Victoria’s racehorse death dispute needs names, not just numbers

Ohope Wins was euthanised after falling in the Caulfield Cup. Two more horses subsequently died in Victorian racing: a two-year-old filly collapsed on track at Ballarat, and a six-year-old gelding was euthanised after an injury in Alexandra. For a public helping to fund the industry, those deaths leave a basic question: can racing provide an account of its losses that people can actually check? ¹

A new annual tally has sharpened that question without settling it. The Coalition for the Protection of Racehorses (CPR) attributes 48 Victorian horse deaths to the racing industry between August 2025 and July 2026. Racing Victoria, the state’s thoroughbred regulator, says there were 22 racing fatalities and calls the coalition’s figure “misleading, if not mischievous”. Both accounts were reported by ABC on October 27. ¹

The difference is not simply 26 horses awaiting an arithmetic correction. The organisations are counting deaths under different boundaries, and there is no horse-by-horse reconciliation showing exactly where their accounts separate. CPR supplied ABC with its Victorian list. Racing Victoria said it was unable to supply ABC with a list of horse names. ¹

Racing Victoria’s objections deserve more than dismissal. Its written response says CPR’s list includes horses that died from colic and paddock accidents, three killed in a road accident, and horses whose last races were 10, 12 and 17 years earlier. It also identifies a horse that died from complications following a suspected stingray attack. Those are substantial reasons to question what a racing-industry death count is intended to measure. ¹

But examples are not a reconciliation. They do not show which horses constitute the regulator’s 22, how every other horse was classified, or whether all excluded deaths lacked a connection to racing. A horse dying away from a racecourse may still have died because of an injury sustained there. Location alone cannot answer the welfare question.

CPR general manager Helle Erhardson explicitly rejects an on-track-only interpretation of her organisation’s report. “We’re not claiming these are all on-track deaths, these are the ones we know are racing-related,” she told ABC. Her explanation includes 15 horses that died in the days after racing injuries and nine that died from starvation. ¹

Those subtotals do not solve the Victorian discrepancy. ABC’s account does not unambiguously identify them as Victorian-only figures, and any overlap with the regulator’s total would need checking. Adding them to 22 would manufacture a reconciliation rather than establish one. The original 2026 report and a matched register have not been independently examined for this account.

There are legitimate distinctions to preserve: an immediate racing fatality, delayed euthanasia following a racing injury, and the death of a long-retired horse are not interchangeable events. A useful register could retain those distinctions while allowing readers to see the full record. The choice need not be between counting everything identically and making some deaths invisible.

DeathWatch Report 2026 puts Victoria above every other state in CPR’s recorded death count for the first time. The previous 12 reports recorded the most deaths in New South Wales, which runs about 1,000 more races each year than Victoria. That history does not establish which state is most dangerous for an individual horse. ¹

For that comparison, the definitions would need to match, along with exposure measures such as horses or starts. A larger racing programme can produce more deaths without necessarily having a higher fatality rate; a broader reporting system can record more deaths without demonstrating worse underlying safety. Calling Victoria the “deadliest” state goes further than these raw totals can support.

Nationally, CPR attributes at least 160 deaths to the racing industry during the 2025–26 season, including more than 50 from front-limb injuries. No Victorian subtotal for those injuries has been established. Erhardson says the minimum reflects deaths the group could confirm, with trials and training on private properties difficult for the public to scrutinise. It is not a statistical estimate of an unseen additional toll. ¹

CPR also says nearly 70 per cent of the horses in its account began racing or trialling at two, before it argues they were likely to have reached full skeletal maturity. That describes their histories; it does not demonstrate that starting at two caused their deaths. ¹

Racing Victoria offers a different safety measure: a claimed 99.95 per cent safety record over the past decade, alongside an annual average of more than 40,000 thoroughbred starters. The calculation behind that percentage is not supplied in ABC’s account, nor is its applicability to CPR’s broader death categories. Starters also do not necessarily mean distinct horses. The percentage cannot resolve the disagreement over which deaths belong in the register. ¹

The deaths attracting attention this spring occurred after the annual report’s July endpoint. Erhardson places the Ballarat and Alexandra horses among 12 Victorian racehorse deaths over the preceding nine weeks. CPR’s October 20 statement had counted 10 deaths from racing-related injuries over eight weeks. The later account covers a later, longer window—not an identical period with a contradictory total. Neither figure should be added to, or treated as part of, the August 2025–July 2026 tally. ^{1 15}

The complete identities, dates and circumstances of all 12 recent deaths remain unestablished in the available account. Ohope Wins’s death brought unusual attention because of the prominence of the Caulfield Cup, not because she was the only horse dying in Victorian racing. That is the force of Erhardson’s argument, even while the broader totals remain contested.

Stewards cleared the jockeys involved in the Caulfield Cup fall and described Ohope Wins’s reason for euthanasia as a “serious racing injury”. The online replay has been edited to remove the fall involving Ohope Wins and Half Yours. Erhardson says the same unspecified injury description appears for nearly all Victorian deaths and criticises the removal of incident footage more broadly. That wider allegation remains distinct from the documented edit to this particular replay. ¹

Victorian taxpayers have supplied A$72 million through the Racing Industry Fund over four years. Labor has promised to increase that figure to A$80 million if re-elected in November—a conditional pledge, not money already spent. A government spokesperson told ABC it was working with Racing Victoria to ensure the industry “continues to meet the highest standards of animal welfare”. ¹

Racing Victoria says the industry generates A$5.5 billion in annual economic activity and supports nearly 34,000 full-time-equivalent jobs. Those are the regulator’s estimates, not independently audited findings in this reporting; full-time equivalents measure work rather than individual workers. The regulator also accuses organisations such as CPR of seeking to shut racing down and deprive Victorians of jobs and a lawful social activity. ¹

Employment and enjoyment are legitimate parts of the argument over racing’s future. They do not determine whether a particular horse’s death should be attributed to the industry. Equally, opposing racing does not make every death on an activist’s list demonstrably racing-related. Both positions require records that can withstand examination.

CPR’s Nup to the Cup campaign continues through the Spring Racing Carnival, including the following week’s Melbourne Cup. Erhardson wants racing bodies to publish death records themselves. The immediate test is narrower than the argument about whether racing should survive: will Racing Victoria release the names and classifications needed to check its account against the coalition’s? Until then, the public has two totals, but no shared record explaining the difference. ¹