There is no doubt in my mind that the vast majority of racing officials and executives care about the sport. When they do things that may seem to hurt the sport, I am just as certain that wasn’t their intention. That still doesn’t diminish the criticism that is heaped on the decision-makers when they obviously screw-up.

There isn’t a delicate way to say it. NYRA deserves some culpability for accepting entries for horses that were ineligible under the new emergency rule that requires entrants to have at least 14 days between starts, and then scratched those horses on race day. On Sunday this resulted in two three-horse fields and a four horse field. In what can only be described as a higher power showing an off-beat sense of righteous indignation, a major snowstorm is scheduled to hit the New York area starting Monday, creating a high probability that racing will be cancelled Thursday. This means the 11 horses for which entries were accepted even though they had a race within the last two weeks will technically not have to be declared.

Fortunately for NYRA there are convenient scofflaws available – the trainers. Based on racing rules, it is the trainer’s responsibility to only enter his horse in races for which the horse is eligible. The stewards rulings are not posted yet, but it will be interesting to see if they fine the trainers who entered those horses on Sunday.

What needs to be discussed is how this situation could have been avoided. The trainers were obviously not happy about the 14 day rule. Their comments were somewhere between the compromising “how about a few days less” and the snarky “they’ve obviously never trained a horse.”

The question is, how much discussion could have gone on to reach an acceptable consensus if the trainers think it is on the poorly conceived side of the line?

Managing people or an organization is not easy, and believe me I know that from personal experience. But it is a lot harder when you believe you know what is best for everyone without giving them a chance to have input into the decision. If you’re a boss you are paid to make decisions. The buck stops here and all of that. But if the decisions you make are seen as “stupid” by everyone except you, well, the chances are the people in the “it’s stupid” camp have a point worth listening to. And even if in the end you are right, you still need everyone’s help and support to get the decision implemented in the right way.

Horses are dying at what seems to be an alarming rate on track at Aqueduct. NYRA understandably wanted to take action but there are two parts to any plan: the conception and the implementation. If either are not good, the plan fails. Not all horses need two weeks between starts, but I suspect it could be difficult and expensive to do an assessment on the dozens of horses entered within the 14-day window. It was certainly easier just to make a blanket rule, but perhaps not the only option. The right thing for NYRA to do is to make an assessment of how the on-track breakdowns can be addressed most effectively, and if that means modifying a decision they had already made, that is the right thing to do.

Because the alternative is another embarrassment like the one that occurred Sunday, and that is simply not acceptable.

For the middle of January it was a busy week for horseracing news.

Roman Chapa allegedly got caught – again – with an electrical device. I say allegedly because at this point all we know for sure is that the track photographer snapped Chapa driving Quiet Acceleration to victory in the Richard King Stakes at Sam Houston in Texas, and it looked like he was holding something in his left hand.

The Eclipse Awards were held last Saturday. In general there was agreement with the winners, although there was some static about the winning margin for a few of them.

Finally, NYRA implemented “emergency” rules to deal with what seems to be an excessive number of deaths on the track. The trainer reactions were priceless.

Let’s start with Roman Chapa. In his first year as a jockey Chapa was suspended for 19 months for using an electrical stimulation device (often called a buzzer). In 2007 he was suspended again for the same thing and this time was given a five year vacation. New Mexico gave him a break by reinstating him in 2011, a bit before the five years was up.

I know fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me, but what is the saying for fool me three times?

You have to figure the two times he got caught weren’t the only two times he used a buzzer up to that point, so arguably the two suspensions were lenient. In fact, you have to question how he managed to only get five years for a second violation that is about as close to a capital crime as race riding has. There are no mitigating circumstances for this type of offense. There is no beneficial use associated with a buzzer. The crime is completely conscious. Unlike a positive for theraputic medication, there is no way it could be explained as ignorance of the rules or accidental. This wasn’t like carrying the wrong type of riding crop. Use of a buzzer is unequivocal cheating.

I don’t believe myself to be naive, but it is really hard to imagine jockeys with buzzers are a rampant problem in racing. There are some people who would have fans believe it is happening everywhere, and with some big names involved. I’ve been around racing long enough to know a couple of things. First, almost nothing happens on the backside that doesn’t get passed around like chicken pox before science developed a vaccine. If a jockey was using a buzzer, the other jockeys would know they are cheating and it is highly unlikely they would tolerate it. A cheating jockey takes money out of their pockets. Second, it is the rare owner or trainer who would permit that kind of animal abuse, not to mention their unwillingness to be associated with any sort of cheating. Third, horses may not be the most intelligent animals on the planet, but they are smart enough to understand the association between the shock in their neck and who is giving it. If the horse makes the association he will react to the jockey in obvious ways. If jockeys are using buzzers, it is mostly marginal jockeys at marginal tracks, and maybe the occasional marginal jockey at a larger track. But no jockey making a good living would risk his livelihood any more than any of us would risk our reputations or careers without being completely desperate.

If the Sam Houston stewards determine Chapa was using an illegal device the message needs to be clear – carrying an electrical stimulation device gets you suspended for life with no chance of reinstatement. No jobs as a hot walker. No jobs as a groom. No exercise riding at the racetrack. Any career at a state sanctioned facility is forever out of the question.

That being said, the stewards need to be damn sure that a conviction only comes after incontrovertable proof of guilt. The fact that it looks like something is in his hand should not be sufficient to give him the ultimate penalty. This needs to be investigated thoroughly and if Chapa is unwilling to confess, the stewards need to lay out a case that would hold up in any court. The current action of the stewards to suspend Chapa indefinitely is wrong. This isn’t like a regular job where you can be suspended with pay while the investigation is ongoing. Regardless of the depth of their suspicion, if Chapa doesn’t ride he doesn’t eat. The stewards need to consider what might happen if they can’t convict him and they took away his ability to make a living.

Hopefully the full story will come out soon and we’ll see how deft Texas is when it comes to handling what is a very serious situation.

I’m not going to go through the whole suite of Eclipse selections. There were some votes that Daily Racing Form analyst Mike Watchmaker called “bizarre.” I think he made a critical point – if you have a vote, you need to show the proper respect for the process. Voting for Adelaide as Horse of the Year was not simply a wasted vote, it was levels beyond the simple bizarre. It showed ignorance of everything that should be important when selecting a HOY.

I didn’t know what to do about Goldencents. He was certainly more of a sprinter than a router, but his most impressive races were at seven furlongs and a mile, the inbetween distances.  He had five starts in 2014, won the Pat O’Brien and the Breeders Cup Mile, and finished second in the Met Mile (to Palace Malice), and the six furlong Bing Crosby and Santa Anita Sprint Championship. Taking nothing away from some of the outstanding performances in the Breeders Cup, Goldencents gritty win in the Mile was a the epitome of class and heart. There should have been an award for him somewhere.

If I had an issue, it was with the wide margin by which California Chrome captured HOY. He was not my choice for HOY, but even so the distance between him and the two other contenders, Main Sequence and Bayern had to have been more reflective of Chrome’s popularity with the broader crossection of ardent and casual racing fans than his actual accomplishments.

Fortunately or unfortunately, there are no fixed criteria for voting in the Eclipse Awards so let’s talk about the most often cited reasons for voting for a particular animal: body of work and value to the sport. If getting people to notice horseracing were most of the vote, California Chrome deserved the top spot. He was this year’s people’s horse and was primarily responsible for keeping enthusiasm high during the Triple Crown series. He was clearly this year’s version of the early Beatles, inspiring the equivalent of swooning teenage girls* within the racing community. He won the vox populi award and second place wasn’t that close.

But while we can’t stop the Eclipse from being a popularity contest, it doesn’t mean it is right. Let’s look at the body of work argument. We’ll start with the Kentucky Derby. North American racing fans see the Kentucky Derby as one of the high holy days in racing. The hype that surrounds the race is high, with NBC and the racing channels promoting coverage for months leading up to the race. The fact of the matter is that the Kentucky Derby is to the Breeders Cup what the college football championship is to the Super Bowl. On the first Saturday in May there  were probably five older horses in training that could have beaten Chrome. In the Derby you are taking horses who are the equivalent of late teenagers and throwing them into a race most of them are not physically ready to run. Remember when you were in high school and there was the guy who could grow a Grizzly Adams beard? Or the girl who was already getting served alcohol in restaurants because she looked 25? In a few months all the other three year olds will have caught up, but on that Saturday there are simply horses that are the equivalent of men against boys. Half of that field will either be out of racing or in Optional Claimers by the end of the year. In 1876, the year of the first Kentucky Derby, three year old racing was considered somewhat of a novelty. Up until the mid-1950’s when horseracing was one of the big three sports (along with boxing and baseball) the folks at Churchill aggressively marketed the Derby as the fastest two minutes in sports and captured the imagination of the public in the process.  In racing’s heyday, the Kentucky Derby was a big as the World Series or the heavyweight boxing championship. Today, it is a good race, and in some years a great race, and it often identifies future stars, but it is still not the championship race. That distinction is left to the Breeders Cup – you know, racing’s CHAMPIONSHIP day. The horses that win on that day, in my opinion, should be the primary contenders for Horse of the Year.

Remember when the Giants beat the Patriots in the Super Bowl? The NFL didn’t get to turn around and vote the Patriots the champions because their “Body of Work” was superior to the Giants. The Giants won the Championship game, and they were the champions. Period, end of discussion.

Let’s go back and look at Chrome’s Kentucky Derby win. Commanding Curve didn’t get closer to winning the rest of the year. Danza was finished for the year after the Derby. Wicked Strong did win the Jim Dandy and may turn out to be a decent Graded horse, but in the HOY category Adelaide was a more deserving vote than Wicked Strong.. In fact the best horses Chrome beat may have been Hoppertunity in the Santa Anita Derby, who came back to win the Clark late in the year, and Bayern who bobbled at the break and got pinched back in the Preakness, ultimately finishing ninth. Hey Bayern – it sucks to lose all chance at the break, doesn’t it.

Chrome then went on to lose the Belmont, the Pennsylvania Derby and the Breeders Cup in succession, two of those races to the aforementioned Bayern. He closed the year with a win over a Canadian filly and a couple of mid-level allowance horses in the Hollywood Derby at Los Alamitos on the turf, a performance so apparently impressive to the Chromies he got votes for Turf Horse of the Year over Main Sequence. Any comment I make about that will be mean so I’ll just let it go.

Chrome was not horse of the year based on performance or even the amorphous “body of work.”

The three Chanpionship winners that should have contended for HOY were Bayern, Main Sequence and Untapable. I couldn’t justify an Untapable vote despite her dominating performance in the distaff. The filly and mare group was simply not strong enough for Untapable to merit a vote. Main Sequence won four Grade 1 races, including the BC Turf Classic. Even though Wise Dan won HOY the last two years, turf horses are still often seen as sideshows. The other knock on Main Sequence was that other than the BC, he didn’t beat a lot. However, he beat every horse willing to race against him and did it in the best turf races in North America. Bayern destroyed fields in the Haskell and Pennsylvania Derby, and showed great courage in winning the BC Classic. He beat Chrome straight up twice, and beat older horses, something Chrome couldn’t do. The knock on Bayern was that the Haskell and Pensylvania wins came on speed biased tracks, and the BC victory was tainted by the wild start.

I said at one point any of the top three were deserving. On second look, I simply couldn’t buy Chrome as the winner. Of course, winning HOY gave Chrome the one thing he couldn’t accomplish on the track – beating a first rate field.

Finally, NYRA implemented emergency rules in a desperate attempt to head off the Joe Drapiness of criticism over what seems to be an excessive number of track deaths this year. Most of the rules were welcomed by the horsemen. Some of the more significant changes are:

• NYRA will create a poor performance list, and a horse on that list won’t race until they work a half mile in 53 seconds. In other words, if they can’t beat Arabians, they don’t get to race against thoroughbreds.
• They are cutting back on the number of weekday races, and including some long breaks in the schedule.
• They are requiring at least 14 days between starts.

That last rule got the most reaction. Gary Contessa suggested 12 or 13 days would have been a better number. Mike Hushion went a little farther, saying that whoever made the rule knew nothing about training horses. Another trainer pointed out that under this rule horses that raced in the Kentucky Derby would be ineligible to run in the Preakness, unless of course they moved the Preakness to Sunday. Salutos Amigos wouldn’t have been able to run in the BC Sprint.

I get their point. Not every horse comes out of a race with a budding injury. But as most of the veterinary world knows, rarely do catastrophic injuries come out of the blue. They are a result of cumulative stress and poor training methodology. The rule is perhaps too inflexible. There has to be a way to clear horses at the highest levels, but for most classes, the rule will defray a lot of the criticism of the trainers that seem to run their $16,000 claimers every few days.

Perhaps NYRA will lead the way, but racing is in about the same position as the NFL was a few years ago with concussions. Before the anti-racing people get their way, racing needs to start being proactive without being arbitrary.  While I rarely seem to think NYRA gets it right, in this case
I really believe NYRA is on the right track, no pun intended.

*Note: this is a metaphor. It wasn’t actually all swooning teenage girls who made up the Chromies

You are about to enter another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight Zone!

If Rod Serling (no relation to Andy I think) were still alive even he might not have come up with what’s happening at Calder Race Course. I’m sure you’ve read the story. Gulfstream Park and the Stronach Group had leased stall space at the old Calder Race Course, but that space became “unavailable” as of January 1. Churchill Downs Inc., the owner of Calder, has plans to redevelop that area of the track, displacing about 600 horses. With nowhere to go, the horses were set up in a tent in one of the parking lots. According to most of the bivouacked horsemen, the conditions are less than ideal and it seems a matter of time before some sort of accident makes new headlines.

Everybody is angry about the situation, except perhaps CDI, horseracing’s apparent version of the Empire. One trainer said,

“It’s over, and everyone seems to be admitting that it’s over. We don’t have anywhere to go, except maybe the temporary stalls Gulfstream is building on a parking lot here.”

Then he asked to not be identified because of concern about possible retribution from Calder and CDI. Can you imagine fearing retribution for making a simple statement about the situation at Calder? As someone once reminded me, even paranoids have enemies.

In CDI’s defense, everyone knew the agreement for the stalls expired on December 31. The displaced horsemen were told by Gulfstream Park that negotiations with CDI were moving along and that it they would be able to stay longer. In fact, Gulfstream told the Florida HBPA that they had assurance the stalls would be available through spring. This was reinforced by the fact that CDI apparently had signed no contracts for the redevelopment of the backstretch area, although CDI hasn’t confirmed this. So while CDI is technically and legally in the right, there is still a sense that the December 31 deadline unnecessarily punishes a lot of small horsemen, not to mention 600 animals. Perhaps CDI is just firing another salvo in their long-time skirmish with Stronach, but I believe it is intolerable to be a party to what may amount to abuse of horses, and that for me is puts me on the opposite side from CDI in this dispute.

I know the first thing that went through my head. If these were children, there would be a lot of time-outs in their future. These problems are hardly unresolvable. Gulfstream Park seems to be willing to spend money to find space and build stalls somewhere else, so if CDI isn’t going to start construction until spring, there is no reason why the existing stalls at Calder can’t be used by these horsemen for another few months.

The Florida HBPA has talked about fighting back by simply squatting on the property, relying on the fact that no one wants to figure out how to move 600 horses to nowhere else, and by denying the simulcast signal to CDI tracks and their ADW, Twin Spires. Unfortunately such a move punishes the Florida Horsemen as much as CDI. It’s as petulant as CDI’s move and makes the horsemen no better than CDI.

There are three groups with a lot of unexercised  leverage: the owners, the trainers and the bettors. Owners and trainers are in a precarious position. If they boycott NYRA, CDI or Stronach tracks, they run the risk of losing their livelihood, not to mention incurring whatever wrath those tracks might have. Besides, getting trainers to act as one entity has rarely worked. If you remember when Buddy Jacobson organized backstretch workers and got them to go on strike for nine days, he won the battle, but found out his reward was being on the outside looking in for five years.

Bettors are even less likely to have an impact unless a great majority of them all move in lock-step. A boycott (related to raising the take) against CDI  has been tried, and while there has been a measurable impact, it has not been enough to change their behavior. I’m not sure we won that battle, much less the war.

The fact is that until owners like the Ramsey’s, the Papiese’s (Midwest Thoroughbreds), the Winchell’s and others work in concert with trainers like Bob Baffert, Todd Pletcher, Chad Brown, Jerry Hollendorfer, Steve Asmussen, Mark Casse and others, NYRA, CDI and Stronach will hardly feel obligated to listen. When bettors stop acting as solo entities they have the opportunity to impact the decisions of the big track owners.

Picking on the small horsemen that weren’t big enough or powerful enough to get space at Gulfstream hardly makes a ripple with racing’s 1%. While politicians often talk about “small business” being the backbone of the economy, the fact is that the only entities with power are the large or the organized. When it comes to racing, the large do well but there are hardly enough of the organized. Small owners and trainers are easily pushed around by the tracks. Small bettors are being squashed by excessive takeout and the whales. The sport, as I have mentioned before, doesn’t need to wait for the anti-horseracing groups to kill it. We’re doing a fine job of that without their help.

There is an old proverb that the longest journey begins with one step. I believe the time has come for each of us to take a step. For my part, I will not bet any CDI track, including the Kentucky Derby, or use Twin Spires until they start remembering the little guys are as much responsible for their success as the 1%. There are horses at Calder that need protection. Don’t let a petty squabble put them in jeopardy.

When a problem comes along

You must whip it

Before the cream sits out too long

You must whip it

When something’s goin’ wrong

You must whip it

Whip it good

–  Devo

Unlike my old editor (oops, I mean my former editor) at Horseplayer Magazine, Frank Scatoni, I haven’t been able to completely shake off the magnetic field that seems to surround New York, tugging at ex-pats like they were so many iron shavings. Perhaps it occasionally tilts my blog eastward, so when I asked for some feedback on issues pertinent to California, Frank suggested the new rule that limits jockeys to only three consecutive whips, and then a pause to give the horse a chance to respond before they can start cracking that whip again. Oh, and the CHRB rule also changed the name of the offending implement to “riding crop,” which makes absolutely no difference if you are the horse.

This rule had the support of the Jockeys’ Guild and such distinguished members as John Velasquez, Gary Stevens and Kent Desormeaux. And it was interesting to hear most of them say they minimized their use of the whip, meaning it was those OTHER guys that the rule was meant to target. CHRB chair Chuck Winner said

“This is an important issue. We are making every effort, working with the industry, to try to do what we can to protect the integrity of this sport and the horses and the riders. It’s a long time coming, and it’s a big step in my view.”

Then he proceded to explain how the CHRB was also protecting the integrity of the sport by giving Bayern a pass for his start in the Breeders Cup Classic.

Well perhaps the timing of the two statements was not quite that proximate, but it’s comforting to know everything the CHRB does protects the integrity of the sport, even when it arguably didn’t protect the integrity of sport in the BC Classic. It reminded me of the famous “safety clause” that the Colorado legislature used to stick at the end of every bill. The safety clause stated that the prospective new law was “necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health, or safety.” The beauty was that they didn’t have to prove it, they just needed to add the clause to the end of a bill. This innocent sounding language Constitutionally prevented any law containing that phrase from being petitioned by the people for referendum. Without that language a few signatures could have had the public undoing legislation left and right. Pretty slick, eh?

And trust me. There were plenty of bills where protecting peace, health or safety was a stretch. They still use the language, just not every time.

Jockeys whip horses for various reasons: to control the horse (given the jockeys’ position in the saddle they can’t really use their legs to control the horse), to get the horse to change leads, or to inspire the horse to give a maximum effort. Anyone who has been around horses knows that many of them will not extend themselves without…reinforcement from the whip. Many trainers and jockeys believe that when a horse feels a sting in its rump it will run faster to get away from it. Eventually it becomes a conditioned response. The horse gets the whip and understands it is now time to run. It doesn’t work for every horse, but it certainly works often enough that owners, trainers and jockeys don’t want to completely remove it from the toolbox. One other critical point. Anyone who knows horses also knows that if the horse was being injured by the whip, it would react with fear when seeing a jockey approach, and would show clear signs of stress after a race. Animal rights people, on the other hand, are against whipping a horse under all circumstances because….well because it sounds cruel. For Winner to suggest this was an important issue was to imply many jockeys were often whaling away indiscriminantly on their mounts and injuring them, since if it was just a few scofflaws riding at the margins the rule change would have been of small consequence.

It’s too bad this wasn’t a rule when I was growing up and I could have told my father a fine would have been in order if he spanked me more than three times without taking a pause.  Like THAT would have made it more tolerable.

Based on what I’ve seen so far, the three whip rule is more perceptive than substantive, especially considering the punishment for exceeding the protocol is most likely not going to be more than a fine. Rather than hyperbolic statements about protecting the integrity of racing, I suspect the truth was closer to, we need to get the animal  rights people to back off and this is an easy compromise. It cetainly didn’t appear to be a wave of complaints from the people paying the bills – the bettors. Organized thoroughbred horseracing has been going on for hundreds of years. I haven’t come across studies showing horses were being injured by the whip to the point it was requiring serious treatment or interferring with their ability to run, especially considering the modern riding crop is designed more to slap than to cut. If you’ve ever stood at the rail as the horses approach the wire, you know there is a distinctive and loud popping sound, but as I said above we don’t see a fear or stress reaction from the horse. Jockeys will very occasionally mishit the horse causing it to jump away, but that is not a regular occurrence. In reality there may be the slightest sting that lasts briefly, but there is not an acute pain associated with the crop. Most jockeys with any skill know when whipping the horse is getting a response. They also know when whipping the horse will cause it to sulk. To suggest jockeys were behaving otherwise was a not so subtle slap at the Guild.

Which brings me to the reason I thought this topic was timely. The ride Martin Garcia gave Dortmund in the Hollywood Futurity at Los Alamitos. Garcia gave Dortmund a strong left-hand whip entering the stretch and the went to a vigorous hand ride in the early part of the stretch, giving him an occasional whack on the shoulder to inspire him. Dortmund was apparently not giving Garcia the desired response because inside the 16th the horse still had about three quarters of a length to make up. At that point Garcia appeared to start rapidly hitting Dortmund on the shoulder and once he started getting to the front two made sure to show him the whip. It was a little hard to tell exactly from the pan shot because it is easy to misperceive hitting the shoulder for showing the horse the whip, but it certainly looked to me like Garcia hit Dortmund a few more than three times without pausing..

The message after watching Garcia seemed to be clear. Regardless of the three whip rule, when a horse needs to make up ground in a Graded race the jockey will do whatever seems to be working to get him there. There was somewhere around $30,000 on the line for Garcia and no fine the stewards might levy was going to keep him from riding the hell out of the horse. If the “riding crop” felt like it was going to get Dortmund or any horse over the top, no top jockey would have given it a second thought. And no jockey would be willing to go back to the barn and tell the trainer, I thought the whip was working and I wanted to keep it going but you know, that three whip rule sort of discouraged me.

This rule is not the armageddon for racing and it is not a completely harebrained idea – in fact, it is unlikely to have an outrageous impact on race results – but the jockey has one overriding responsibility – get the most out of the horse that he can. He owes that to the owners and the bettors. THAT is what the integrity of racing is all about. For hundreds of years jockeys learned that the whip was part of that. No doubt there were jockeys who garnered a reputation for the an overenthusiastic use of the whip. Ted Atkinson was known as “the Slasher” and Jorge Chavez was given the nickname “Chop-Chop,” in part because of their aggressive use of the whip. Since both jockeys were very successful, trainers and bettors rarely complained. This generation of jockeys has to unlearn years of developing a winning style, and frankly it will be an uphill struggle for a few years at least. The next generation of jockeys may fully embrace the rule and bettors may ultimately adjust, but in the meantime you can expect to see more rides like Garcia on Dortmund when the jockey reverts to training and instinct.

You arrogant ass. You’ve killed us.

     – Andrei Bonovia in The Hunt for Red October to Captain Tupolev.

A Twitter topic that is sure to stimulate discussion is the obliviousness of tracks and ADW’s. I think oblivious is the right description because the alternatives are to conclude they are either incompetent, arrogant or purposely ignoring problems, and I simply don’t want to believe that is the case. I’ll point out a few things that are seriously hurting the game.

Odds Manipulation

On May 21, 2012, one (or more) bettors manipulated the pool in the fifth race at Thistledown Racetrack, pulling off a pretty neat betting coup. The favorite, Eye Look the Part, was a 1-5 favorite in the win pool until 30 seconds before the close of betting, ultimately winding up at 5-1. What the manipulators did was bet $15,000 on every horse, except Eye Look the Part, through Lien Games, a legal ADW in North Dakota. This maneuver drove the other starters down to around 9-2. The manipulators then bet a large amount using Euro Off-Track, a service based on the Isle of Man, and one that does not pool bets with the tracks in the United States, instead running a separate pool that pays track odds.

On a typical Monday Thistledown expects to handle $9,000 in the WPS pools, but in the 5th race the pool was $128,010.

The Thistledown Racing Secretary said, “Our people did everything correctly. The wagers were not illegal. Thistledown verified the money had been transferred into the race pool before approving the payoffs.”

Yes, that is what the bettors wanted to hear. It’s perfectly legal to manipulate a pool. How about showing a little disgust at this reprehensible behavior?

I don’t know all the racing rules in Ohio, but to be fair I expect there is some language that requires tracks to pay off on all legal bets once a result has been declared official. Even so, the high road would have been to simply refund all bets on the race, calling it a non-event for betting purposes. The manipulators would not have made a dime, and I really believe the bettors would have supported the decision. Euro Off-Track apparently cancelled the associated accounts, but that is not the point, especially if the manipulators collected first. The track and ADW  had no incentive to make a refund regardless of the rules, because whatever percentage Lien Games or Thistledown was getting, it was a lot bigger number at $128,000 as opposed to $9,000. The greedy betting brokers were willing to essentially send the message that they have no scruples when it comes to their share of the pie. Arrogant? Powerless? Idiocy? You can decide.

Two years later, on Sunday August 17, 2014 in the fifth race, Missjeanlouise was a 1-2 favorite until about midway through the race when the tote board flashed 3-1. The rest of the horses also dramatically changed odds so that every other starter settled between 3-1 and 5-1. For example, the outless longshot Dusty Lily dropped from 35-1 to 9-2.

It wasn’t quite the pool manipulation from 2012 – the average WPS pool was only $14,000 that day – but the 5th race had a pool of over $45,000. Someone put $4,000 on each of the five starters not named Missjeanlouise through – that’s right – Lien Games in North Dakota.

It certainly looks like a case of fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice it’s because I learned nothing. The Ohio State Racing Commission had two years to fix this problem, including working with Lien Games to try to keep pool manipulation from happening through their hub. They could have adopted a rule that said in the case of obvious pool manipulation, bets may be cancelled, although horses could still be paid their purse money.

North Dakota said all the right things. We’ll work with Ohio, we’ll develop methods to prevent odds manipulation in the future. I’d feel a little better if it wasn’t the second time the manipulators used the same ADW and picked on the same track. It takes a lot of faith to believe THIS time they’ll get it right. It’s a week from 2015. Software is pretty sophisticated. It shouldn’t be tough to find pool manipulators BEFORE a race is official.

This sort of thing hurts racing in inestimable ways. Every group that thinks the game is dirty is handed confirmation, not because an unscrupulous few try to manipulate pools, but because the racing commissions have looked completely impotent against them. If you aren’t smart enough to identify pool manipulators, I’d argue you aren’t smart enough to manage racing.

Track Take and Rebates

I shouldn’t have to talk much about track take, but there are jurisdictions that still insist on gouging betters on some combination bets. It’s not unusual for tracks to snag around 25% for trifectas and superfectas, but Pennsylvania takes it to a new level. At Penn National the take on trifectas is 31% and superfectas 30%. Parx is almost as bad with 30% on both the trifecta and superfecta.

Pennsylvania as much as any state doesn’t care about pool size. The vast majority of their gambling revenues are associated with the casinos, and it isn’t rare to see the pool size LESS THAN the purse. Casinos subsidizing racing is common, and in Pennsylvania the horsemen feel certain the state will never sever the tie between horseracing and casino betting. You know, just like Massachusetts gave the casino franchise in Boston to the Wynn group that never promised a continuation of racing instead of the Foxwoods group that promised to keep Suffolk alive.

The Horseplayers Association (HANA) has tried to create pressure by organizing players boycotts, but it is hard to convince millions of what are essentially independent contractors to all move together in the same direction.

Study after study has shown that decreases in handle are directly related to increases in take. How racing commissions and track management can operate against their own best interest is as mysterious as some DaVinci Code-like novel.

That’s only half the problem. Even with the 25% “normal” take on trifectas, whales betting through rebate operations can be offered as much as 17%. I’ve written about The Killer Whales http://halveyonhorseracing.com/?s=Killer+Whales and the damage they do, but the states are inarguably complicit here.

If I’m betting $5 million a year on trifectas and I’m a 12% loser, I can still make $250,000 profit for a year. The take kills all but the best bettors, and having to compete against big money players getting huge rebates is making the game almost unplayable. Hey racetracks, IT’S PARI-MUTUEL. It’s not like football where the amount bet doesn’t change the payoff. In an NFL game f you bet $5 or $5,000, you get 10 to 11 odds. Horse bettors are forced to figure out a way to win starting out 15-25% in the hole due to the take. Let me pass this message along to track management. IT’S REALLY, REALLY HARD TO CONSISTENTLY MAKE MONEY WITH A BIG TAKE.

Tracks have little incentive to raise the signal cost to the point where whales start pulling out of the pools. Tracks are agnostic about everything other than pool size because the more bet the more they make, even if it means eventually tracks will only be left with whales betting against each other as they push more and more small-time fans out of the game. Tracks WANT the whales, and perhaps they even believe they NEED the whales. Good luck surviving while you try to compete for the small number of plus-sized bettors out there. It is not like casino gaming where the whales have no impact on payouts. You still get 3-2 on your blackjack no matter how much the whales are betting. Casinos can and do cater to both the seniors sitting at the penny slots and the Phil Ivey’s who bet (and apparently win) millions.

It is also doesn’t make sense for tracks to offer a rebate like the ADW’s. Rational economic behavior indicates they should charge no more than they need to cover costs (with a reasonable profit for those tracks that are not non-profit corporations). Rather than offer rebates, if costs went down, they would just drop the take. But still, how can they compete against ADWs that offer money back to their customers? If racing wants to work on a big problem, whales, signal cost and rebates has to be pretty high on the to-do list.

Answer Your Tweets and Emails

This came up because a few people have mentioned to me not getting responses from ADWs and the regular complaints about one of the NYRA public handicappers.

I’ve only had a couple of “problem” people on Twitter, but 99.9% of the people I’ve interacted with are pretty reasonable folks.  When I hear about people who have been blocked by one of NYRA’s public faces and I know those people to be not only rational and informed players but big supporters of NYRA, it represents the epitome of arrogance. How in the world can a circuit treat good customers like irritants? If you are smart enough and sophisticated enough to become a public handicapper for the biggest circuit in the country, you have to be able to handle all sorts of people.

Nobody should have to tolerate abusive people, but like any good performer, you recognize they inevitably and occasionally show up, 99.9% of the audience doesn’t like them any more than you do, and there are clever ways of handling them without being abusive yourself. A thousand people who like and respect you offsets the one that doesn’t. If you are a public figure and you think you need to block someone, be sure it is a person the rest of us would block in your position.

I’ll pass along my best advice. Nobody is too small. And you never know if the person you blocked in a petty snit, or you are too good to answer will one day be important to YOUR success. You’re a public figure. You already know you can’t please everyone, no matter how hard you try. Don’t let the haters bother you so much, and figure out which people appreciate you and make sure they keep appreciating you. It’s good for you, it’s good for NYRA and it’s good for your fans.

Same with the ADWs. If someone has a problem and they ask about it in a respectful way, respond quickly and with an equal amount of respect, whether the person bets $100 a month or $100 a race. There are always options.

Track Improvements

I’ve written about this during the year, but it’s worth reminding tracks.

• I’ve had high-def on my TV for ten years. Having high-def TVs at the track, or sending an HD signal to people betting at ADWs is not some new fangled innovation. It’s catching up with where you should have been five years ago. And stop being so parochial and only making it available to people who bet through your hub. You’re vending a product and you’ll sell more if you offer a better product at a better price than the next track.
• There should be enough public seating for everyone who would rather bet the $5 than hand it to the person at the admissions booth. You want to pay extra for a special seat in the clubhouse, great. But just because you don’t shouldn’t mean you have to stand up for four and a half hours.
• There should be enough betting machines and tellers windows so nobody has to wait more than a minute or two to make a bet, even close to post time. Getting in a line with five minutes to post and not getting your bet in should horrify racetracks. They just lost whatever the take was on your action. If you are track management and you just said, they should get in line earlier, drop me a note and I’ll be happy to chat with you about missing the point.
• If you aren’t already doing it, on track racing programs with past performances should be subsidized, just like a lot of ADWs do. Trust me, you’ll get it back in the extra action it can generate. Knowledgeable bettors are willing to risk money. People who are guessing won’t be quite as willing to part with the Benjamins. Racing Forms are up to $7.50. It’s simply too much if you aren’t a serious bettor. With parking, admission, Racing Form and Timeform, the nut at SAR is close to $20 a day BEFORE food and drink. If you think that is no problem, once again I’ll go with oblivious.
• Every track should have wi-fi. Again, this isn’t Buck Rogers stuff, it’s just catching up to where you should have been five years ago. Timeform U.S. openly touts the beauty of being able to open your tablet and have hundreds of pages of past performance available on the screen. DRF touts its Formulator program as being able to put together data analysis on the spot. Why should I not be able to use those tools on a whim at the track?
• I love going to Saratoga, not just because I grew up there and broke my pari-mutuel maiden there, but because the place is a party with plenty of food and drink options. Every track should have real restaurants, even if they aren’t four star. They should have bars that people would come to even if they weren’t at a track, and they should stay open until the track closes at the end of the simulcast day. Show baseball or football games or whatever sport happens to be on  TV. If someone comes out because they don’t have to miss their team play and they make a bet, the track is ahead. Even if they are only drinking top shelf liquor and not playing the ponies you are ahead. If you have places that would be destinations if they were out there in the real world, perhaps people that normally wouldn’t make their way out to the track would show up.
• While I’m thinking about it, a restaurant in a strip mall that was charging $9 for a frozen hamburger on an institutional bun with a plastic packet of ketchup and frozen french fries along with a $5 diet soda that goes for $1.29 at 7-11 would go out of business in a month. Actually, they’d never be able to find a bank willing to give them a loan. Admittedly we’re all captive, but does that mean you have to gouge us like workers in a company town? I could stomach (no pun intended) paying $9 for a burger made fresh with quality beef and french fries I watched you slice, and even though it would cost you more, I’ll bet you’d sell a lot more of them. Otherwise I’m stuffing myself before I go to the track and waiting until after I get out to eat again.
• If you cannot identify your best customers (read that largest bettors) within one week of starting a race meet, you should be replaced as general manager. And once you do you should decide how you are going to treat them better than the average twice-a-year player. If someone tells you it’s not fair, tell them that fairness is treating special anyone who bets ten times the average per person handle.
• Listen to every suggestion and thank whoever offered it. If it is a silly suggestion have a laugh privately in your office after the races. If not, figure out how to implement it.
• Finally, race tracks are inherently better than casinos from a betting perspective and everyone knows this. The two reasons why casinos flourish is that (1) the skill level to play most games (slots being the best example) is minimal; and (2) the action is fast. Players get caught up in it. Tracks need to do a lot more promotions related to the betting aspect of the game. Sure, that bobblehead of Fourstardave is great to add to my collection of cheap, useless crap I’ve picked up from Saratoga over the years, but is that the best way to spend your promotional budget? How about this idea. Print the comprehensive Saratoga statistics book and give that away the first weekend. It can’t be that much more expensive than the bobblehead/poster/umbrella/lunch bag you were planning on giving away and it will actually help people to bet, not to mention getting them into the track. If you can’t convince people that they should be parting with their money at the track instead of slots-a-plenty, it’s time to start thinking outside the box. Instead, tracks are selling out to the casino companies as a way to inject dollars into purses. This only works until the market is saturated and as they found out in places like Delaware, it is no guarantee of profit. Racetracks need to start thinking like this:

Remo Williams: “Chiun, you are incredible.”                                                       Chiun: “No, I am better than that.”                                                                           (from the movie, Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins)

Racing Commissions

I used to work for state governors. I can personally attest that they care about every interest in their state and they want to see those interests, and the citizens, prosper. They believe the people have an absolute right to competent government.They make appointments to literally hundreds of boards and commissions. They cannot know every single person that is recommended for appointment by the staff people who vet them, but they can demand that anyone appointed to the racing commission be free of conflicts of interest and have real experience and qualifications. “I like horses” or “I worked on your campaign” are not sufficient to qualify a person to sit on the Commission. I haven’t gone through every person on every commission, but I have gone through commission membership in a few states, and I can tell you that based on the available biographies, a scary percentage are not what I would term qualified to be making rules and adjudicating violations. The other side of that is they often cede enormous power to the Commission staff, or allow the staff to exert enormous influence over the final decision. Some of the problems I cited above are directly the result of part-time, unpaid, marginally qualified political appointees being in charge. That absolutely has to change.

That is enough for this week. If you managed to read this far in the blog, you are either a close relative or someone with world-class perseverance. In any case, thank you. I’ll have my Christmas message out for Thursday morning and I promise it will be a lot more upbeat.

Another successful Arizona Symposium on Racing and Gaming concluded last week. By successful I mean they got through the entire agenda, more or less on schedule. There are a number of insightful people who have great perspective on racing’s problems, but in racing things change at a glacial pace. We’re great at talking about what ails racing; we aren’t nearly as adept at fixing it.

First, I’m tired of hearing about Hong Kong. Hong Kong has huge fields. They handle $11 million per race. Their handle has increased 47% since 2006. They have the greatest drug policy in the universe. Why can’t we all be more like Hong Kong?

I’ll give you a few reasons. The have two racetracks. North America has well over 100 if you include harness tracks. Hong Kong has one authority running the whole show. North America is a hodgepodge of state and provincial commissions run by people who were appointed and not necessarily for their expertise in making and enforcing racing rules. Hong Kong has 83 racing days a year. North America has that in a half a month in August. Hong Kong has a virtual monopoly on gambling. The nearest casinos are in Macao, an hour away by ferry. The Hong Kong Jockey Club controls the lottery. They control sports betting. There is no hometown football or basketball or baseball to distract the racing fan. 80% of residents have been to the track, and 20% characterize themselves as regulars. It’s like America in the 1920’s when racing topped sports attendance by far.

Horses based in Hong Kong start an average of 7.4 times a year. That’s comparable to higher quality horses in North America. Why can horses be pampered the way they are in Hong Kong? The purses. Average earnings per horse are a little over $78,000, which means most horses more than pay for their upkeep. If you wanted to own a string of horses and were told you were all but guaranteed to make money, you think the number of owners and horses being bred might go up?

The Hong Kong Jockey Club is effectively a self-perpetuating not-for-profit corporation, much like NYRA or Keeneland, but unlike the for-profit Churchill Downs or the Stronach tracks. Unlike North American tracks the HKJC is the alpha and the omega. It puts on the races, owns the facilities, employs just about everyone in the business except for horse owners and trainers (even the grooms and hotwalkers are HKJC employees), runs the vast network of OTBs and phone and online wagering, and is its own regulator, setting the rules, running the testing laboratory and meting out punishments. How does that sound all you fans of due process?

Oh yes, and the grooms who work for the HKJC (and not the trainers), are earning $5,000 a month, plus their cuts of purse money, and they don’t have to tend to more than three horses. I know some trainers who would be happy clearing that amount every month. That whole situation has to be an intersting dynamic. Oh, and when the government comes to collect its share of the taxes, the maximum they get is 15%.

We’re not Hong Kong, and we’re not going to ever be Hong Kong. The Hong Kong model works because there is one central authority and everybody buys into it. They don’t have to worry about filling races. They are running 830 or so races a year, so if the average field size is 12 horses and the horses run their average of 7.4 races a year, arithmetically 1,400 horses could get them through a season. Even at Arapahoe Park they would need 4-600 horses to get through two weeks of racing. I also expect if 1,400 horses could get us through the entire racing season, being drug free wouldn’t be nearly the challenge it is today. On the other hand, if you can keep the rest of the 10,000+ horses we need to keep racing going in a summer season race-capable without medication, unlocking the secret of the universe prior to the Big Bang should be child’s play.

So enough of Hong Kong. That tangent on Hong Kong spun on a little longer than I thought it would.

Back to the Racing Symposium.

Robert Evans the CEO and President at Churchill Downs listed his five reasons to be optimistic about the future of racing. Number one was the expansion of “alternative gaming” at tracks. This sounds a little bit like dating someone else because your current partner is a little stale. I get that in the short term the injection is like a B-12 shot, but what happens when the gaming people do what they did in Iowa and say they are tired of essentially burning money subsidizing racing, in this case the greyhound tracks?

Second was that balance sheets are improving because operations emerging from bankruptcy are shedding debt and are being bought by stronger, casino companies. I can tell you based on the Colorado experience that the casino companies hope to use the tracks to expand their gaming operations, and if that doesn’t happen, racing can be dropped like a bad habit. It’s not a bad thing, but it only works as long as the casino companies don’t see racing as a drag.

Evans was proud of how Churchill is using technology to increase handle. I think high def feeds are a nice feature for tracks and ADW’s but I hope that’s not the best you’ve got to try to suck my money in (disclosure: I won’t bet Churchill or on Twin Spires since they’ve raised their take to cover executive salaries).

Fourth was an emphasis on quality racing. Yes, the Kentucky Derby, the Travers and the Breeders Cup generate huge handle, but how many more of those days can we squeeze in without adding lower quality horses? The Kentucky Derby already has 20 starters, and every year there are five or six that have absolutely no chance and are running just so their owners can claim a Derby starter. More quality racing is a great idea, but we need to quickly move beyond ideas to collaboration and implementation. When half of the creme de la creme  of horses in America are trying to win a race at Saratoga in August, what’s left for the other few dozen tracks?

Finally was the offer of innovation, which given the slide Evans used, seems to be stuff that has already been tried with some success, like expanding the meeting at Saratoga, although his suggestion of exchange wagering would in fact be a great innovation.

The reality of the presentation was that it was a rehash of the same problems with most of the “solutions” things that are already being tried while racing continues to decline. Innovation is not finally adopting technology I’ve had on my TV for 10 years.

Ray Paulick argued in a recent editorial that tracks must come to grips with the idea that there are too many racing days, and this leads to smaller field size which in turn leads to smaller handle. Jennifer Owen, an Australian racing consultant said her research shows that if you can increase the average field size in the U.S. from the current 7.86 per race to 10 horses per race, you could increase handle by 43%. In this calculation, Ms. Owen projects that if a track went from10 races a day to eight, redistributing the starters from the two cancelled races across the remaining races, handle would go from say, $5 million to $7 million. Unfortunately, all I have are the summary articles and not her actual calculations, but I’m guessing she used the same calculus that CHRB and Churchill Downs did when they calculated raising the take would result in higher revenues. How did that work out anyway? If she argued that the PER RACE average would go up by 43% I could buy it, but cancelling two races and seeing daily handle rise by that much assumes a lot of people yanking a slot handle (I know, you push a button these days) must be shifting over to racing. The handle on a given day cannot be greater than the total amount people are willing to bet, and perhaps it is the case that bettors have money in their pockets they are not pulling out because of field size, but 43% sounds like a pretty difficult number to embrace. Still, the point is well taken. Short fields suck from a pari-mutuel perspective.

Ray Paulick asks what needs to be done for stakeholders to see the light. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of suggestions floating around that would get those stakeholders to change directions. It may be a little more destructive, but the market will eventually sort this out. We’ll see more Suffolks and Hollywood Parks and Rockinghams until all that is left are the tracks that live because of slots or because their handle can sustain their existence.

As Buzz Lightyear said, to infinity and beyond.

December 19 marks the day Doug O’Neill’s suspension is finished and he’ll be back training his string. Welcome back, Doug. Racing is better with you participating.

Doug O’Neill would be the first to tell you that he’s made some mistakes, but I believe he’s worked as hard as any trainer to run a clean operation. I’ve talked extensively with Doug, with some of his owners, and the people who work with him. I haven’t found one who believes in anything less than running a totally clean operation. Doug even signed the petition to the CHRB asking for the installation of security cameras on the backstretch. That doesn’t sound like a guy with something to hide.

The current suspension was related to in incident in New York involving a positive test for Oxazepam on the horse Wind of Bosphorus. I won’t go into detail – you can read about the case in one of my earlier blogs – but the whole thing really underscored some of the problems with racing rules, especially the absolute insurers rule. We still don’t know how the Oxazepam got into the horse’s system, and ironically the one guy who wants to know the most is Doug O’Neill.

Before I launch into the rest of the blog, let me ask you to remember this. I firmly believe that a trainer who knowingly cheats in an effort to gain an advantage is reprehensible and should be dealt with harshly. I am not nor will I ever defend any dishonest trainer or jockey.

Twitter has been buzzing with opinions on trainers, and these days David Jacobson seems to be the most common target. He fits a lot of the criteria for garnering suspicion. He’s successful, seems to improve horses dramatically after a claim, and often races them hard until he drops them to a level low enough to induce another trainer to take them off his hands. The one thing Jacobson hasn’t done is have a horse test positive for seven years, despite being scrutinized microscopically by NYRA.

The list goes on. Bob Baffert had 7-11 horses expire suddenly, and although the CHRB could find no explanation that would put the blame on Baffert, the cloud still hangs over his head. Dick Dutrow is gone for ten years. Tom Amoss, one of the cleanest guys in racing, has had to spend a substantial sum fighting a positive in Indiana. When a trainer can’t comply with the rules when he tries as hard as as humanly possible to keep a horse honestly healthy and clean, you have to wonder if the issue is something other than the trainers.

It’s a common story in racing. Once a trainer is labelled as one who will use chemical means to get an edge, the stain is pretty much indelible. Once a trainer enjoys what some will label unnatural success, the cloud is inevitable. Just as Doug O’Neill and David Jacobson.

I’ve been looking at this issue for quite a while now. I’m far more convinced that the absolute insurers rule needs an update and it is not due process to have one body be judge, jury, appeals court and executioner. I’m convinced that racing commissions are no different than other rulemaking bodies, finding more and more ways for trainers to become lawbreakers, setting standards that may or may not get to the heart of racing’s real problems. I’m convinced that people like Dr. Rick Arthur, Joe Gorajec, and Chris Kay have become engorged with the power they’ve cultivated over the years, becoming almost imperial under the cloak of protecting racing from everyone but themselves.

In a highly publicized 1987 case, former labor secretary Ray Donovan was indicted and tried in New York for larceny and fraud in connection with a project to construct a new line for the New York City Subway. He was ultimately acquited and famously asked, “Now where do I go to get my reputation back?”

More than a few trainers are wondering the same thing.

Last week’s blog, For Whom the Bell Tolls, generated a good amount of response, although there were a few who didn’t quite get the essence of the piece. Let me make one thing absolutely clear. I will never suggest that jockeys or trainers never knowingly break the rules. Of course they do and if anybody believes I thought otherwise let me unequivocally disabuse you of that notion. I also believe that transgressions involving performance enhancing medications (as opposed to theraputic drugs) should be dealt with fairly, but in the end a proven, willful violation should be dealt with harshly. Just like in the real world, Commissions need to understand the difference between a traffic ticket and a felony. My piece was primarily about the competency and consistency of racing commissions. I quoted liberally from Maggie Moss’ article for Blood Horse Magazine, When Regulation Runs Amok, which was about the problems she saw with the Indiana Horse Racing Commission.

I’ve argued that many racing commissions are filled with political appointees who are marginally qualified to enforce racing’s rules, much less steer racing through increasingly choppy waters and grow the sport. I agreed with Maggie Moss that the commisions can be inconsistent and seemingly arbitrary in the way that they deal with violations. Because of the absolute insurers rule they often lose any incentive to coduct complete investigations on violations. We all know that despite numerous real world demonstrations that increasing take out decreases handle, commissions will still raise take out rates and then be puzzled  about why revenues from betting go down. Most of all, we were in agreement that the negative press that results from racing’s trevails tends to do less to rid the sport of all evil than to reinforce the negative opinion held by too many of the non-racing public.

Those on the inside, under the aegis of cleaning up the sport, are casting so wide a net that every fish in the sea is getting snared. That is more what my piece was about.

Joe Gorajec, executive director of the Indiana Commission, wrote a response to the Maggie Moss piece, and I’ll focus on that this week.

Not unexpectedly, Mr. Gorajec suggested most of Maggie Moss’ claims are “either false or misleading.” Then he goes on to essentially not refute most of those claims with any substance. The depth of his argument is that she is simply wrong in most of her assertions.

This is the list of issues/questions I got from the Maggie Moss article and how Mr. Gorajec responded.

Moss: There were uncertain withdrawal times for theraputic medications, creating an ever-changing landscape for horsemen.

Gorajec: As best I can tell, his response was that Indiana applies the Association of Racing Commissioners’ International model penalty guidelines to everyone equally, and then he launches into a discussion of the Tom Amoss and the Ross Russell cases. I was having a hard time actually seeing the connection, but I think he was saying nope, that didn’t happen, and there you have it.

Moss: There was a pattern of closed door deals, and she actually cites two trainers who were deposed and admitted they used illegal substances, but are still training.

Gorajec: The idea that there is selective enforcement could not be, in Mr. Gorajec’s words, farther from the truth. And that takes care of that. As for the allegation that the Commission was not consistent in disciplining the two trainers she mentions, there didn’t not seem to be a direct comment.

Moss: Indiana (read that Joe Gorajec) changed labs without Racing Commission approval, initially picking a lab that was not the low bidder then in the middle of the meet switching labs again. Ms. Moss suggests that this put the chain of custody in disarray.

Gorajec: As best as I could tell, Mr. Gorajec didn’t address this issue directly.

Moss: The measure of substances was done in picograms, a trillionth of a gram, and that these amounts were not only immeasurable, but could not affect the performance of a horse. Ms. Moss notes that positive notifications went up substantially (from 5 to 70), often to trainers who had been historically clean. She also charges that none of this was told to the public.

Gorajec: Mr. Gorajec says that this is “simply untrue.” He then basically explains that using modern measuring devices, they can in fact measure trace levels and this is critical to identifying the use of illegal drugs. The answer was pretty clever. He focuses on the idea that measuring equipment is getting more and more sophisticated and can find smaller and smaller amounts as a way of discrediting Ms. Moss’ statement. In fact, her use of the term immeasurable was inaccurate for conveying what I thought was the base issue – how reliable is a measurement of a picogram? It was about precision, not the raw number. Now I don’t pretend to understand physiology on that level, but I have a feeling at some point you could be picking up stuff a horse breathed from the steel plant down the road if all you find is a trillionth of a gram. I think in this case they were talking past each other.  If I understand it, she is saying, people have been caring for their horses a certain way for a very long time, and all of a sudden normal care turns into violations and somebody at the Commission should be taking this into account. New rules, new measurements – how about some time to adapt? Gorajec argues that unless measurements are in picograms, Indiana could miss a cocktail of the most abused drugs in racing. Really? A trainer could feed a horse clenbuterol, stanozolol, methylprednisolone, betamethasone, and dexamethasone on race day, and unless the track could find a trillionth of a gram, the trainer could get away with it? Just as a point of reference, a trillion seconds is 31,688 years. In other words (and apologies if you don’t buy the whole evolution thing), 31,688 years ago neanderthals were what passed for humans. I’m going to go out on a limb and say Mr. Gorajec really needs to give us a better discussion of how having a picogram of methylprednisolone is an unmitigated disaster for racing. An assurance that they’d never railroad anybody just isn’t good enough for a lot of us.

Moss: Ms. Moss alleges that there were trainers deprived of any due process or procedures outlined specifically in the Indiana Racing Rules. She says that rights to lawyers, timely split samples, or allowing the HBPA representatives to accompany alleged violators were ignored. She also says that individuals were threatened with excessive penalties of they didn’t not take deals that were offered.

Gorajec: Mr. Gorajec suggests that Ms. Moss is frustrated because the media did not look into her “self-styled troubling allegations.” In defense of the Indiana Racing Commission, he notes that in 20 years no court has supported a charge of lack of due process. He didn’t address the whole plea barganing issue.

In reality, Commissions are not obligated to investigate beyond the sample positive. As we learned in the case of Doug O’Neill and TCO2, the fact that a positive was measured was all that was necessary to penalize him. The California Commission was not required to demonstrate how O’Neill elevated the horse’s TCO2 level. In fact, all they did was speculate that it could have been Lasix or dehydration, but in the end it didn’t matter how the TCO2 got elevated. O’Neill sued, in part contending he was not given due process. He never stood a chance because due process at the racing commission primarily means did they follow their own administrative rules. It has nothing to do with the state having to prove how the TCO2 level became elevated. Any statement that the one thing racing commissions are good at is due process is sort of humorous.

As for plea bargaining, we all know that is the way of the world. Whether or not it is the case that trainers were threatened is probably a matter of perspective, but if you ever got a traffic ticket and went to see the D.A., you pretty much know how things work. Some extraordinarily high percentage of the time the violator pleads guilty and in return for not burdening the system, you get the violation knocked down to something less.

I don’t know either of the participants, nor do I have a great familiarity with Indiana racing, but after reading the two pieces I’d say Gorajec was mostly non-responsive or perhaps tangential in his response. Maggie Moss makes some fairly serious allegations and Joe Gorajec pretty much dismisses them out of hand without really offering a lot of substance.

Seems like business as usual to me.

“No man is an island, entire of  itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Those words were written in 1624 by John Donne, at the time Dean of St. Pauls in London. Earlier Donne had been afflicted with spotted fever, and as he was lying in his bed at home could hear the tolling of the funeral bell from the neighboring church day after day. This led him to the profound revelation that we are all part of a greater whole, all in this life together. When one of us dies, we are all diminished by that death.

It is no different in the racing community. When a racetrack closes,  we all suffer a part of that loss. When the sport is spoiled by jockeys who use “buzzers,” or trainers who resort to performance enhancing medication, we are  all diminished. It is the strangest of conditions, where each of us often feels like an island, but we are all tied to each other through our devotion to the sport, and of course the parimutuel pool.

This is equally true when the state through its regulatory bodies does not act in the best interest of the sport. I’ve written extensively about the absolute insurers rule and how it has absolved the state from its investigatory responsibilities in some cases. The politics of racing commissions and the cronyism that often pervades regulatory issues angers many fans, but since so many see themselves not only as islands but as singularly impotent, we often restrict ourselves to complaining, mainly to each other.

Maggie Moss wrote a scathing piece about new regulations at Indiana Grand http://www.bloodhorse.com/horse-racing/articles/88735/commentary-when-regulation-runs-amok

In it, she says

The 2014 meet began May 6 with an attempt to adopt new Association of Racing Commissioners International medication rules. However, uncertain withdrawal times for therapeutic medications—in the middle of the meet—created an ever-changing landscape for horsemen. It was, admittedly, a work in progress; even trainers strictly complying with new rules were called in with “positives.” The immeasurable amounts, by all scientific data, could not ever remotely affect the performance of the horse.

This is often the rub. A trainer gets a relatively severe penalty for a positive for oxazepam at a trace level, despite the fact that there seems to be no logical explanation for why any horse would be given what amounts to a sedative in an attempt to enhance performance, or even how the drug had made it into the horse’s system. Because racing commissions are paranoid about public perception the letter of the law becomes the alpha and omega of the law. How a horse winds up with a positive often becomes irrelevant in the world of racing commission violations.There is no innocent until proven guilty – it is quite the opposite. The idea of due process is perverted to the point where it only means the commission lets you talk before they found you guilty, or as in the words of Sheriff Cobb in the movie Silverado, “We’re gonna give you a fair trial, followed by a first class hanging.”

This is consistent with what happened in Indiana as Ms. Moss documents.

Trainers notified of overages were allegedly deprived of any due process or procedures outlined specifically in the Indiana rules of racing. Any rights to lawyers, timely split samples, or allowing Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association representation was ignored. Worse, individuals were threatened with excessive penalties if they did not take the “deals” offered. Most of this was done behind closed doors; the identities of those disciplined were never released to the media or the betting public.

This is the epitome of business as usual. Commissions hell-bent on getting guilty pleas cajole and intimidate the accused. I once served on a jury in an armed robbery case. The defendant, in this case the getaway driver, was offered the same deal as his partner who actually went into a jewelry store with a gun and robbed the place. For some reason this guy thought he could beat the rap, and to avoid trial the D.A. offered him the same 12 years as his partner. To make it tougher on the defendant, she threatened him with a three-strikes violation, a crime that carried a life sentence, if he wouldn’t plead guilty. His other two felony convictions were for things like jimmying the coin box at a laundromat, certainly not a violent or particularly heinous crime, but a felony nonetheless. It didn’t matter. His partner pled guilty and a few years later walked out of jail. The defendant was convicted, is still at the penitentiary, and will be for quite some time. The point wasn’t lost on me. If you don’t plead guilty, the penalty after conviction can be orders of magnitude worse.

Maggie Moss’ article is a horror show of a state commission run amok, and perhaps it is worse than what occurs in most jurisdictions, but I expect not.

It is the nature of the world that partisanship exists. We are loyal to those who have always supported us and we have little patience for those who are arrogant or aloof. It is no different in racing where certain trainers and jockeys always seem to warrant the enmity of the press, the public and racing commissions, while others have the appearance of being teflon coated.

It is not that the racing commissioners are not well-intentioned. On the contrary, they believe they have been ordained to protect racing by treating all transgressions as violent felonies. In the words of one backstretch worker who asked not to be identified, it seems rare that any medication violation is treated as a simple traffic ticket. It will always be that way as long as the sport is governed by unelected commissioners appointed by politicians who often are dispensing favors to the appointee or to those who are the equivalent of the Rockefellers or the the Morgans in the sport. It is far easier to focus on the O’Neill’s, the Dutrow’s, and the Asmussen’s of the sport, people for whom public opinion has already placed them in the category of chronic cheaters. Intent can rarely make up for competency.

Maggie Moss says,

“We must stop calling everyone cheaters when we discuss picograms of therapeutic overages versus cobalt, dermorphin, and other boutique drugs that kill our horses and jeopardize our jockeys. The media must do its job and stop calling everyone in racing cheaters, and also inquire into what a picogram is and how it affects a racing animal. The media also should ask what our labs are doing to test as they never have before and trying to measure amounts that are simply immeasurable.”

“Most of all the media must realize it is what makes the public think that racing is a cesspool of cheating when in reality it is not. A good starting point would be to see how inconsistent drug testing and inequality by our regulators is aiding a very unfair playing field. Indiana with its new regulations, switching of labs, and selective prosecution would be a good starting place.”

Each of us that loves racing has a responsibility to get involved with changing the administration of the sport so that governing bodies are filled with objective and qualified people. Where racing commissions are filled with lobbyists, attorneys who have represented the companies that own tracks and may understand administrative rules but were never inside the game, horse owners STILL connected to the trainers and racetracks they have to judge, B-level actresses, state veterinarians who still have certain trainers as clients, and so on, we cannot expect better than we are getting. The media, the commissions, and ardent racing fans are accomplishing what PETA could not. We are killing the sport from the inside out, by sensationalizing its faults and allowing amateur regulators to hold the reins of power.

When the next track closes; when the next honest trainer gets suspended; when the next horse dies inexplicably in its stall and nothing is done; when you hear the tolling of the funeral bell, ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.