Nick Nicholson, the president and chief executive officer of Keeneland, called for the Thoroughbred industry to expand its efforts to protect its participants–both human and equine–from injury on the opening day of the third Welfare and Safety of the Racehorse Summit June 25 at the Lexington track.

The Keeneland executive also said tracks should release, on an individual basis, information collected by the Equine Injury Database about their facilities because "openess and transparency is the right way to go." Participation by tracks in the EID currently is based on the premise that information about individual operations will not be made public.

During the summit's first day, Nicholson presented Keeneland data that included the results for its Polytrack surface and turf course since Jan. 1, 2007. There have been 10 racehorse fatalities in 9,934 starts, or an average of 1.01 fatalities per 1,000 starts. Since October 2006 on Polytrack only, there have been 10 fatalities in 9,662 starts, or 1.03 fatalities per 1,000 starts.

"This is on our website (https://www.keeneland.com/lists/copy//copy.aspx?Page=Safetystats), and we'll continue to update our website," Nicholson said. "I know that a number of other tracks are going to release their data, and hooray, I commend them. I wish that the data could be released by trainer as well