The latest state to parlay with Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) is Florida, and this time the mighty mavens of DFS are looking for a deal instead of a fight.  Rather than going to court again, they are uniting to do what all good Americans with and ax to grind  and money to spare do – buy themselves some legislators.

The big hitters – Draft Kings and Fan Duel – as well as some of the upstarts have banded together to push $220,000 in the direction of some key legislators. All the DFS operators ask in return is the ability to run their games without the interference of government regulation.

Remember the famous words spoken by Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address?

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation,  conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Inspiring words, but when Lincoln talked about equality, he must have known it to be a celestrial ideal, an abstraction, because it can never be an absolute that applies without limits to all. If everyone and everything was equal, we would have never developed the Bell Curve and the Supreme Court would have come down on the other side of Citizens United. No constitution can change the immutable law of politics: money talks, and bullshit walks.

This isn’t about whether DFS is a game of skill versus gambling. Anyone who decides it is or isn’t a game of skill is right. Anyone who decides it is or isn’t gambling is right. DFS is whatever you want or need it to be.

There is no aspect of life that comes completely risk free. And there is no betting game that doesn’t have an element of chance. The best poker players, horseplayers, or DFS players will always rise to the top in the long run, but that makes no difference to those who want to equate betting and gambling. Skill becomes irrelevant if it is your mission to make sure everyone “pays to play.”

In the case of DFS, the going rate in Florida would be an initial license fee of $500,000 and an annual renewal fee of $100,000. The best part would be no government interference in the activites of DFS. Are you kidding me? Horseracing is supposed to compete with that?

It gets even better. The Seminoles, who would like a gambling monopoly in Florida, sent $500,000 to Gov. Rick Scott’s political action committee called Let’s Get to Work. It should be more fully titled, Let’s Get to Work Getting Rick Scott More PAC Funding. According to a column by well known Florida writer Carl Hiaasen, Scott recently signed a new gambling compact that would give the tribe’s seven casinos exclusive rights to roulette, craps and blackjack. In return, the state would be guaranteed at least $3 billion from profit-sharing over seven years, beginning in 2017. Of course, the deal is contingent on the legislature approving it, but another few hundred thousand should take care of that.

The best part for Florida legislators looking to fill their campaign war chests is that the Seminoles oppose DFS. This means both sides will spend freely to support or oppose the tribal compact. In the meantime, horseracing gets no help, no equity.

Equality means all the gambling groups – Indian casinos, DFS, horseracing tracks – should all be regulated and taxed so that one doesn’t get the competitive advantage over the other. Let the market decide who succeeds and fails the old fashioned way. As long as horseracing has to pay up front to do business, they will always be at a competitive disadvantage against the other groups. And if DFS and the Seminoles get their deals, the uphill climb for horseracing just got a little bit steeper. What we need is fairness for all, but as long as we are reliant on having to line the pockets of governmental executives and legislators before they decide which laws and compacts they’ll support, horseracing is at a clear disadvantage. Horseracing cast its lot decades ago when the sport was king and profit was plentiful. It’s time to revisit the deal in light of the broad expansion of gambling markets. Forty years ago if you wanted to play table games your option was Vegas, and betting football in the rest country was limited to coded phone calls and conversations with local bookmakers. The times, they have a’changed.

Horseracing will not survive in its current incarnation without some relief, and I don’t mean slot machines or instant racing. I mean internal and external structural relief. Some companies, like CDI, have decided to join the casino business, and other tracks, like the Pennsylvania tracks, Delaware, and Charles Town, have simply become casinos with a side of horseracing. They will all tolerate the horseracing only as long as they have to. Starting with Florida would be fine, especially considering they are apparently wide-open for business, and someone like Frank Stronach may just have the clout to pull it off.

Horseracing simply cannot survive if it is forced to compete on an uneven playing field. If the industry doesn’t get smart and play the game that creates wins for all the stakeholders, then it will continue to deteriorate while DFS and Indian casinos prosper.

The New York State Gaming Commission has adopted new rules aimed at repeat violators. Essentially, they adopted the same sort of point system other states use to target trainers with multiple violations. Each violation will accumulate points, with the humber of points per violation dependent on the severity of the offense.  Reaching certain point levels will result in suspension. For example, accumulating 3 1/2 to 5 points would result in a 30 day suspension, while 11 points would bag the offender a year off.

Nobody seems to have any serious opposition to this sort of rule, and I expect you won’t hear any until someone gets pinched for multiple violations of the same medication, much like what happened to Bill Brashears. (http://halveyonhorseracing.com/?p=1351) In any case, if the rule snags offenders looking to gain an edge, it’s a good tool for the toolbox.

What may be more interesting are the proposed rules still under consideration.

This includes an idea to reduce exercise-induced pulmonary hemorrhage incidents. The NYSGC wants to more specifically use episodes of epistaxis (bleeding from the nostrils) to restrict horses from racing. This includes mandating disclosure of such cases to future owners, and requiring endoscopic exams after such episodes. I’m not how the rule will work out in practice, but it doesn’t sound like a bad idea.

The proposed rules also call for something I have advocated for a long time – requiring a log of all medications given to a horse, both by veterinarians (already required in NY) and trainers and their employees. According to an article in the Blood Horse,

“The package of proposed rules also include efforts to eliminate “the unnecessary administration of metabolism-modifying drugs,” [state equine medical director Scott} Palmer told the board, as well as new requirements involving drug prescription renewals, and the effort to ban the administration of drugs “in the absence of an actual medical disorder.”

That last part was targeted at trainer Steve Asmussen who was accused by PETA of unnecessary administration of the thyroid medication thyroxine.

While the medication log is an excellent step, I’ve suggested that for the strategy to be most effective it has to be accompanied by an audit requirement. One of the problems with enforcement is that most of the money and effort goes to post-race violations. By doing, say, monthly audits of the medication log, you have a real opportunity to catch a problem before it manifests in a race result, and this should be priority one. After a result has been declared official, the horseplayer is already screwed if one of the horses has a violation level. I don’t know what the exact division should be between pre-race and post-race testing and investigatory funding, but it currently is too heavily weighted toward getting offenders after the real damage is done.

Putting away bad guys may keep them from committing crimes, and that is one element of enforcement, but I will continue to push for the idea that tracks need to increase proactive efforts to find violators before the bettor is taken advantage of. They need to hire real investigators and not incompetent hacks (http://halveyonhorseracing.com/?p=1742). I’ve outlined a series of proactive efforts in the article about Kirk Ziadie’s suspension (http://halveyonhorseracing.com/?p=2911) and if tracks are serious about protecting bettors, they will start taking the proactive part of enforcement more seriously.

What everyone who works in enforcement knows is that a violation prevented is far better than catching someone after the fact. Make the bettors believe the races are being run fairly and you are on the road to helping the sport rebound, but if all we ever read about is suspending a Kirk Ziadie after 18 violations, racing may have won a battle, but unless it uses all the potential tools, it will never get the necessary public confidence or win the war.

Kirk Ziadie, to the surprise of almost no one, had an administrative law judge in Florida recommend that he be suspended for six years and fined $18,000 for a series of clenbuterol violations.

Clenbuterol is a legal therapeutic medication in Florida. It functions as a decongestant and bronchodilator, and can have anabolic (muscle growth promoting) effects. Clenbuterol has long been a controversial medication in horseracing. It’s even been banned in some places (New  Mexico).

Ziadie was cited for multiple violations, and in his defense he pleaded stubborn.

In 2013 horsemen were told by Florida to increase their withdrawal time for clenbuterol from five days to 14. Despite the “advice” Ziadie continued to run his horses five days after he gave them clenbuterol, and subsequently had six positives.

In testimony, Ziadie said he chose not to change to the new, longer withdrawal time.

Ziadie said to the law judge, “I was still stuck on the five days, your honor. I was stubborn. I know I did wrong. I know that there was a rumor and I know there was a brochure going around—14 days—but I was trying to do the best for my horses. I thought that if was the medication that they needed at the time when we were racing and I take blame for being stubborn and making a mistake, but I did keep it at five days.”

Ziadie made an effort to get the samples thrown out, and succeeded for the blood samples. But the urine samples stayed in and revealed 18 violations. Ziadie was pretty much up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

I’m not seeing any way he wiggles out of this one. He called it stubborn, it just as easily could have been called arrogant, putting his head in the sand or something more nefarious. His statement showed that he really didn’t measure his actions with the same sense of gravity that the administrative judge noted. In his decision, the administrative judge said that while clenbuterol has some therapeutic value, its adverse effects and excessive use present a danger to racing thoroughbreds.

You can’t have it both ways. It’s either a useful therapeutic or a dangerous drug. The administrative judge can believe whatever he wants, but as long as the drug was legal, limit the commentary to the relevant facts of the case. As for racing, make up your mind about whether clenbuterol should be legal, let trainers know, and let’s move on.

Where I want to zero in is with the responsibilities of track management and enforcing authorities. Ziadie made the decision to engage in wrongful behavior, but all of Ziadie’s violations were as a result of post-race testing and not anything proactive.

Ziadie was ultimately charged with 18 violations. You can see Ziadie as a serial cheater – you don’t commit 18 violations and claim it was totally unintended – but how does the violation count get to 18 before someone takes action?

At the end of the day, a violation that never occurs is infinitely better than having to take an enforcement action after the fact. Racetracks can do so much more to prevent violations than they are currently doing. Let’s start with the obvious.

Closed circuit cameras should be mandatory on the backside. Not every track has them, and even when they are available the storage times are not always long enough to ensure a violation can be matched with a video record. It does no good to recycle tapes every 15 days if it takes 30 days to notify a trainer of a violation. Regardless of trainer responsibility rules, if a trainer has video evidence that a horse was tampered with, that should form an affirmative defense if a violation is measured.

The stewards should be conducting regular, unannounced inspections. You cannot convince me that authorities are totally in the dark about what goes on in the stable area. When A.C. Avila was investigated for an acepromazine violation for the horse Masochistic, investigators found a plastic bin full of medications/drugs, many of which were unmarked. They may have never found the bin without the prompting of Masochistic’s violation. That sort of thing needs to be cleaned up before it gets out of hand, and regular, unannounced inspections would go a long way to help trainers pay closer attention.

The authorities need to have trained, professional investigators available. Many of the cases I’ve looked at had poorly trained and barely competent investigators. While some may argue the burden of proof after a positive test rests with the trainer, I believe the track owes it to the betting public and other trainers to get to the bottom of some cases, especially cases where there was no way the trainer could have administered the offending substance. You will never fully gain the public trust when you leave too many questions unanswered or you fail to punish the right people.

Random drug testing should be mandatory for workers on the backside. Given the number of potential cases of environmental cross-contamination that occur, the authorities need to know potential sources of the contamination. And obviously tracks should help establish and fund support groups for those with drug problems.

Pre-race testing programs should be established, especially for trainers who have had previous positives. As I said, a violation prevented is infinitely more valuable than a post-race positive.

All medications/drugs should come from a single track pharmacy, and veterinarians should be required to keep detailed records on medications purchased and used, and there should be regular audits on those records. This is really the most important thing tracks could do. When people ask how we can be more like Hong Kong, an obvious answer is that we can make sure every regulated compound given by a veterinarian to a horse is catalogued, the records are kept permanently, and the track has unlimited access to the records. If Florida had Kirk Ziadies’s records and had seen that he was dosing horses with Clenbuterol five days before a race, they could have intervened before things got so far out of hand. Or maybe Ziadie would have never been “stubborn” had he known he was on record. What happened to the administering veterinarian in all this? Did he not know about the new clenbuterol advice? Did he tell Ziadie? Did he refuse to administer clenbuterol because he knew it would likely result in positive post-race tests? And if the vet (or Ziadie) was required to buy from a single source and the amounts being bought were documented, wouldn’t the racing officials have the necessary heads-up to investigate? And any horse that shows up with a drug/medication that is not in the official log could earn the trainer additional penalties. Veterinarians could also be subject to penalties for not properly logging medications.

Perhaps you haven’t thought about it in that way, but the fact that tracks are not as proactive as they could be means the number of violations is higher than it has to be. For those who are indignant about drugs in racing and rail about trainers, there are more solutions than just waiting for the trainer to come up with a positive post-race test. For all the people who “knew” Kirk Ziadie must have been doing something to gain an edge, did you also call for the track to do more than just wait for Ziadie to get caught?

If you believe drugs in racing are a scourge, why would you not favor stopping as many violations as possible before they happen by using technology, proactive intervention, and tighter control over how horses are being medicated? The trainer may get the ultimate blame for a medication violation, but track management and the enforcing authorities are not without opportunities to keep at least some violations from ever becoming news. Let’s hold them all to a higher standard.