The New York Racing Association (NYRA) is challenging the methodology used by The New York Times to determine horse injury rates that were the basis for a front page article published March 25.

In an April 12 press release, the NYRA outlined how the Times developed a metric for an "incident rate," defined as the number of times a set of terms appeared in official data per 1,000 horse starts.

"To assess how often horses break down or get injured, The Times purchased official data covering more than 150,000 race results from 2009 through 2011," NYRA quoted a sidebar to the main Times article. "The data are compiled by trained 'chart callers,' and used to compile results charts that bettors use to evaluate horses. The Times searched the data for terms indicating that a horse encountered a physical problem: broke down, vanned off, injured, lame, euthanized, died, collapsed, bleeding, or went wrong."

Using chart callers' descriptions of how a race was run to estimate how often horses are injured is "unreliable and potentially deceptive," NYRA contends