In late November, the horses race under the floodlights. Woodbine Racetrack’s season is long—from the end of April to the middle of December—and by the final weeks, when Toronto temperatures plunge and the sun sets early, the late afternoon races are held under artificial light in an atmosphere of eerie quiet, witnessed by just a smattering of fans huddling in the cold.

“When I first came, there used to be a lot more people in the grandstands,” says jockey Jason Hoyte. “Things change.” The 39-year-old Barbados-born jockey arrived in Toronto in 2004 and worked as an exercise rider for 15 years. Then a fellow rider introduced him to a diet that worked, he cut weight to a punishingly light 116 pounds, and made the jump from training horses in the morning to racing them in the afternoon. In the hierarchy of Woodbine jockeys, he describes himself as “average.” He’s not among the winningest riders, but he makes a living—$80 to $100 a race, plus a percentage of any prize money. And each race, he knows, is another opportunity.

In the fourth race of the day on Nov. 28, 2024, Hoyte’s mount was a two-year-old bay filly named Speight Rasees. The horse was like Hoyte—not some blue-blooded, highly touted prospect, but an animal squarely in the racetrack’s middle-class. She had been bought as a yearling at auction for just $7,379 USD, far below the median selling price of $30,000, and had run her first race just a few weeks earlier, finishing well back of the winner. She was a horse who would never become a star, perhaps never win a stakes race. Which is to say she was like so many of the 1,750-odd horses at Woodbine—animals necessary for the business of the track but whose ceiling for success might be scraping together some purse money for their owners in a few end-of-season races.

When the bell rang, Speight Rasees got out of the starting gate cleanly. As the horses made their way down the backstretch, she was running in second.

“Going down the back, everything was good,” remembers Hoyte. Sometimes, he says, there’ll be an early indication that something’s not right with a horse. With Speight Rasees, disaster came out of nowhere. “There wasn’t no warning,” he says. “[Her] front leg just snapped.” One moment the horse was charging around the track, making the turn for home. The next, she was plummeting toward the ground headfirst, her momentum sending her tumbling in an awful tangle of limbs.

Horse racing in Toronto is as old as the city itself. In 1793, the same year the town of York was established, the first organized races were held between military officers and the local citizenry on a sandy stretch of land near Gibraltar Point known as “The Bend.”

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, as York became Toronto and horse racing became one of the premiere spectator sports in North America, racetracks sprouted up across the city. From Thorncliffe Park Raceway to Dufferin Park, Long Branch Park Racetrack to the original Woodbine Race Course in the east end, Torontonians flocked to see both thoroughbred racing and its less glamorous cousin, standardbred racing, in which horses pull small carts behind them.

The sport has always had a dual identity: both “the Sport of Kings,” with its history as a hobby for European aristocracy who owned and bred the animals, and a sport that has tolerated, and often romanticized, a colourful cast of gamblers, scoundrels, and petty criminals. In Ontario, there were sporadic attempts from governments and temperance movements to ban gambling and clean up the sport. But the creation of Woodbine Racetrack was the most successful move to turn a scattershot collection of horsemen, gamblers, and plutocrats into a professionalized business.

The track was the vision of E.P. Taylor—the business tycoon who author Kevin Chong calls “Canada’s most reviled plutocrat” in his book on the legendary horse Northern Dancer, but whose name is now revered within the sport he shaped and dominated. In the 1950s, Taylor bought up a number of local racetracks and then promptly closed them, consolidating their racing licenses. More horses, more races, and a longer season helped turn a hobby for the wealthy into a business where a racehorse owner could actually make some money. And it was concentrated in the track he opened in 1956 to much fanfare—the “New Woodbine,” a supertrack in a corner of Rexdale in northwest Toronto that would become the horse racing epicentre of Canada.

Today, the racetrack is the crown jewel of Woodbine Entertainment Group, the country’s biggest horse racing operator, which also runs the standardbred track Woodbine Mohawk Park in Milton and the horse racing gambling platform HPIBet. Walk through the gates of Woodbine today, home to the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame, and you’ll find monuments to the great horses of the past—photos of Dance Smartly and Secretariat, a life-sized statue of Northern Dancer.

But the truth is the business of Woodbine has never been horses. The business is, and always has been, gambling.

Woodbine has 168 race days a year and, with the exception of the King’s Plate, doesn’t charge admission. There are a few ancillary revenue sources, like the restaurants in the building and the money the racetrack earns as a landlord. But the lifeblood of the sport is provided by the bettors—the middle-aged men in the paddock scrawling notes on their programs with golf pencils, the young couples throwing down two-dollar bets during an afternoon at the races, the hardcore gamblers watching over simulcasts from racetracks and off-track betting parlours across the continent.

The majority of every dollar gambled goes to paying out the winning bettors, but a significant cut—just under 15 cents for simple bets—is taken by the track. That money, the “takeout,” is divided between the racetrack and the purse, the prize money won by a race’s top finishers.

Purses are how you get money into the system. Racehorse owners are willing to shell out for the purchase, care, and training of their animals for all sorts of illogical reasons—vanity, a burning equine obsession, a gambling spirit. But ultimately, the hope of being handsomely rewarded for winning a race is what provides the incentive to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars on yearlings at auction, and thousands a month to keep them. On a Saturday in August, there were 11 races with purses ranging from $28,600 to $150,000, with the lion’s share going to the winners (the other top finishers get smaller cuts, while the owners of the rest of the horses get nothing). That money flows through the industry, paying for the grooms who muck out the stalls, the exercise riders who are up at dawn with the horses, the trainers, farriers, and the entire vast apparatus of professional horse racing in North America.

At least, that’s how the economics of the sport used to work. But the finances underpinning the racetrack have been collapsing for almost as long as Woodbine Racetrack has existed.

Horse racing was once the only form of legal gambling. The story of the sport’s decline is, among other things, the story of an industry losing its monopoly power. A 2019 report from the Auditor General of Ontario documents how horse racing revenue in Ontario has been shrinking ever since lotteries became legal in 1969. The introduction of slot machines in 1985 further ate away at the sport’s gambling dollars. Starting in 1998 in Ontario—and in many jurisdictions across North America—authorities eager for slot machine revenue, but reluctant to be seen opening up predatory new gambling depots in their communities, struck a deal. In exchange for putting slots in racetracks, the tracks and horse racing industry would take 20 percent of revenue—10 percent to the tracks for race day costs and 10 percent directly to horse people, primarily through purses. By 2012/13, the program was pumping $335 million a year into Ontario horse racing.

That money was a mirage. It papered over the growing gap between how much revenue the sport was able to bring in, and what was needed to maintain it. In 2012, the deficit reduction report known as the Drummond Report called the Ontario horse racing business “unsustainable” and called for reform: “It is time for the industry to rationalize its presence in the gaming marketplace so that the industry is more appropriately sustained by the wagering revenues it generates.”

In the report’s wake, the Dalton McGuinty Liberal government moved to do just that, announcing the sudden end of the Slots at Racetracks program. Why, they argued, were hundreds of millions of dollars in slot machine money going to horse racing of all things? “At a time when we’ve got to find a way to reduce government spending, we’ve got to compare supporting the horse racing industry with supporting our schools and supporting our health care,” McGuinty said at the time.

The outrage from horse people was immediate and overwhelming. Removing the slot machines, they warned, would destroy the industry. Tens of thousands of jobs would be lost, not just at racetracks but across voter-rich rural Ontario, where racing money trickles down to everyone from the people who breed horses to the farmers who sell the straw for their stalls.

An expert panel of former cabinet ministers, assembled to advise the government on how to help horse racing transition to self-sufficiency, laid out the economic reality in stark terms: “Without slots revenue or a new revenue stream, the horse racing industry in Ontario will cease to exist,” the report read. And without racing, the authors added ominously, the government should prepare for the “humane dispatch and disposal of 7,500 – 13,000 horses in early 2013.”

The Liberals backpedalled. In 2013, new premier Kathleen Wynne announced temporary funding to the industry. Over five years, the government would allocate $500 million to help horse racing transition from the slots program to a sustainable business model.

Starting in 2019, Doug Ford’s Conservatives made that deal permanent. The long-term funding agreement for live horse racing sends the industry $105 million a year, funded by the OLG, for an astounding 19 years. And it’s just part of a series of government programs and grants designed to help Ontario breeders, owners, and others in the horse business.

The deal was cautiously cheered by horse people. Raising a racehorse is a long-term investment—with about five years from breeding to potentially earning money at the track—and the funding brought some stability to the industry. But it also put horse racing in this province in wholly new territory.

On Nov. 9, during the second race, a three-year-old filly named Social Dancer took an awkward step on the backstretch. In video of the race you can see veteran jockey David Moran easing her, the young horse’s unsteady gait painful to watch. She had to be euthanized. That same afternoon, a stakes winner named Owen’s Tour Guide ridden by jockey Jose Campos went down in the eighth race. “In the middle of the turn, she just broke,” remembers Campos.

On that single disastrous day in November, between training on the track in the morning and racing in the afternoon, a total of six horses broke down, according to a report by the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO), which regulates horse racing in the province. Three required euthanasia.

Over the next weeks, Woodbine temporarily closed the track and brought in maintenance workers and consultants. Regulators from the AGCO descended, examining track conditions and ordering a variety of measures to protect horses.

But the deaths kept coming. On Nov. 16, it was a horse named Flawless Ruler. On Nov. 24, three-year-old colt Tunechi took an awkward step early in the race and later had to be euthanized. Speight Rasees collapsed on Nov. 28. The next day, during the first race, two-year-old Mad Chatter had to be euthanized. By the time the season ended a few weeks later, it had been the most disastrous run in recent history. Between Oct. 28 and Dec. 15, according to the AGCO, there were a total of 19 musculoskeletal injuries at Woodbine, 10 of which led to euthanasia. For comparison, Saratoga Race Course, the storied New York track, reported just one racing-related fatality in all of 2024.

A series of breakdowns is the worst thing that can happen on a track. “There’s nothing more devastating,” says veteran trainer Catherine Day Phillips. “It’s terrifying. It’s scary to go back out after that’s happened.” The deaths, the AGCO wrote in an official ruling on Nov. 30, were “a threat to the long-term sustainability of the industry.” Online and at the track, there were calls to shut things down for the season.

Following the Woodbine news from his farm near Cobourg, Ont., Colin Davis just felt nauseous. The 42-year-old is a relatively young breeder, the owner of Apricot Valley Thoroughbreds. He’s a big guy from the country who isn’t the most emotional person in the world, but something about horses just gets to him. The first time he saw one of his horses race, he says, there were tears in his eyes. “These are the babies you raise,” he said. “We know all the little quirks about our horses. So when you sell them at auction and you don’t see them for a while, and then they pop up at the track, and you see how grown up they are, it’s just amazing.” Davis knows all of the time and emotion and money that goes into bringing a horse from birth to the moment it can actually compete. And then for that horse to go down due to “something as simple as track maintenance, with no straightforward responses from management? It makes you want to throw up,” he said.

In their final investigation, the AGCO put the blame squarely on Woodbine officials. The track’s maintenance was “inadequate and inconsistent with manufacturer guidelines” the AGCO wrote in a statement about the investigation. (The AGCO declined to make the investigation itself public). They found “substandard grooming practices,” “undertrained and inexperienced maintenance personnel,” and an “absence of standardized maintenance protocols.” As part of their settlement with the AGCO, Woodbine donated $200,000 to organizations that support retired racehorses and instated a series of reforms designed to improve the track.

Woodbine didn’t contest the report. But in an interview with The Local this summer, racetrack executives rejected the AGCO’s findings. “Anytime you investigate operations of any organization, on any function, there’s probably things you can find that you could be doing a little bit better,” said CEO Michael Copeland. Woodbine, he says, was committed to making those improvements. “But we don’t believe that those things were material, causal factors in what transpired.”

Officials pointed to Woodbine’s record as one of the safer tracks on the continent. The main track is made of Tapeta, a synthetic racing surface that officials have long touted as safer than traditional dirt tracks. In 2023, the year before the cluster of breakdowns, the track had a rate of 1.14 fatalities per 1,000 starts according to the Equine Injury Database (a start is each time a horse runs a race). The North American average was 1.32 per 1,000 starts.

According to Woodbine executives, the primary cause of the breakdowns was an extreme temperature shift at the beginning of November. “I think what occurred was we were towards the end of a season where a lot of horses had been running a lot, and we then ran into a kind of abnormal temperature change significantly within like two days,” said Bill Ford, Woodbine’s general counsel and executive vice-president of racing. “And we probably didn’t get on top of softening [the track] up quickly enough, so it was a little bit firm.”

But the ultimate causes of the fatal injuries, Ford said, couldn’t be reduced to any single issue: “They were multifactorial.”

That’s a buzzword that has become the standard industry response to any question about equine fatalities. It can sound like an official throwing up his hands and saying “it’s complicated” as a way to avoid responsibility. But the unsatisfying reality is there is often no clear, single answer to why a horse breaks down. Just as there were endless debates about what caused the rash of achilles injuries in the NBA last season—with competing theories about too many in-game minutes, the long-term effects of high-level junior play, training regimens that doesn’t emphasize the lower leg enough—so too is there no singular explanation for a string of catastrophic breakdowns.

If you talk to horse people candidly, a simpler, but ultimately more damning explanation emerges: death is just a normal, inevitable part of the business of racing. Jose Campos, the jockey on one of the horses that went down on Nov. 9, says the number of horses that broke down that day was highly unusual, and everyone at the track felt awful. “But like we say, it’s part of the game. The horses are athletes, so that happens.”

“Unfortunately, sometimes things come in bunches, and it kind of distorts the picture of what is really the normality of things,” says trainer Kevin Attard.

Attard is one of the leading trainers at Woodbine, and the winner of back-to-back Queen’s Plates. When I spoke to him one morning in July, he was standing at the edge of the track watching two of his young horses getting accustomed to the starting gate. He’d been on the backstretch since about a quarter to 5:00 that morning, as he is every morning. That dedication, Attard says, is what people who criticize the horse racing industry don’t see. They don’t understand the treatment horses are given, that they have the best available doctors, the best of everything. “They can get an MRI in 48 hours,” he says. “They’re treated like a top player that works for the Maple Leafs.” If he could get reincarnated, he says, he’d get reincarnated as a racehorse.

For critics of the sport, however, a series of breakdowns like what happened last fall at Woodbine is only the most dramatic proof that horse racing has no place in modern society. Patrick Battuello, founder of the anti-horse racing organization Horseracing Wrongs, has made ending the sport his explicit mission for years. The entire sport, he argues, is no better than dog racing, a practice that has all but disappeared in the past few decades as public attitudes have shifted. Racehorses may love to run, as horse people insist, but at the track they are coerced into running at unnatural speeds by people perched on them wielding whips.

In recent years, following a series of reforms in the sport across North America, horse racing officials point to a significant decline in the number of horse fatalities. Battuello contests those numbers, but beyond that, he puts it as a moral choice. “What’s the acceptable level of killing? And to what end?” he says. “We’re talking about an archaic form of gambling that can no longer compete in the 21st century.”

Everyone I spoke to on the track believed that what happened at Woodbine last fall should not have occurred; nobody I spoke to believed that they could stop horses from dying in the future. How the public feels about that fact is likely to determine the sport’s future.

The first time I visited the Woodbine backstretch was as a teenager. My best friend Paul’s mother, an immigrant from St Kitts, was part of the large Caribbean contingent of regulars at the track. Paul began working there as a teenager, starting out as a hot walker, and I tagged along with him and picked up a few shifts.

At 14 or 15, we would sleep at his house, wake at 4:00 a.m. to take a series of night buses out to the track, and spend the morning walking horses around and around the barns after their workouts. I was tiny, yet to hit my growth spurt, and I remember a trainer looking at me with an appraising eye. “You ever ride?” he asked. I quietly demurred. The horses were majestic—glossy and powerful, bred for speed. They were also terrifying, and seemed to instantly sense my utter lack of confidence and authority.

But the universe of the track was fascinating, filled with characters that seemed like they’d stepped out of another time—the hard-bitten horsemen who rode on the highway down to Saratoga racetrack with the animals in their caravans , the death-defying jockeys who would knowingly jump on 1,000 pounds of horseflesh barreling at 40 miles an hour. In the afternoon, we’d head over to the grandstand to gamble. The automatic terminals made underage betting easy, and we’d walk down to the paddock to try to get a tip from one of the jockeys—”What do you say, Sandy, you got a hot one?”—and then bet two dollars on some long shot to win. The track was like some pocket universe in the middle of industrial Rexdale, its mixture of seediness and glamour instantly appealing. It felt incredibly romantic.

Decades later, to be honest, it still does. Reporting this story, I visited the track and the backstretch multiple times over a long season. In the grandstand one afternoon, I put two dollars on a horse called Little Teddy and found myself rising to my feet unconsciously along with the rest of the roaring crowd, a puppet on a string, as the horses pounded their way down the homestretch.

On the backstretch, exercise riders rolled past on bikes with whips in their back pockets while horses were everywhere—grazing on the grass in front of their stalls, bathing in the spray of a hose. One morning I walked with trainer Catherine Day Phillips—backstretch royalty, in pearls and riding boots—as she checked on the horses in her barn, cradling the head of each one, murmuring compliments. Another morning I stumbled into Emma-Jayne Wilson, the highest-earning female jockey in history, 112 pounds of sly confidence. She swaggered over to Nathan Squires, a 61-year-old Barbados-born trainer, and gestured at his purple warm-up jacket. “You know, they say purple is the colour of sexual frustration,” she said. Squires glanced down in mock surprise. “Then I better get two of these,” he said laughing.

But if the backstretch retains its charm as a place cocooned from modernity, it also feels out of step with the world in more problematic ways. In defence of its subsidies, the industry likes to boast about the thousands of jobs horse racing produces in the province—about 1,500 jobs on the backstretch, according to Woodbine, and 22,965 full-time equivalent jobs across the province, according to a 2019 impact study by the OLG. But the quality of many of those low-paying jobs, often taken by foreign workers because it is increasingly difficult to find anyone willing to take them here, is nothing to brag about. The dorms on the backstretch, where some 250-odd people live throughout the season, are dilapidated. Last winter, one track official proudly told me, they began distributing food baskets to workers who remained at the track through the long off-season. It seemed a worthy endeavour; but it suggests that employees need food baskets in order to survive—not a sign of a healthy industry.

And indeed, despite the extensive government support, the sport is struggling. If the financial story of racing is the story of an industry slowly losing its grip over the gambling business, then Ontario’s decision to launch an online casino market in 2022 was the final chapter. “We thought when horse racing was introduced on [gambling app] Bet 365 that it would bring new customers to horse racing,” says Sue Leslie, the president of the Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association. “But it had the opposite effect.”

Today, a racing fan looking to bet on the horses online is greeted by numerous gambling products for far more popular sports, like football and hockey. More than just sports betting, horse racing is now competing with an entire universe of online gambling products offered by enormous corporations with mammoth marketing budgets that have perfected the dopamine-delivery-methods of mobile gambling. The Great Canadian Casino Resort, which opened at the racetrack in 2023 and was long seen as a vital new revenue source for the racetrack, has had a slower-than-expected start, according to CEO Michael Copeland. Why come out to the casino when you can gamble from the couch? “In terms of trying to capture and retain your customers, you’re competing against some real Goliaths that have some very, very well structured operations,” he said.

The horse people I spoke with expressed frustration with the OLG, which is both their benefactor and their primary competitor. If only they would allow more varied betting options, maybe a quick ticket you could buy from the convenience store, next to the lottery tickets, that let you bet on the horses? But the OLG’s primary mandate is to earn money to pay for Ontario’s public services; why would they introduce a product to help the horse industry at the expense of their other offerings?

Any loss of gambling revenue is an accelerant to a vicious cycle. It leads to smaller purses, which makes the sport less attractive to owners (the signs throughout Woodbine urging visitors to “become an owner” suggest that things are dire). That leads to fewer horses being bred in the province. Fewer horses means smaller field sizes, which are far less attractive to gamblers, which leads to fewer betting dollars, and the cycle continues.

This is the death spiral horse people lose sleep over. “The economics of breeding and owning race horses doesn’t make sense anymore,” says Sue Leslie bluntly. Leslie is a giant in the industry, a member of the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame, and a horse owner herself since the 1970s. Back then, she remembers Woodbine as a very different place. “The racetrack was full, the grandstand was full, the restaurants were vibrant,” she says. “A lot of that is gone.”

On a rainy afternoon in June, Premier Doug Ford, Woodbine executive chair Jim Lawson, Mayor Olivia Chow, and any local politician who could finagle their way in front of the cameras stood under a tent at the track to make an announcement. They had broken ground on a new Metrolinx GO station on the Kitchener Line that would, with $170 million of investment from Woodbine, connect the track to the rest of the city.

That station was an important step in what Woodbine envisions as a massive new development. The racetrack’s sprawling property is 684 acres—the largest undeveloped parcel of land in the city of Toronto, roughly as big as the entire downtown core south of Queen Street. Explaining the vision in an interview with The Local, Michael Copeland said the station would “unlock” the value of Woodbine. “That really will be the anchor of a very comprehensive, major real estate development that is going to allow us to generate significant annual revenues that we will then put back into support racing,” he said. It is going to have entire neighbourhoods—“29,000 housing units, 60,000 residents”—and all of that development in service of the racetrack at the centre of it. “It’s something that was envisioned decades ago by E.P. Taylor, when he purchased the land,” says Copeland.

It was an audacious vision. Could you build an entire city-within-a-city out here, in a poor neighbourhood under the flight path of Pearson Airport’s planes, with the express purpose of supporting an increasingly unpopular sport? It was possible. But as Copeland expanded on the track’s development plans—the visions of parks and shopping centres, homes and businesses—the obvious question kept intruding. What in god’s name were horses doing in the middle of all of this?

By 2038, when the government’s current 19-year agreement is up and the early stages of this development aim to be complete, how will the public feel about racehorses? That’s the question that hangs over the industry. The phrase used in horse racing circles these days is an academic one—social license to operate. That’s not a document, or a piece of legislation, but the general sense that society approves of what you’re doing. It’s hard to define. But if you lose it, you lose everything.

Today, a racehorse exists in a very specific, strange corner of the human imagination. Racehorses are not beloved pets, or members of the family, as the animal-friendly marketing suggests. In claiming races—in which every horse running is up for sale at a pre-approved price—animals are shuffled back and forth by owners like any other asset, moved from barn to barn, trainer to trainer. Nor are they professional athletes; they do not take to the track of their own agency and with knowledge of the possible consequences. They may love to race, as horse people insist. But if they don’t, they do not have a choice.

A racehorse, instead, is some strange combination of a pet, an investment in a work of fine art, and any other disposable head of livestock. Above all, it is a financial asset. That doesn’t mean racehorses aren’t loved and cared for. But it costs approximately $40,000 a year to keep a thoroughbred, according to the HBPA’s Sue Leslie. And they must pay their way. When track officials say they would do anything for their horses, then, it comes with an unsaid proviso: so long as it keeps the current business model intact.

The stewards of the sport are hyper aware of the fragility of an industry dependent on the goodwill of the public. “When you have an industry that’s supported by government, and if you had a sizable faction within the general public that’s against an industry being funded by the government, that doesn’t bode well for continued government support,” says CEO Michael Copeland.

Once the public opinion turns, it can be impossible to hold back. Today, the racetrack is one of the few remaining places where animals are employed solely for our entertainment. But not long ago, there were greyhound racetracks across the continent. Families flocked to the Ringling Brothers Circus to watch elephants parade in circles. Marineland brought in crowds of families to watch trained orcas leap through the air. And then things changed—slowly at first, then all at once.