HISA’s vet list data deserves more than a press release. It deserves an honest conversation the industry has been avoiding.
There is a version of this piece that writes itself easily. HISA releases data, Past The Wire applauds the transparency, everyone moves on. That version does not serve the reader, and it does not serve the horse.
So let us try to do something harder, which is to look at what HISA published this week, sit with the discomfort it creates for some of the positions this publication has staked out on regulatory veterinary oversight, and then explain why that discomfort is not a contradiction. It is a refinement.
HISA released an equine health advisory this week centered on a number that should stop anyone who cares about this sport: of the 3,297 unique horses placed on the veterinarians’ list as unsound by regulatory veterinarians at covered racetracks in 2025, nearly 60 percent had not made a subsequent start as of March 31, 2026. That is 1,904 horses. And the advisory adds a second figure that, if anything, is more sobering. Approximately 20 percent of all racing- and training-related fatalities involving covered horses through the first quarter of 2026 occurred in animals who were either still on the vet’s list at the time of death, had been scratched by a regulatory veterinarian shortly before a race, or had been removed from the list within the six months preceding the fatal injury.
Those are not numbers to argue with. They are numbers to understand.
The Task Nobody Asked For
Before we go further into the data, it is worth saying something plainly about the entity that produced it, because context matters here more than most places.
HISA did not arrive in American horse racing because the industry earned it. It arrived because the industry failed, for decades, to govern itself with any meaningful consistency on the questions that matter most, which are the questions of horse safety and human accountability. The states did what the states did, which varied wildly. The tracks did what the tracks did, which also varied wildly. The trainers, the owners, the veterinarians, the horsemen’s groups, all operated within a patchwork of rules that differed from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and enforced with a range that ran from serious to negligible depending on who was watching and who was involved.
When federal legislation created HISA, the industry did not welcome it with open arms. It fought it in court. It questioned its authority. It lobbied against it. Some of that resistance reflected legitimate constitutional and operational concerns, and Past The Wire covered those concerns seriously. But a meaningful portion of it reflected something else, which is the reflexive resistance of an industry so long accustomed to doing what it wanted, when it wanted, and how it wanted, that the idea of uniform national oversight felt like an intrusion rather than a corrective.
HISA has made mistakes. Past The Wire has documented them. The learning curve has been real and, in some cases, costly. The organization has not always communicated well, has not always been transparent enough on the questions the industry deserves answers to, and has generated legitimate grievances on issues ranging from fee structures to the application of its own rules.
But here is the thing about an institution that is doing something genuinely difficult in an environment of deep institutional resistance. The standard by which you evaluate it cannot be perfection. It has to be progress, accountability, and honesty about what the data shows. On this advisory, HISA clears all three bars.
Sixty percent of flagged horses did not race again. That is not a bureaucratic statistic. That is a signal about what those horses were carrying.
What the Numbers Actually Say
The 60 percent figure is the headline, but it requires careful handling. Nearly 1,900 horses placed on the unsound list in 2025 had not made a subsequent start more than a year later. That could mean they retired. It could mean they were sold, claimed, or repurposed. It could mean they broke down in training before they could return. It could mean all of those things in different proportions, and HISA has not yet broken out those categories publicly, which is a transparency gap worth noting and worth asking about.
What it almost certainly does not mean, in the majority of cases, is that the regulatory veterinarians who flagged those horses were wrong. Sixty percent is too large a number for that argument to hold. You do not get to nearly 1,900 horses who never race again by assuming widespread overreach. You get there because a lot of horses who were flagged as unsound were, in fact, unsound, and the system caught something real.
The fatality cluster is the figure that demands the most careful reading. Twenty percent of racing- and training-related deaths in covered horses through Q1 2026 involved animals who had been on the vet’s list, had been recently scratched, or had been removed from the list within six months of their death. That is simultaneously evidence that the system is working and evidence that it is not working completely. The flags were going up. The horses were dying anyway. In some cases they died while trying to work off the list, which brings us to the part of the advisory that deserves more attention than it has received.
Fewer than half of the horses placed on the veterinarians’ list as unsound had documentation in the HISA Portal indicating that a veterinarian performed an evaluation following their placement on the list.
Read that again. The flag went up. And in more than half of the cases, there is no documented record that a follow-up examination even happened.
Where Our Prior Work Fits, and Where It Does Not
Past The Wire has been critical of the regulatory veterinary scratch process, most specifically in the context of high-profile cases where the consistency of decision-making and the transparency of criteria have been legitimately questionable. The White Abarrio situation, in which the same characteristic gait that was cleared before a Breeders’ Cup Classic was flagged as a scratch basis in a later appearance, raised real questions about whether the standards being applied were uniform, documented, and defensible.
In the same pre-Derby period, we also covered the Fulleffort scratch, a horse withdrawn from the Kentucky Derby after a bone chip was identified during pre-race examination. That case drew a different kind of attention, because it was the Derby, and because the reaction from some corners of the industry was frustration rather than relief. Past The Wire framed it then as the system working, and framed it correctly. A horse with a bone chip does not belong in the Kentucky Derby. The vet list caught something real, acted on it, and in all likelihood saved that horse from a catastrophic outcome on one of the most demanding stages in the sport. That is not overreach. That is the job.
Nothing in this HISA advisory resolves those questions. But it does something important, which is to reframe them. The argument this publication has made was never that vet lists are wrong as an instrument. It was that vet lists applied without transparent criteria, consistent standards, and documented follow-up are a problem regardless of whether individual decisions turn out to be correct. This data validates many of those individual decisions. The documentation gap validates the process critique. Both things are true at once.
The honest concession Past The Wire makes here is this: the 60 percent figure is compelling evidence that regulatory veterinarians are, in aggregate, identifying genuinely compromised horses. The scale of horses who never returned to racing is not consistent with a system running on overcaution or institutional overreach. Something real is being caught.
The honest continuation is this: catching something real is necessary but not sufficient. The follow-up documentation gap, the absence of recorded attending veterinarian evaluations in more than half of flagged cases, and the fatality cluster among horses who had been on or recently cleared from the list all point to a system that is doing important work and needs to do it better. Those are not contradictory observations. They are the same observation from different angles.
An industry that fought federal oversight for years now has an obligation to engage honestly with the data that oversight is producing.
What the Industry Owes This Data
There is a temptation in racing, particularly among those who have spent years resisting HISA’s authority, to treat an advisory like this one as either a vindication of regulation or an irrelevance. Neither response is honest, and neither serves the horse.
The industry that failed to regulate itself consistently for decades, that allowed medication rules to vary from state to state and enforcement to depend on who was in the stewards’ stand, that made the case repeatedly that the states were the right locus of authority and then demonstrated with some regularity that they were not, that industry now has data in front of it that tells a story about what happens to horses who get flagged as unsound. The story is that a very large percentage of them were genuinely done, and that a meaningful percentage of fatal outcomes had prior warning signs in the form of vet list placement.
The response to that story cannot be political. It cannot be framed around HISA’s budget, its fee structure, its jurisdictional authority, or any of the other legitimate operational debates that exist in parallel. Those debates matter, but they are different debates. This one is about horse safety, which is its own category, and the industry’s obligation to engage with it honestly is not contingent on resolving the other fights first.
What the data asks for is straightforward. Trainers need to be taking the vet list seriously as a diagnostic signal and not as a bureaucratic inconvenience to be managed. Attending veterinarians need to be performing documented evaluations when a horse is flagged, because the current numbers on that are not acceptable. HISA needs to continue publishing this kind of data and needs to break it down further, separating horses who retired from horses who died in training from horses who returned and raced successfully, because the aggregate tells an important story but the disaggregated tells a more useful one.
And the industry as a whole needs to stop treating every HISA initiative as a front in a political war and start treating some of them as what they actually are, which is an attempt to build the evidentiary infrastructure that a safe sport requires.
Credit Where It Is Due
HISA deserves credit for this advisory. Not qualified credit, not credit with an asterisk, but genuine acknowledgment that publishing this data, framing it clearly, and issuing specific guidance to trainers and attending veterinarians represents exactly the kind of proactive, data-driven oversight that the industry needed and did not give itself.
This is the fourth equine health advisory HISA has issued, following earlier work on proximal forelimb fractures, exercise-associated sudden death, and proximal hindlimb fractures. The pattern matters. An institution building an advisory record based on its own data collection is doing something the sport did not have before and could not have gotten voluntarily from the entities that had the authority to build it and chose not to.
Past The Wire has been willing to criticize HISA when the criticism was warranted. That willingness is only worth something if it is matched by an equal willingness to say, when the work is good, that the work is good. This work is good. The data is significant. The recommendations are sound. The transparency is welcome.
What happens next is the industry’s call, and its response will say something about whether the long, difficult work of building a safer sport is actually underway, or whether the political fight over who gets to be in charge is still consuming the oxygen that the horses do not have to spare.
I’m Not Like Everybody Else:
