Category Archives: Opinions

Opinions and editorials

Opinions

The End for Lavender Road

I blogged the other day about the incident with Lavender Road. If you hadn’t heard she scratched before the 7th race on Wednesday and as she was returning to the paddock she suddenly collapsed. She tried getting up and on her way back down she apparently hit her head on the padded rail. She tried getting up at least 9 more times, and 9 times she flopped right back down. Finally they sedated her and took her to the Rood and Riddle vet clinic.

Initially they though it might be her right foreleg but x-rays were negative. She seemed to be exhibiting symptoms of heat stroke and was treated for that, but when she didn’t respond as expected they did further x-rays. At that point they found a fractured vertebrae that could not be repaired and she was humanely euthanized.

Trainer Abigail Adsit had the horse since she was a weanling, so she is taking the loss very hard.

In my previous blog I gave high praise to Junior Alvarado who sensed  something was wrong with the horse in warmups and alerted the vet who then scratched her. Alvarado indicated that her strides were choppy and she was making strange sounds. I also think the track vets and attendants did their level best to treat the horse on the track.

Heat stroke would have been quite odd given that it was not hot and the horse hadn’t done more than warm up, unless the horse had some sort of inherent problem with heat dissipation. And the speculation was that the cracked vertebrae happened after she smacked her head on the rail.

But the question remains. What caused her to go down in the first place? Did no one see the signs before she got on the track? Was it perhaps a virus with symptoms that mimicked heat stroke? Could it have been the Lasix she was given on race day?

Abigail Adsit is like a lot of trainers. Her charges are like pets, and they are treated as such. But five years ago she was matriculating at Union College. Did her lack of experience as a trainer cause her to miss something? She obviously doesn’t have a big stable – she only had one other starter at Saratoga. It seems unlikely if the horse was stepping badly or was showing symptoms that looked like heat stroke that there wouldn’t have been some sign in the paddock.

The general sense is that we’ll never know what happened to Lavender Road to cause her to collapse on the track. It seems highly unlikely that a foreleg injury was the explanation, and while I’m not Maggie Wolfendale I watched the horse trot off after Alvarado dismounted and the horse did not seem to be seriously injured. People who were watching the horse thought that when she was up long enough she seemed to be favoring her leg, but she was never up for more than a few seconds. It didn’t look that way to me, but I’ll admit I was focused more on the fact that she looked pretty loopy. Ostensibly the x-rays on her foreleg confirmed that it wasn’t a bone injury anyway. The turn of events after she banged her head seem to have led to her ultimate demise, but again we may never know if the vertebrae was a prior problem or completely happened when she banged her head on the rail.

In my history of going to racetracks, Lavender Road was not the most obscene injury I’ve seen. The reason Lavender Road got so much press was that the whole thing took place in full view of the crowd. It’s hard to ignore a horse struggling as she was on the track and not have it have an impact. Most of the time horses are attended behind a screen out of view of the crowd. It was also hard to ignore that the 8th race was held up for close to an hour. Had she made it to the paddock and fallen over we may never have read about her. But in today’s facebook and twitter world, nothing publicly happens that isn’t making it’s way around the planet 30 seconds later.

I think the stewards need to at least do a little investigating and rule out either prior injury or a medication problem. This would certainly be in the best interests of the racing public, but moreover it could fully keep negative speculation about Abigail Adsit from circulating.

Opinions, Stories and Reporting

Lavender Road at Saratoga

Today’s 7th race was a $50,000 starter allowance for fillies and mares on the turf.

The  1 horse, Lavender Road  never made it to the starting gate.

While the horses were warming up and before they made it on to the turf course, Lavender Road was scratched. There was a lot of chatter about whether it was the jockey or the vet who scratched the horse, but it really doesn’t matter. From my vantage point it looked like Junior Alvarado initiated the scratch, telling the vet she was warming up poorly and making strange noises. Alvarado may have saved Lavender Road’s life because as they were leading her off the track she collapsed.

Clearly she was disoriented and in bad shape. The vets and track staff worked furiously to bring her back around, even starting an IV and  packing bags of ice around her. She tried getting up six or seven times, but collapsed back on the track each time. Finally, they managed to sedate her and load her into the horse ambulance and she was taken to the highly regarded Rood and Riddle Vet Clinic.

I would give the highest marks to Junior Alvarado, the track staff, and the vets for how they handled the situation. I’d also give high marks to the track for holding the 8th race up for an hour while the vets worked on Lavender Road. The potential biggest losers were the horses in that 8th race who had to walk endlessly around the saddling trees in the paddock, but incredibly they stayed calm and managed to run a fairly predictable race.

So why the blog? Two things. Trainer Abigail Adsit  doesn’t start many horses in New York. In fact, Lavender Road was her second starter at the meet. I don’t know anything about Adsit, but I have to wonder how the horse made it on to the track in the first place. Second, I’d be very interested to know if medications might have had anything to do with it.

I’ll tell you what I don’t think it was. The weather. It was not hot. The NYRA web site showed the temperature was in the 60’s at first post and it really didn’t get a lot warmer. It wasn’t one of those brutal northeast days where everything wilts.

I think the betting public deserves an answer. I believe we need to know how the horse got out of the paddock and what exactly happened to cause her collapse. I believe we are owed some sort of investigation into trainer Adsit’s training methods. There were people on the public media expressing sympathy for Adsit. I’m holding off feeling bad for Adsit until someone says she did everything right and it was just one of those unfortunate things. Now read that carefully. I’m not accusing her of any mismanagement. I’m simply saying until we know the whole story let’s hold off on making any conclusions one way or the other.

Horseracing suffers enough bad publicity. When this sort of thing happens at one of the biggest race meets of the year, only the transparency of full disclosure makes sense for Saratoga and horseracing in general. I hope we get the answers we deserve.

Opinions

Do We Ever Blame the Horse?

Yesterday was a pretty good day for upsets. Untapable got drubbed by Bayern (as did every other horse in the Haskell). Goldencents was held at bay by Big Macher. Every time this happens it almost seems to become personal. And then the excuses fly.

  • Untapable was wide around both turns.
  • Goldencents was at the wrong distance.
  • Bayern fell into a highly speed favoring track.
  • Goldencents didn’t get into the bit until late in the race.
  • Social Inclusion was apparently suffering Lasix withdrawal (some humor) and was fractious in the gate, bothering Untapable.

I have an interesting explanation. Bayern and Big Macher were better horses in those races. Just because the crowd makes a horse the favorite doesn’t mean the horse is the best horse IN THAT RACE. The crowd is wrong about that 65% of the time.

Untapable was never going to live up to her hype in a field with the talent the Haskell had.  In her last race she swamped Princess Violet, a horse still eligible for NW2X and America, a horse eligible for NW2L.   My Miss Sophia and Unbridled Forever, the place and show horses from the Kentucky Oaks aren’t a lot more distinguished. I’m just going to ask you to think about this. Substitute Bayern for Untapable in the Mother Goose and speculate on the winning lengths.

Untapable was more an example of a hype horse, a horse people just wanted to see succeed. Anyone who said Untapable was completely outless in the Haskell would have been pilloried on social media. Is she a prize filly? You bet. Is she Rachel Alexandra? Not yet.

I’ve been in horseracing long enough to know that sometimes horses lose because they get poor trips. Sometimes they lose because they run into a bias that is against their running style. Sometimes they lose because they are sprinters trying to get a route and sometimes they are routers trying to sprint. And apparently they lose because other owners cheat and enter their fresh horse against your tired runner. But most of the time, horse lose because they are not as good as the winner.

It’s human nature to think you lost because things went wrong. But I, for one, am kind of tired of reading about all the reasons why the favorite lost. How about trying this one on for size. There was a better horse in the race today.

Opinions

Distasters at Del Mar

Link

So Del Mar decided to make a wider turf course in an attempt to attract the Breeder’s Cup. Apparently that was what took them past the finish line. 2017 is BC at the beach.

But something went wrong in the first two weeks of the meeting. Four horses have been put down after racing on the turf. Here is Del Mar’s statement:

“Del Mar is deeply saddened by the loss of Thoroughbred lives we have experienced at the track since the start of our season. Four of those losses have come on our new turf course. Despite that, we continue to have the utmost confidence in the course, as do our partners in this race meet — the Thoroughbred Owners of California, the California Thoroughbred Trainers, the Jockeys’ Guild and the California Horse Racing Board – all of whom have expressed that confidence to us today.

Nonetheless, as a precautionary measure, Del Mar will shift the two turf races scheduled for Sunday’s card off the course and run them instead on our main track. Additionally, we will move up scheduled maintenance on the turf course to Saturday evening instead of the Sunday evening schedule that had been planned. The entire course will be aerated and watered starting on Sunday. Track crews will work on it for the next three days and, in the end, reposition the inner rail at the 18-foot position.”

Track officials feel that they are adjusting on the side of caution with these moves. They are meant to give all parties involved – riders, trainers, owners and fans – assurance that everything possible is being done to ensure the track’s first priority, which is safety of horses and riders. Those same officials feel strongly that when racing resumes on Wednesday, the turf course will perform in a positive fashion.

So this is my interpretation of the statement.

Yeah, four horses broke down, but we don’t think it was the turf course. But, we realize that if another horse breaks down before we move the deck chairs around, we’ll have a shitstorm to deal with so we’re going to take racing off the turf.

Del Mar will aerate the course first. The purpose of aeration is to allow nutrients and water to get to the roots of the grass, and it is often used when soil is highly compacted.

So either the turf course was as hard as a rock, or they just had to do something and aeration was the first thing that popped up. I’ve written earlier about turf racing in America. The courses drain poorly, resulting in races being removed from the turf after a rain. Turf courses, other than at a few tracks, are really the stepchildren of the racetrack.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that California turf courses look like putting greens, while eastern turf courses look like the rough.

I’m going to flat out say this. Turf racing is inherently safer than dirt racing. The ground is softer, and as I’ve mentioned in my previous blog, horses don’t slide on the turf like they do on the dirt or synthetic. The roots of the grass stabilize the stride. Del Mar took great pains to issue a statement that said nothing was wrong – they just figured they’d come down on the side of caution. Let’s face it. To admit your turf course is unsafe really screams that the maintenance folks have done something wrong, either the wrong type of grass or poor maintenance practices. And if that is the case, somebody might just scream negligence.

I mean, assuming there was something wrong with the turf course.

The other thing Del Mar is doing is repositioning the rail. I assume this is so that horses are racing on the older, more mature part of the turf course and the turns aren’t quite as sharp. But again, if they think the rail was not in a good place, they are in essence admitting there was a flaw in the track.

There is another possibility of course. It just happened to be Del Mar’s bad luck to have four horses ready to break down racing on the track. From the reading I’ve done, catastrophic injury is usually not a random event.  Horses have multiple injuries which over time pile up until one day – snap! I’m not sure I’ve heard anyone say, maybe it’s the trainers who aren’t diagnosing these injuries, or maybe they are just filling their horses up with anti-inflammatories and analgesics to keep them on the track. As long as we are speculating, it’s at least as much a possibility as poor track maintenance.

I’m going to mention one other thing. If you are a veteran jockey, you have to know when horses are not traveling well because the course is not right. You have to feel the difference. Nobody else has the perspective of the person sitting on the back of a charging thoroughbred. Did the jockeys ever say anything? Hey, the course is hard as a rock. Or, my horse is sliding all over the place. I’m pretty tired of jockeys refusing to speak up for fear that a petty trainer will take them off a mount, or they’ll get a reputation as a complainer. I have to believe if ALL the jockeys adopt the same attitude the concerns related to trainers would be obviated. Jockeys are flat out risking their bodies every time they ride, and if they believe the course is some way or another “unsafe” they need to speak up.

We all want it to be the track because that is an easy fix. Pull some plugs, soak the grass, move the rail and we’re good to go. But we absolutely have to know if it is the horses. I understand that there are necropsies scheduled. I hope they are thorough in describing not only the horses’ injuries, but what other contributing factors may have been at work. Mostly I hope they make those results public. The people risking their money on thoroughbreds have the absolute right to know why horses they bet on couldn’t finish a race.

Tracks are hesitant to ever criticize owners or trainers. They are the life blood of the business (well, except for all the bettors who pay the bills). But sooner or later this boil is going to burst. For every Pletcher or Baffert that can afford to treat their horses like house pets, there are dozens of marginal trainers who have to find ways to keep horses running in order to pay the bills. I just have a hard time believing that the blame isn’t proportioned in some way between the jockeys, trainers and track maintenance people. Do I know the proportion? I wish I did.

But, it can’t be as simple as, it’s 100% the track. Let’s not just make a few simple changes and expect that is the end of breakdowns. Let’s really dig into the problem and find some answers, even if they are the hard answers.

Opinions, Stories and Reporting

Will Bobby Flay Save Racing?

Let me start by saying anytime a celebrity gets involved in horseracing, it is a positive thing. Bobby Flay, Jim Rome, Joe Torre, Drew Brees and others have been bitten by the horseracing bug. But Flay has taken it a step farther. Not only does he own, but he seems determined to make himself as well known in horseracing as he is as Iron Chef on the Food Network.

Will Farish, Jr – are you ready for a throwdown?

Flay decided to challenge Will Farish, Jr. for a seat on the Breeder’s Cup Board of Directors. That’s the same Will Faish, Jr. from Lane’s End farm. That would be the same Lane’s End Farm where A.P. Indy, Curlin and Zenyatta currently reside. Will Farish, Jr., the chairman of the Breeder’s Cup Board. Racing royalty versus the guy that owns, announces races, and hands out trophies in the winner’s circle from coast to coast.

Flay actually tied Farish in the original vote and there will be a runoff next week.

The question is, would Bobby Flay be good for the Breeder’s Cup and racing in general?

I’m on the fence. Oh, I don’t question Flay’s sincerity for a moment. I think he truly loves horseracing as much as he loves whipping out southwestern food at his many restaurants. But I have to wonder how the ubiquitous Flay can spread himself much thinner than he is already spread.

On the other hand, if horseracing has a novella of problems, you have to say a lot of them occurred while the Will Farish, Jr’s of the world have been at the helm. In all fairness the Breeder’s Cup is a pretty successful endeavor so the Board has done a pretty fair job of promoting it. But therein is the rub. Everybody loves the Triple Crown and the Breeder’s Cup, and they are big enough to attract sizable TV audiences. But it isn’t just those events that need attention.

Bobby Flay wasn’t raised on a big farm in the bluegrass of Kentucky. He is a New York City boy, and he still has a soft spot for the Big Apple. He’s an outsider, a man who wasn’t born into money but worked tirelessly to make himself famous, and wealthy, as a chef. Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good, and Flay happened to be born at a time when being a chef could produce as much celebrity as being a movie star. Can you imagine in 1964 some TV executive saying, let’s start a TV network with cooking shows and cooking games all day? Probably made as much sense as the guy who pitched a 24-hour weather channel.

In short, Bobby Flay is an outsider elbowing his way into the boardroom of racing biggest event.

Could racing use the new blood? Absolutely. Is Bobby Flay the right guy? I don’t know. I’d like to believe he will represent the everyman on the BC Board, but frankly, other than elevating his stock in racing, I’m not sure what he represents to the $2 railbird. As far as the people who voted for Flay, I think they made an obviously self-serving move at the expense of Will Farish, Jr. Putting Flay in the spotlight can only help their marketing efforts.

It’s not a fight that we can likely influence. The BC board is an insider’s game. But I’m going to take the fact that upstart Flay can knock off racing royalty as a positive. Who knows. Perhaps a whole new cohort of wannabe Iron Chefs will get into racing just like their hero Bobby Flay.

I’m not sure he’s the underdog, but I like the idea of upsetting some apple carts. Let’s have the throwdown.

Opinions, Stories and Reporting

Welfare and Safety Summit

The fifth Race Horse Welfare and Safety Summit wrapped up this week. I was really hoping we’d hear that they found the smoking gun when it comes to why animals appear to be more fragile than just a few decades ago. They didn’t. But after looking at the summaries, the main criticism is the one I’ve already noted – anybody who even insinuates drugs are the cause gets drummed out of the club.

For the most part they provided useful and interesting perspectives.

As I believe Mark Twain said, “They are three kinds of lies. Lies, damned lies and statistics.” On the other hand, how are you supposed to make your point other than with statistics? So as Twain might have added, it is how you use statistics that creates the rub.

Take these statistics.

  • Only 31 trainers started more than 150 horses in 2013. This was used to illustrate that mega-trainers aren’t really at the core of race horse fragility. I’m not sure how they got blamed in the first place since for the most part it isn’t the mega-trainers who are dictating which sire gets bred to which broodmare, but good to know.
  • However, it turns out breeding isn’t the culprit either since 16 of the top 20 sires by earnings had strong form at a mile and an eighth or longer. Similarly the 15 of the top 20 two year-old sires also had strong form at a mile and an eighth or more. Call me dense, but the fact that the top racers can go the classic distances proves the breed is as strong as it ever was? You sure it isn’t just that out of 20,000 foals born, a few hundred of them actually turn out to be solid because statistically that is exactly what we would expect? 2% of the crop doesn’t prove or disprove anything, other than the Bell curve still seems to have pertinence.
  • Finally, some people posit that two year-olds are racing too early and that leads to more injuries. However, statistics tell us that more than 50% of the foal crop started as two year-olds in 1948, but today it is only 29%, so that can’t be the answer. I’m sort of thinking, doesn’t that actually tell us that two year-olds in 1948 were sturdier?

The highly respected Dr. Larry Bramlage made a fascinating point about bone issues. He said that bone remodels and strengthens in response to stress, so some injuries require some rest, others just need a reduction in hard training. This I found most fascinating. The cannon bone reacts to stress differently. At a gallop or below, stress travels up and down the bone, but at racing speed stress is rotated around the bone. So horses need the correct exposure to both sorts of stress in order to properly strengthen the bone. He didn’t say this, but doesn’t that sound like trainers need some training in how horses remodel and strengthen bones? Or maybe to put it another way, the good trainers have this figured out and the not so good trainers didn’t get the memo.

Remember Joba Chamberlain, a pitcher for the Yankees now with Detroit? Or Washington Nationals pitcher Steven Strasburg? Remember how caught up management was about limiting their innings pitched? In Strasburg’s case, it may have cost them a world championship. Ironically, they both wound up having Tommy John surgery, but maybe management was onto something. It turns out that apparently racehorses can only accumulate so much racing and fast workout stress before they are in dire danger of injury. Again, it sounds like the culprit is the trainer. Not the Pletchers or the Assmussens or the Bafferts who have first-class horse flesh and can immediately throw expensive diagnostics at the problem and put their injured runners in recuperation mode. Without saying so, it seems to be the trainers who aren’t always in a position of delicately managing a runner who are the problem. And how do these trainers deal with these injuries? Yup. Medication. Because too many of these trainers simply can’t afford to lay up their blue-collar runners.

When the expert panel consists of trainers like Todd Pletcher, you simply aren’t going to have the problems of the marginal stable conditioners represented. I have no doubt Pletcher doesn’t overuse medication, mostly because he can afford not to and still make payroll. But as I’ve mentioned on a number of occasions, if racing keeps insisting it’s not the medication and they trot out the A+ trainers to prove it, the conclusion that it isn’t the drugs remains suspicious.

If there is an extremely sad bit of anecdotal evidence, it is that jockeys and exercise riders are afraid to notify trainers if a horse is not warming up properly or working out well. In fact jockey Chris McCarron told a story about getting off a horse that wasn’t warming up well. They took the horse back to the paddock, put another rider on, and the horse won the race. But it turns out the horse never ran again. McCarron was roundly criticized by the connections.

If jockeys take an apathetic attitude because they fear losing mounts more than they fear losing their livelihood due to catastrophic breakdowns, I think what they are really saying is that once again the maze leads back to the trainers. Any trainer worth his salt will thank the jockey profusely, assuming the jockey doesn’t pull a horse out of the race too often. But the fact that too many trainers will run the horse anyway really gives one pause.

In a bright note, mandatory continuing education seems to be on the horizon. The Association of Racing Commissioners International has passed regulations to mandate four hours of continuing education for trainers. It’s a start, but seriously, how much can you accomplish in four hours? I referee high school basketball and I have to score a certain level on an annual certification exam and do two or three training camps a year if I expect to get a good schedule. I’m pretty sure something more like 20-40 hours a year for horse trainers makes a lot more sense.

I’ll say this again. Bravo to the Grayson-Jockey Club Research Foundation for holding the summit. Sooner or later we really need someone to say enough is enough, we’ll have a national horseracing commission that can set the rules (including training) and stop just talking about the problem.

Opinions

Why Would You Go to the Track?

Horseracing’s big days are great. Lots of people, lots of pageantry, TV coverage, a full press box.

And then there is the rest of the year.

I don’t think it is about promotion. Those of us who love the track don’t need advertisements or urging. We’re already captive. And unfortunately those who aren’t captive could hardly be expected to see an advertisement and think, “hey, let’s become horseplayers!” If you are a complete neophyte, it’s pretty frustrating to think about going to the track, watching horses run around an oval nine or ten times a day, and basically have only the slightest clue about which horse to bet. I have an uncle that goes to the races four or five times a year and still just bets his lucky numbers. He has a blast and I think it is great that there are fans like that. But four or five times a year is not the strategy that saves horseracing.

For most people a day at the track is like a day at the amusement park. Once in a while it is a fun thing to do, but a steady diet? And like the amusement park most occasional racegoers go with the intention of losing their $40 and still feeling like they had a good time, and we’ll see you next year.

The problems with race tracks are myriad, and have been discussed to death. Many of the facilities are crumbling. They are not really family friendly places (with a few exceptions).They treat their best fans (assuming they know who they are) as if they were simply a meal ticket. Most of the potential fans not already involved think the races are fixed or drug-riddled or somehow corrupt. And even for those who like horseracing, online betting sites just make it too easy to not have to spend five hours at the track.

One of the things sports fans need is someone to root for. Like the Cubs or the Broncos or the German soccer team. In horseracing you root for the horse you bet in the upcoming race. When the race is over, it’s on to the next event. You only like your horse if it wins (but it isn’t a real affection), whereas the Cubs or the Mets are imprinted on you, win or lose. You root in spite of their record. You don’t have a consistent “team” you can root for. In fact, you’re lucky if you get two seasons to root for your favorite horse. As I wrote the other day, owners more and more are moving horses to the stud barn after a black type win. If you’re lucky your horse will race, oh, on average six times a year. If you are a hard-core handicapper, the last thing you want to do is become emotionally involved with a horse.

No, it isn’t like rooting for the Cubs, although some days your selections have as much of a chance as the Cubs do of winning the National League pennant. It’s hard to fall in love with a horse. Once you get to know them, it seems like they get hurt or retire. You can root for trainers in a, “Gee I hope Chad Brown unseats Todd Pletcher one of these years at Saratoga” sort of way, but you can’t expect to generate new fans with the exhortation, come root for D. Wayne Lukas. Rooting for trainers is almost like loving baseball and rooting for Theo Epstein (the Cubs  GM). You root for the players.

So tracks wind up stuck with promoting the “excitement” of racing. They certainly can’t say, come to the track and win a lot of money because there is a pretty good chance you won’t. They can’t even advertise like casinos do – we have the loosest slots in town, or we pay out at a 97.6% rate. Can you imagine that? People are addicted to slots to the point where they have tournaments like there is some sort of skill involved in pushing the button. Once betting involves some skill, their interest level apparently goes way down.

How does NASCAR do it? Do you think it is just the excitement of watching drivers make left hand turns for two hours? No, it is that the drivers have a fan base. You go out and root for your guy, who even has his own number. And you know everything about him, including his (or her) shoe size. Come to think of it, what is California Chrome’s shoe size? You argue with other (what do they call NASCAR fans? NASCAR-ites?) about which driver is the best. The NASCAR owners are equally well known.

And as I’ve said in a number of blogs, organizations like NASCAR or the NFL tightly control the product. It’s a small club with only those people at the top of their sport. They have a commissioner. They have one set of rules for everyone. They have a centralized drug enforcement group. When you have a Donald Sterling owning a team, you kick him out of the club.

Let’s face it. Horseracing isn’t going to be for everyone. But then again, neither is NASCAR or baseball. I’ll tell you a big difference between NASCAR and horseracing. For NASCAR you pretty much can get by with a six-pack, a sunny day and two hours to watch the same race. It’s a lot more work to be a horseplayer. You spend hours before the races, and hours at the races, and then more hours after the races getting ready for tomorrow’s races. Well, unless you just bet your lucky numbers.

All of the obvious things have been tried. The average age of a serious horse racing fan seems to go up every year. It’s time to have a national racing commission and it is time to start thinking outside the box. Race tracks, other than the Taj Mahals of racing like Saratoga or Santa Anita or Del Mar, are losing attendance while the on-line betting sites are gaining at their expense. Handle goes up, purses go down. Not the first choice as a business model.

So tell me what you think? What would bring someone new to the track and make them a lifelong fan?

Opinions, Stories and Reporting

Of Course It Can’t Be the Drugs

At the Welfare and Safety of Racehorse Summit a panel of experts couldn’t come to a consensus on why average starts per horse and average field size are down.

They did a lot of speculating – trainers work their horses up to a race rather than racing them into condition, trainers only want to run their horse in a race they think they can win because they need to be high-percentage trainers in order to keep owners happy, more time between races is better for horses.

Todd Pletcher, a trainer who is not exactly your average workingman trainer, agreed that horses can take more time between races and get ready through workouts. Everyone knows Pletcher is an extraordinary trainer, but he also gets extraordinary horses and owners who can afford to pay the bills without a second thought.

Someone else offered that once a horse wins a Graded stakes, owners want to retire that horse so they can cash in before their horse turns into Mine That Bird. Mine That Bird won the Kentucky Derby, raced eight more times and won exactly none of those races, although to be fair he did finish second in the Preakness and third in the Belmont.

So that’s great for the owners who have potential breeding stock, but that isn’t most of the owners or most of the male horses racing.

The one thing they couldn’t agree on was the role drug use plays in the health of the thoroughbred.

They panel was made up of highly credentialed people, but there is always a nagging suspicion that if they said, “oh yeah, it’s the drugs,” they might lose their racetrack jobs. Even if it was the drugs, it’s supposed to be the great unspoken. You see, if the people in the know admit drug use is a much wider spread problem, they run the risk of further damaging the industry they want to save. If it is everything but the drugs, then we can work on breeding more horses or something like that.

They other thing they didn’t appear to get into was the difference between the legions of trainers who are scraping by for owners who are scraping by at the dozens of racetracks featuring $5,000 NW2 in the weekday feature race.

I’ll tell you the other thing I didn’t read about. The fact that ownership is down 25% in the last two decades. The fact that the number of foals being born is down 57% since 1986. You think that just might have something to do with the fact that there are fewer racehorses out there to fill a race?

Did you happen to read about the misery the Texas tracks are facing? Handle at Lone Star is down something like 67% from it’s historical high. We had a Breeder’s Cup at Lone Star for goodness sake. The number of race days is  almost half of what it was a few years ago at the Texas tracks. And the problem? They don’t have “instant racing” machines at the tracks. Seriously. It has nothing to do with all the other stuff that is causing racing to slide into the toilet. It’s that they don’t have racing’s version of slot machines.

I was out at my local track the other day and they had a lower level claiming event where the YOUNGEST horse in the field was five and there were two nine year-olds. And it’s just not at my track where they are depending on owners and trainers keeping geldings in training well past their prime.

Sports Illustrated did a long piece this week about Alex Rodriguez and his use of PEDs. One of the things that seems to be the case is that when you use those drugs your body breaks down. It stands to reason that if it happens to humans, it can happen to horses.

I think it is wonderful that horseracing folks get together to talk about this stuff. But if the conclusion is going to be, it’s the trainers and the owners for sure, but we can’t say it’s the drugs, I have a feeling the problem of short fields and low-start horses is only going to get worse.

 

Opinions

Thankfully, We’re Not All Arizona

In previous posts I’ve argued for a national body that would oversee all racing. I think the reasons are fairly obvious, but if you need more convincing, let’s go to Arizona.

Arizona has two main racetracks – Turf Paradise in Phoenix and Yavapai Downs in Prescott Valley. I’ve been to Turf Paradise many times. It is really a pleasant place to watch horseracing. And the quality of racing is pretty good during the middle months of the meet. They also have a good simulcasting schedule. However, in Arizona, there is no online wagering.

In fact, it’s more than just frowned upon, it’s at least a Class 1 misdemeanor (punishable by a maximum $2,500 fine and six months in jail) and potentially a felony, and felonies mean hard time. Arizona law does not allow any online gambling for financial gain or profit. Apparently if you bet to lose you have a potential defense.

When I’ve talked to the folks in Arizona, they speculate there are three reasons for making it a crime to wager on the internet. First, the Native-American tribes feel strongly about their exclusive casino franchises, and generally oppose anything that gives people betting options beyond having to show up in person at one of their casinos. That includes, slots, poker and horseracing. Second, it is a way to ensure the tracks handle all of the money bet on horses. Finally, Arizona has a large population of conservative religious types who generally find gambling immoral. And I can tell you, the state pretty much has horseplayers frightened to death on signing up for any online betting shop.

About 60% of the states allow internet wagering on horseracing. This is apparently because Americans do not have a constitutionally protected right to wager, and your home state has to decide if it wants to make it legal. You have to wonder about the framers of the Constitution when they called out gun ownership, religion and being able to write about any stupid thing that comes into your head in a blog, but ignored betting on horse races, something that had been going on for centuries by that time. Then again they also ignored such important things as drinking, football, and twittering. We tried banning drinking. Do you remember how that worked out?

I’m picking a bit on Arizona. At least they have horseracing. You could be in Utah or Hawaii where they don’t even allow a lottery, much less a real parimutuel track.

This is not anymore a moral issue than having a glass of wine with dinner or listening to rap music. In Arizona it is really about who should get the horseracing dollar, and if it isn’t going to Arizona, it’s going to be a crime. And as far as I am concerned, it’s as a crying shame.

 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

—Declaration of Independence

 

Handicapping and Betting, Opinions

Elevating Turf Racing in America

Bob Ehalt wrote an interesting piece (linked here) on whether there should be a turf triple crown. Mr. Ehalt points out that with the addition of the Belmont Derby this weekend to the perennially run Secretariat Stakes at Arlington in August, we already have two legs of a potential three race series.

HIs point is very well taken. Racing needs to constantly find ways to generate fan interest.

The great thing about the Derby, Preakness and Belmont is that even casual fans have an interest in those races, in part because for close to a hundred years they have been part of American sports lore, like the World Series or the Superbowl. The Triple Crown races are a tradition. Do you think 150,000 fans show up at Churchill Downs because of the importance and popularity of horseracing? No, it is always a milestone event and a helluva party. And if one horse manages to capture the first two legs, the Belmont even gets a mention on ESPN’s The Sports Reporters, usually four guys who together watch fewer races in a year than I watch in a week.

Any series of races would have to fill a hole. That is exactly what the Breeder’s Cup did. It settled a lot of the arguments about which horse was best in which category. It was also a great made-for-TV event.

Perhaps to racing enthusiasts a turf triple crown makes sense, but to all those people who are horseracing fans two days a year (Kentucky Derby and Breeder’s Cup) what reason would they have to care about it? To a degree this sort of thing regularly pops up. Remember the handicap triple crown in New York – the Metropolitan, the Brooklyn and the Suburban? They still run those races but they are not really linked anymore. Remember the Strub series – the Malibu, the San Fernando and the Strub. Those races don’t attract nearly the depth they used to. How about the Triple Tiara (the old filly triple crown) – the Acorn, the CCA Oaks and the Alabama? There is only one Triple Crown, and they pretty much hold the patent on the three race series.

I’m not decrying the idea. I think this is exactly the sort of thing horseracing fans need to do – suggest ways to give the sport greater exposure. And there is certainly nothing wrong with doing it as soon as a third leg is identified. If the point is, we need to elevate 3 year-old turf racing, as my previous two posts indicate, turf racing overall is second class in America. If it is going to be elevated, breeders need to stop ceding turf breeding to the Europeans, tracks need to build better turf courses, and fans need to be just as excited about turf racing as they are about the well-known dirt races.