Mike Brunker Horse racing editor • Profile • E-mail

BALTIMORE - There are times when even the most ardent horse racing fans wonder why they invest so much emotional currency in the sport, and this is one of them.

There’s nothing like a catastrophic injury — the kind that cut short Barbaro’s racing career and, far worse, put his life in jeopardy — to make you look in the mirror and ask yourself why you’re devoted to a sport that has a nasty habit of killing off or crippling the majestic animals that drew you in to begin with.

(There’s also its not-inconsequential side-effect of putting the humans who ride the horses into coffins or wheelchairs, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

It’s a conversation I’ve had with myself on numerous occasions, most memorably when one of my favorite horses broke a leg in a $4,000 claiming race years ago — long after the stakes race glory that first etched his name in my memory — and had to be destroyed.

But when it happens to a horse that had just burst into the public eye as a Triple Crown contender in a high-profile race like the Preakness, the internal discussion is suddenly a public debate. Now friends and acquaintances are, in various forms, asking the same question I’ve posed to myself on other occasions: How can you enjoy a sport that causes so much harm to its animal athletes?

For some who make their living in the racing industry, the answer is sometimes just a shrug and the words, “That’s racing,” or, as Hall of Fame trainer LeRoy Jolley once put it, “This is not a game for little boys in short pants.”

But you’ll also see sorrow written large on the faces of many racetrackers after an accident like the one that befell Barbaro. Witness jockey Edgar Prado’s tearful embrace of the horse’s assistant trainer Peter Brette moments after dismounting from his badly injured mount.

The emotional equation is even more complicated for racing fans, who after all aren’t dependent on the sport to put food on their tables.

It was summed up well in an e-mail I received from a reader shortly after Barbaro’s gut-wrenching accident.

FREE VIDEO Supporting Barbaro Fans gathered outside a veterinary hospital show their support for Barbaro and his connections.

“I think my heart is so broken I will never watch another race,” the reader wrote, adding that she was typing the message “blinded by tears.”

Let me be clear that I’m talking about passionate racing fans here, not the pure gamblers who consider horses to be living, breathing versions of the numbered balls that drop out of the lottery’s popcorn machine.

These fans — the sport’s true fans — have an abiding respect for the sport’s storied history and an almost reverential regard for the mighty thoroughbreds whose lives literally revolve around the racetrack.

I put myself in that category. I, too, have been reduced to tears by racing accidents in my 25-plus years as a fan and, later, as a turf writer. And I have experienced the sickening feeling of being kicked in the stomach (my other physical reaction to the carnage) more times than I care to remember.

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On those occasions I’ve also asked myself whether I could watch another race or should just leave the racetrack and never look back.

So far, the answer has always been yes, and I believe it always will be.

The reasons are hard to explain, especially to those who are only vaguely aware of racing outside the Triple Crown season and think I’m crazy to follow what appears to them to be a blood sport like bull fighting.