Mike Celizic

There will be a lot more than a jockey riding on Big Brown’s back this Saturday at Belmont. There’ll be a whole industry up there.

I don’t know that any sport has ever depended as much on one athlete and one event as much as horse racing is counting on Big Brown in the third leg of the Triple Crown. If the horse wins, it’s magic and glory and endless wonderful publicity. If it loses, it’s another in a 30-year string of disappointments. And if it breaks a leg, it’s the end of horse racing.

It’s the difference between Secretariat and Barbaro, the difference between glory and death.

It’s a good thing horses don’t understand any of that or have any clue why all those thousands of screaming people show up just to watch them run around in a circle. If they knew how much was at stake, they’d probably faint in the starting gate.

And if they knew just how fragile they are and the risks they take every time a small person with a whip climbed on their backs, they might decide there’s an easier way to earn their daily oats.

But the horses know none of this, which is why the industry is under so much scrutiny. First Barbaro goes down at the Preakness a year ago. Then Eight Belles shatters both ankles at the Kentucky Derby this year. And just like that, people are asking, why? And not just why did they die, but why do we tolerate this sport at all?

It’s not like people taking risks climbing cliffs or driving race cars. People know what dangers await them. Animals don’t. When a driver sees the wall coming at him at 200 m.p.h., he’s thinking, “Oh, vulgarity!” because he knows what’s happening. When a horse’s leg snaps and somebody sticks a needle in it and the lights go out forever, it’s thinking, “Huh?” or maybe, “Wha…?” because it doesn’t have a clue.

And that’s why people get so angry and upset when a horse goes down, especially a popular one on national television. The horse can’t assess risk and decide whether to participate, so it falls on us to see to it that no animals are killed in the presentation of this spectacle.

We haven’t done such a good job of it lately, and if it happens again in the Belmont, I’m not sure racing will ever recover. If it happens to Big Brown, the sport is going to spend a lot of time explaining to an outraged public why it shouldn’t be banned. One of those Congressional subcommittees might even take time out from making baseball players and NFL executives squirm to put horseracing on trial.

Horse racing’s in an unenviable position in all of this because it has no control over what happens. Either a horse will get hurt or it won’t. There’s no way of predicting it.

Horse people will tell you that the animals are treated exceptionally well, and the ones that are worth big money certainly are. They work short hours, get the best feed, and never have to worry about making a rent payment. And every day someone gives them an all-over brushing.

They will also say that racing deaths are rare, which is true, but not true. Any individual track will see a catastrophic injury very rarely. But pretty much every day, somewhere in America, a horse will go down.

It’s inevitable. The animals have been bred to be fast – and fragile. They’re also injected with various drugs, including steroids, and then there’s that little guy flogging them to go faster with the whip. Because the best ones run just a handful of races in their lifetimes before retiring to a life of making baby horses, their weaknesses may never show up as they would if they ran dozens of races over several years. The problem is getting worse, not better.

Take Big Brown, which has a history of foot injuries. The horse is just three years old and has already spent time on the DL. After winning the Preakness, it had more problems – a cracked hoof. The horse’s handlers have called in the best hoof-doctor to patch things up, but the equine equivalent of a hangnail got a lot of publicity. People can’t help but think about Barbaro and Eight Belles when they hear about another horse having any sort of foot problem

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If all goes according to the script that racing has put together, Big Brown gallops to a historic victory, the sport has a new hero and a ton of great publicity, and everybody goes home with a warm glow about horse racing.

But if something bad happens, I don’t know how the sport will defend itself. It won’t die overnight. Things don’t happen that way. It will just lose a whole lot of casual fans, the ones who make the big races the money machines they are. It will draw down the wrath of legislators hoping to pile up political capital in an election year. And it will never recover.