Keeneland summit spotlights data-driven horse safety and risk profiling

At Keeneland’s Sales Pavilion, HISA chief technology officer Steve Keech described a risk-profile system built to tell regulators more than a visual check ever could. CHECK blends veterinary records with training and racing data, analyzes more than 127 risk factors, and gives each horse an individual profile that is meant to help regulatory veterinarians focus on the horses most likely to be at risk.

The stakes were clear across the free, public, livestreamed June 29-30 summit in Lexington, Kentucky, which was underwritten and coordinated by the Grayson-Jockey Club Research Foundation and The Jockey Club, with Keeneland as host and Parx Racing track announcer Jessica Paquette emceeing. The 12th Welfare and Safety of the Racehorse Summit marked 20 years since the first one in 2006, and the conversation has moved far beyond broad safety talk. The practical question now is who gets scratched, who gets cleared to run, and how consistently those calls hold up when the same horse ships from one jurisdiction to another.

That tension surfaced in the panel moderated by Dr. Mary Scollay, which included Dr. Stuart Brown of Keeneland, Dr. Will Farmer of Churchill Downs, Dr. Nick Smith and Barbara Borden of the Kentucky Racing & Gaming Commission, and Dr. Shari Silverman of HISA. The group focused on pre-race examinations as a long-term welfare safeguard. Smith brought Kentucky numbers to that argument: from January 1 through April 25, 2025, the state recorded 155 regulatory vet scratches for unsoundness, and 30% of those horses did not race again within a year. Another 16% showed no racetrack activity for a year.

For owners and trainers, that kind of scratch is more than a missed start. It can mean a horse is being pulled before a problem turns into a breakdown, or before a small issue becomes a longer absence. For bettors, it means the overnight line and the final field are less static, with the gate list increasingly shaped by veterinary judgment instead of only by condition books and entries.

Dr. Tim Parkin tied the technology push to a larger safety record. He said the Equine Injury Database has shown North American fatality rates fall from 2.0 per 1,000 starts in 2009 to 1.07 in 2025, with declines across dirt, turf and all-weather surfaces. Parkin also pointed to Hong Kong as an early model: a system developed in 2022 and launched in 2024 creates risk profiles for horses at Sha Tin and Happy Valley and helps guide regulatory vet inspections.

Other sessions covered track surfaces and maintenance reporting, aftercare, the balanced hoof, equine surgeries in the developing horse, necropsy and mortality reviews, and diagnostic equipment. Grayson said earlier summits helped produce the Equine Injury Database, the Jockey Injury Database, the Racing Surfaces Testing Laboratory, a uniform trainer test and study guide, pre-race examination modules, integration of vet-list and exam information into InCompass Track Manager, void-claim recommendations and inclement-weather protocols. The next test is whether the new profiling tools make those decisions faster, tougher and more uniform before the starter ever opens the gate.