Yesterday Eight Belles, a seventeen hand dark grey thoroughbred filly, sprang from the gate and ran her heart out for second place in the Kentucky Derby.

She also ran her legs from underneath her, breaking the condylar bone where it meets the pastern, first on one side, then the other, driving the bone through the skin, and collapsed on the track while galloping out. Such an injury happens when muscles are tired and ligaments and tendons stretched - she had given everything and was now paying the price. The injury was devastating and she was quickly euthanized even before the winner was draped in roses.

It was nobody's fault - and everybody's - even mine for watching.

Five years ago, I was watching morning works on the Oklahoma track at Saratoga on a sunny August morning. A woman was leaning the rails next to me, scrutinizing a horse that flattened out and barreled towards us. Focusing on the horse, we missed the ocmmotion on the other side of the track until a siren went off The woman's head jerked away from the horse pulling up in front of us.

"Meat Wagon," she said as she glanced over at me, and her freckles grew vivid as she clenched her jaw tight.

The siren is the warning of a loose horse or a horse down on the track. The riders all pull up. Perhaps they are thinking, there but for the grace of god.... Not just horses but riders are hurt every day on the racetrack. It is a grin-and-bear-it reality of the industry - you just hope it doesn't happen to you.

If you can't take it, you get out. The woman's name was Holly, and she was a former exercise rider, still drawn to the racetrack by a single magnet, the horses. Holly had got tired of seeing it. Instead, she came to the track to reconnect with friends and look for prospects to retrain.

Fresh to racing, I was still caught by the charm of discovering a world which revolves entirely around the horse, a throwback to another era. If you are open to being beguiled by beautiful horses, Saratoga is the place to experience it. But I didn't forget our conversation. I think of her and all the others who work in racing for the horses, and quit because of the horses.

Yesterday, I felt like Holly. Maybe I cannot bear to watch any more.
Sure, horses get hurt in other sports, get used up and discarded or downgraded to what the racing industry terms a "pet" or are caused pain to produce extravagant movement, kept like hothouse flowers and exhibited like forced blooms, or ridden into the ground for two-year old futurities, but nowhere is the carnage even remotely close to that of racing, where the sums of money are greater than in any other equine industry.

Horses are inherently fragile, and thoroughbreds seem to delight in challenging their own vulnerability from birth onwards. If you give your heart to any horse, but most especially a race horse, you must accept this possibility.

Or, like Holly, pick up what fallen blossoms you can, muttering to yourself like a stooper, one of those shabby figures who arrive at the track after everyone leaves, sifting through discarded tickets looking for a winner.

I counted the number of breakdowns at Aqueduct one year and tried to correlate them to something, anything, but it had no single factor, no magic button that you could press to protect a horse. The price of the relentless pursuit of speed is sometimes death. It eats at everyone at the track, from the dark comments of a woman in the racing office about the number of amazing two year old, to the owner of a homebred who is to be retired and then breaks down in her last race.

You can blame the trainer, the jockey, the track, the breeder, medications, the handicappers on down to the casual spectators just having a flutter. You can go back to Colonial times and curse the English for bringing their mad sport to America. You can swear at the practice of running on a dirt oval, the conversion of racing to a year round sport, the two year old in training sales, where young horses sprint at breakneck speed, or television and on-line betting, even the racinos that have breathed artificial life into the sport.

It is even debatable who we should be more troubled by - Big Brown, who won the race with amazing grace on crappy feet and will now sire another generation of thoroughbreds with crappy feet, and maybe a few with enough speed to make the nursing along of their poor feet worth it - or Eight Belles, oversized daughter of an oversized sire who carries the legendary weak ankles of Raise a Native. The large ones are gorgeous but the little ones live longer.

I love thoroughbreds, and on a good day I even love to watch racing, but today I am just sad.