It’s been 17 years since the malady of the hoof known as laminitis made headlines, when Secretariat was put down at Claiborne farm in Kentucky at the age of 19 to assuage his unbearable pain. At press time, the Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro is hanging on to his life by a fragile thread.The undefeated winner of six races in a row broke down in May, just yards out of the starting gate at Baltimore’s Pimlico Race Course. He had been the favorite for the Preakness stakes that day, the second leg of what many had thought would be his Triple Crown. Barbaro has been in intensive care ever since, and he has continued to demonstrate as a patient the heart, tractability, and intelligence that made him such a fine athlete.

Whether or not Barbaro’s laminitis kills him is at this point irrelevant. It most likely will. Better that he dies happy, ears up and on the feed, than that he suffer interminably as one thing leads to another. His legacy will prove important, and his influence will far outweigh the simple tally of his victories.

Barbaro’s initial injury — serious fractures in three places in his right hind leg and a dislocation — had been healing exceedingly well. But there is a saying around horses: “No hoof, no horse.”

The hoof is a complicated thing, but basically it is a very evolved middle finger with what we normally consider to be the “hoof” being an over-developed fingernail. I’m certainly not a vet, but as I understand it, the cannon bone is the last bit of the horse’s leg, similar to the last, smallest, joint of a finger. Between the hoof walls and that bone is the laminae. Laminitis is the inflammation of that tissue, and can be caused by many things, including the eating of frosty grass, which points to the delicate nature of these seemingly indestructible animals. Barbaro’s laminitis is caused by uneven weight distribution in the limbs.

“The left hind is basically as bad laminitis as you can have,” Dr. Dean Richardson, who has been caring for Barbaro at the University of Pennsylvania Widener Veterinary Hospital since the horse’s injury, said yesterday morning at a press conference.”We removed a large portion of his [left] foot wall … We’ll see if can re-grow his hoof. It will take months and months … If he starts acting like he doesn’t want to stand on the leg, that’s it. That will be when we call it quits.”

It’s a tough spot, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the horse were dead by the time this hits the newsstands.

What’s most interesting about this whole heartbreaking scenario has been the outpouring of concern regarding a single animal, a single athlete in a sport that many — even those inside the sport itself — have written off as a foundering tradition. Barbaro was well on his way to revitalizing the sport when he broke down. In the aftermath of his accident, his influence has proved only greater.

On Wednesday, Barbaro raced neckand-neck with Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger’s press conference about his motorcycle accident. The flowers at Barbaro’s hospital may have slowed from the deluge that followed the Preakness, but they still haven’t stopped. Again, as on that torturous Sunday when Barbaro was first under the surgeon’s knife, we find a world with bated breath hovering at the hospital door to hear updates regarding the health of a horse. Even if he had won the Triple Crown, it’s hard to imagine Barbaro engaging the public interest so dramatically, and for such a sustained period. It’s a marvelous accomplishment.

But it doesn’t stop there. Hollywood Park is replacing its main dirt track with a synthetic surface said to reduce injury, and the other major California tracks — Santa Anita, Del Mar, Los Alamitos, Bay Meadows, and Golden Gate — are soon to follow suit. While the process was begun earlier in the year, I’m sure that the unanimous decision of the California Horse Racing Board on May 25 was, at least in part, spurred by Barbaro’s breakdown. Certainly, public support for the project has been encouraged by Barbaro’s tragedy.

The tragedies continue in Chicago, where racing began again on July 7 after the track surface was manipulated in an attempt to slow the breathtaking rate of fatal breakdowns. Seventeen horses so far this year have fatally broken down during racing. While breakdowns this frequent would warrant attention in any year, one cannot help but think that post-Barbaro, there is extra-urgency to resolve the problem.

Hopefully, Barbaro’s calamity will continue to inspire attention.The Maryland Racing Commission recently investigated if anything untoward had happened to Barbaro during his final race — if, as was suspected, his heels had been clipped accidentally by another horse. They agreed unanimously that the evidence was inconclusive, and called it bad luck.

Surely it was. But throughout the industry, one that is plagued by bad luck, you can’t help but think that the cards are stacked against the horses.

Resurfacing tracks is a good start, but so would be a reform in breeding techniques, a return to the thoroughbreds bred to run, bred for stamina, rather than the quick sprinters we see today, who are bred for the auction ring to repay investment quickly in short races.

I stress again that I’m not a vet, but perhaps we should limit the use of antiinflammatory drugs and diuretics. Certainly, the industry should continue to tighten the testing for illegal drugs.

Barbaro was an excellent racehorse bound for glory on the track. Winning the Kentucky Derby against the best 3-year-olds in the country is an immense accomplishment. His influence on the sport, however, will be much greater, and his unfortunate death, after having captured the hearts and imaginations of an entire nation not from the starting gate but from his stall in intensive care, will be a wake up call to the industry.

Mr. Watman is the author of “Race Day: A Spot on the Rail With Max Watman” (Ivan R. Dee).