The owners of a thoroughbred racing horse whose tail was torn off as she sprinted out of a starting gate during a race have filed a $49,999 lawsuit against the operators of the Oregon racetrack where the mishap occurred.
Owners Bill and Roberta Fekkes contend that an employee on the gate crew at Grants Pass Downs in southern Oregon appeared to have wrapped their horse’s tail around the back end of the starting gate enclosure or may have been holding onto it just before the race began on Sept. 3, 2023. The couple claims that a racetrack veterinarian instructed the employee to free the horse’s tail, but the employee failed to do so before the race began.
Such an incident is rare but not unheard of. In Pennsylvania, weeks before the Oregon incident, a different race horse lost its tail after it was wrapped around part of the starting gate enclosure, according to a $22,000 lawsuit filed last year.
The horse in Pennsylvania was euthanized, according to that lawsuit. The horse at the center of the Oregon lawsuit — ”Heart on the Run” — was not.
Wade Rarick, a former owner who is not a party to the Oregon lawsuit but said he trained and raced Heart on the Run in her first years on the track, told The Oregonian/OregonLive the horse’s misfortune is deeply upsetting.
“I hope to God they can figure out how that happened so they can fix it, so it won’t happen again,” Rarick said. “Because that’s terrible.”
Rarick said gate crew or others sometimes hold up a horse’s tail before the beginning of a race to ensure that the horse stays standing and doesn’t try to sit down. He said a horse’s tail shouldn’t be tied to any part of the gate. He said he has never seen a horse lose its tail under the circumstances listed in the lawsuit.
The suit, filed last week in Josephine County Circuit Court, says that the tail of the then-4-year-old horse was “degloved” from the soft tissue and bone underneath.
“The hair and skin of Heart’s tail ended up on the ground,” states the suit.
The mare was hospitalized and a veterinarian ultimately had to amputate much of what was left of Heart on the Run’s tail bone and soft tissue, according to the suit.
The lawsuit lists gate crew employee, James Harrell, and the Southern Oregon Horse Racing Association, which it says operates Grants Pass Downs, as defendants. Neither responded to requests for comment.
The racetrack used to be operated by self-made billionaire Travis Boersma, co-founder of the Dutch Bros coffee chain, but he gave up on his dream of reviving horse racing in the state and terminated his lease with the Josephine County in early 2023, months before Heart on the Run was hurt.
Kathryn Hall, an attorney for the plaintiffs, the Fekkeses, declined on behalf of her clients to share more details than the lawsuit offers, including how Heart on the Run is faring today, two years after her injuries. The Fekkeses live in central Washington, about an eight- to nine-hour drive from Grants Pass Downs.
They tried to restart her racing career, but her injuries ultimately forced them to put her into retirement, the suit states.
The suit says that Heart on the Run finished the race that day because her jockey was unaware of what happened until after the race. Racing career totals tracked by the horse racing website, Equibase, show that Heart on the Run pulled in less than $5,000 in winnings the following year, in 2024, but her time on the track ended after that. At the peak of her career, she made more than $25,000 per year for two consecutive years.
— Reporter Aimee Green covers politics, personal finance and issues that matter to consumers. She can be reached at 503-294-5119, agreen@oregonian.com or on Bluesky.
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