Anita’s dirt and turf courses, the track shut down racing and training so that Dr. Mick Peterson, a new-school racing-surface expert widely respected in the racing industry, could conduct an evaluation of the track’s surface and composition, including the use of ground-penetrating radar to determine whether the track’s base had holes or inconsistencies. At the conclusion of the evaluation, which was done in consultation with the track’s superintendent, Andy LaRocco, Peterson and track officials said that the examination had produced no “irregularities.”

Following that endorsement, as limited or as comprehensive as any number of critics believe it may have been, two more horses died on Santa Anita’s main track, one while racing, one while training, in the span of four days. Santa Anita then announced an indefinite cessation of racing and training to bring back its former racing-surface consultant, Dennis Moore, an old-school hand who had 46 years of experience working with racing surfaces, to conduct a second evaluation of the Santa Anita main track. After extensive analysis and some work, Moore also gave the track his endorsement, and Santa Anita re-opened for training on March 12.

Then, this morning, another horse died, a lightly raced filly who broke both front legs shortly after finishing a four-furlong work.

So, despite all that evaluation and work, from the opposite ends of the empirical spectrum, from the hard numbers of science to the soft touch of art, a horse still broke down. Can anyone still blame the racing surface?

“We think the track is in great condition,” Tim Ritvo, the chief operating officer of The Stronach Group, which owns Santa Anita Park, told DRF’s Brad Free shortly after the filly broke down on Thursday morning. “We have confidence in the track. Everybody has been bragging about it.” Ritvo told Free that the filly that broke down had passed all of the protocols that the track had put in place to flag horses that may have been at risk for an injury, given what the racing industry knows about what leads to breakdowns.

It is fair and even accurate to say that the Santa Anita main track is right now the most rigorously studied and exquisitely groomed racing surface in the world, as long as you believe that Peterson and Moore aren’t idiots, which they aren’t. The Santa Anita main track must now conform very nearly to the ideal of what the racing industry believes is the best surface that can be possibly put forth as dirt highways for the racing of fragile animals at high speeds (within the limitations of dirt on compacted dirt, and so setting aside any arguments about artificial surfaces or turf).

There are then two options for evaluating the safety of Santa Anita’s main track. The first is that Peterson and Moore have no idea what they are doing. That’s not a rational argument. If the problem is with the racing surface – which has been subjected to highly unusual stresses due to the massive amounts of rainfall that fell in Southern California this winter – then those problems have not yet been identified by the experts that have devoted their professional lives to developing metrics to determine what is safe and what is not; it is, quite frustratingly, beyond the racing industry’s current knowledge.

As with all scientific endeavors, the identification of the factors that impact a solution to a problem, whether it be a cure for disease or the development of solutions to grave socioeconomic inequities, requires time and detailed analysis. The racing industry has already exhausted its list of solutions. It needs time to study what the next list might look like.