October, 2021 | Horse Racing Free Tips

‘A Breeder’s Responsibility’: Racing Owner/Breeders Take Horse From Foaling Stall To Thoroughbred Makeover

For many riders at last week's Thoroughbred Makeover, the competition represented the culmination of a goal that had been nearly a year in the making. Riders can begin training their recently-retired racehorses for the October competition no earlier than December of the preceding year, since the objective of the event is to showcase the rapid progress an off-track Thoroughbred (OTTB) can make in a new job.

For one ownership group however, the goal of going to the 2021 edition of the Thoroughbred Makeover was born four years and eight months ago, before the horse in question had even stood and nursed.

Ryan Watson, Adolfo Martinez, and Heath Gunnison collectively form RAH Bloodstock and knew that the little bay colt out of Thunder Gulch mare Talking Audrey would be special to them. The trio had purchased the mare out of the 2017 Keeneland January Horses of All Ages sale for $1,200. She was in foal to a stallion none of them had ever heard of — Doctor Chit, a Grade 2 placed son of War Front who stands in Oklahoma.

They were drawn to the mare because Watson and Martinez (who is now the manager of Heaven Trees Farm) had worked with her female family at Darby Dan. Watson is stallion manager at Darby Dan, and Gunnison is the head hunt seat coach at Midway University. The three wanted to go in on a mare together, but they knew they wouldn't want to sell the very first horse that had RAH Bloodstock listed as his breeder.

“We thought, if we don't know anything about [Doctor Chit], we won't be selling the foal,” said Martinez. “We've gone to a couple of stallions with her since and had some nice foals, but the first one is pretty special. Your first child is always the one.”

The group struggled to get a registered name for their first horse; most combinations of the two parents' names ended up being rejected by The Jockey Club as too vulgar. (Talking Chit was a favorite but didn't make the cut.) Finally, they settled on naming him This Is Me after a song made famous in The Greatest Showman, which had come out around the time they were submitting name requests. Around the barn, the bay with a thin white blaze remained “Chit” or “Lil Chit.”

Chit became what's known around the track as a “morning glory” who showed lots of talent in his workouts but failed to deliver in the afternoons. Martinez said he was “a very polite runner — he let everybody go first.”

The colt's very first start, in a maiden special weight at Indiana Grand in October 2019, made them briefly hopeful that he had serious potential.

“He showed a little bit of talent by closing on the frontrunners,” recalled Watson. “After the race we're walking back, waiting for the runners to be unsaddled and I see the outriders go tearing around the backside of the track, going in opposite directions. You look, and there's a horse they can't pull up coming around the far turn. It was him.”

It was really on the strength of that gallop out that RAH Bloodstock and trainer Ronald Kahles continued on for another four starts, trying to unleash that drive without success. Watson remembers fighting a snowstorm to get to Turfway Park in February 2020 for what would be Chit's last start, a distant ninth in maiden claiming company. He asked jockey John McKee if he thought the horse under him had any talent at all, and McKee admitted he didn't think so. Watson, grateful for the honesty, happily took Chit home to begin the wait until they could begin re-training in December.

Chit with dam Talking Audrey

All three men grew up riding – Gunnison and Watson doing ranch work and team penning, and Martinez mostly casual trail and pleasure riding – so they had a good idea of what they were looking at as they considered a new career for Chit. Gunnison has made a name for himself in the hunter world, and they all agreed Chit's natural, smooth gait would set him up for success there. Gunnison did much of the riding, with Watson and Martinez standing by to watch, set fences, and lend support.

It wasn't until this summer that they wondered whether Chit might have some aptitude for ranch work. Watson was always happy to support the Thoroughbred Incentive Program Western pleasure classes at Scheffleridge Farm's hunter/jumper shows, so they threw Western tack on Chit and saw him maintain his long and low frame as though nothing much had changed.

It's an improbable combination for any horse – excelling in both show hunters and ranch work. Hunters are often thought of as somewhat narrow in their worldview, working mostly in arena settings, while ranch horses must be a little more rough and tumble and very brave with cattle. A level head and a smooth movement will be rewarded in both disciplines, however.

“He's really taken everything we've thrown at him,” said Martinez. “He's very level-headed and calm.”

Martinez said they brought Chit into an arena full of cattle along with several other ranch horses to make him feel safe in a group, gradually removing the other horses until he was working the cows alone.

“It's very much sink or swim,” said Watson. “He has to learn about them just like any other discipline – learn to track them, learn to follow them. He actually got good enough this summer where he was able to anticipate how they were going to move.”

A busy show schedule throughout late summer had the team out nearly every weekend at one kind of competition or the other. The hard work paid off, with Chit heading to the finals as the leader in both disciplines. Horses will be horses however, and a sudden stop at the very first fence in the hunter finale took him down to fifth in the overall standings. Gunnison brought him back to finish second in the ranch work division, and Watson said the trio could not be more thrilled with their experience.

[Story Continues Below]

“We were just happy to get to the finals in one category, and two categories was just a bonus,” said Watson. “This horse has done so much for us. He is currently leading the Beginner Horse [division] in the Kentucky Hunter Jumper Association by 90 points or something like that. He's just been a phenomenal horse this year. We'll live to fight another day.”

The group expects Chit to move on to the three-foot hunters (an increase from the two and a half foot heights he saw at the Makeover) and the Take2 hunter series next season.

Not all owner/breeders can necessarily invest four years in a horse with the hopes of competing in the Makeover, rather than hoping to pick up a check. Still, Watson is hopeful that others in the racing industry can take away something from the RAH journey with Chit.

“A horse is a breeder's responsibility throughout their entire life,” said Watson. “It did not ask to come into this world. You are the one who brought it here. So it's definitely a breeders' responsibility to ensure that it's going to not end up where it doesn't deserve to be.

“It's so rewarding. Obviously they're bred for racing, but to see him compete in the preliminary rounds earlier last week, it was just such a proud moment to have everybody coming up to us and talking about what a nice horse he was. It's a very rewarding experience to know that something you have been responsible for creating is kind of the talk of the town and goes on and does something so significant in a second career. It's a really good feeling.”

The post ‘A Breeder’s Responsibility’: Racing Owner/Breeders Take Horse From Foaling Stall To Thoroughbred Makeover appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

Source of original post

View From The Eighth Pole: Of Rulings And Squeaky Clean Racing

We get questions all the time from readers about rumored drug positives or possible suspensions of trainers. It's seldom easy tracking down official rulings since there is no single, all-encompassing resource that provides timely, up-to-date information on such things.

In another era, Daily Racing Form was the go-to publication for stewards and commission rulings. The Form had a chart-calling crew at every racetrack in the country and forwarded copies of all official rulings to DRF offices. The rulings were published alongside entries and race results, sometimes almost as fillers, in editorial or statistical sections of the Form. If you wanted to find out who got caught smoking in the shedrow, parking illegally in the stable area or was fined or suspended for a post-race positive test, America's Turf Authority had 'em all.

Now it's not so easy.

The Jockey Club operates a website, ThoroughbredRulings.com, where you can search for regulatory rulings by trainer name, track or regulatory authority. But the information published there is not always complete or timely.

The Association of Racing Commissioners International keeps a regularly refreshed page of recent rulings – not just for Thoroughbred racing but also Quarter Horse and Standardbred – but it's also not entirely up to date or comprehensive and there is no search function to find rulings that may be more than a few weeks or months old. The ARCI does have a more comprehensive website for its members to access but it is not available to the general public (or media).

Individual racing commissions or government bureaus post rulings on their websites with varying degrees of efficiency and functionality. Some, like the New York State Gaming Commission or California Horse Racing Board web pages, are maintained regularly and have useful search functions. Others, like the Maryland or Indiana racing commissions, have outdated or incomplete information.

This is something that the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority can put on its “to do” list, though not sure where that project will rank by priority.

Squeaky Clean Racing In New York
In searching the New York State Gaming Commission website recently, I could only find one ruling for a medication violation in all of 2021 at New York Racing Association tracks – a phenylbutazone positive for Jeffrey Englehart-trained Runningwscissors after a third-place finish in a stakes at Aqueduct on Jan. 9. The ruling states that Runningwscissors was disqualified from any part of the purse money (though Equibase still credits the horse with a third-place finish and the purse money). Englehart served a 10-day suspension and was fined $1,000.

I could find zero positive tests in the New York State Gaming Commission rulings database in 2020 and zero positives in 2019 for NYRA tracks. Zero. That's one positive for the last three years at NYRA tracks.

By comparison, in 2019, the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission reported 37 medication related rulings. California had 99. Pennsylvania 80. Florida 55. West Virginia 57. Ohio 24.

Perhaps New York's testing laboratory at Morrisville State College, under the direction of Dr. George Maylin, is using different criteria for calling positive tests than laboratories testing for other racing states. Maybe the Morrisville lab isn't very good. Or maybe, just maybe, racing in New York is cleaner than anywhere else in the country.

While I don't know about the criteria used by Maylin to call positives, the idea that his lab is not very good is foolhardy. Maylin was the head of drug testing at Cornell University going back to the early 1970s until moving his test tubes and lab kits to Morrisville State College in 2010. That's nearly 50 years of being the kingpin for drug testing of New York racing, bridging Oscar Barrera to Jorge Navarro and Jason Servis.

The only conclusion I can come up with for the absence of medication violations in New York is that there aren't any. Not only is there no cheating going on, but horsemen there don't make the kinds of mistakes they occasionally do in other jurisdictions or have contamination issues from poppy seed bagels and grooms urinating in stalls. It must be the cleanest racing in the U.S.

Well done, New York racing. Well done.

That's my view from the eighth pole.

The post View From The Eighth Pole: Of Rulings And Squeaky Clean Racing appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

Source of original post

Flying Close To The Edge: Gambling Drone Operators Fighting For Their Rights In UK

Self-described professional gambler Michael McCool is engaged in an ongoing battle with racing authorities over his use of drones to gain an advantage on in-race betting on horse racing, reports wired.co.uk. The footage of races used in betting shops has a built in delay due to broadcast technology, so McCool's ability to reduce that latency gives him an advantage of up to three seconds over most bettors.

Racecourse operators are concerned about both the safety of the race participants and the integrity of the betting product.

“There is no way to know where, and by whom, such broadcasts are being used,” a spokesperson for Arena Racing Company, which runs 16 horse racing courses and two greyhound tracks, told Wired. “In an environment when gambling and gambling controls are under significant scrutiny, it cannot be right that these operators dronehave such a simple way to exploit the loopholes and potentially expose the vulnerable to unlicensed routes to betting. Furthermore, it creates significant concern for all sports and live events over their ability to stage events and control their own business, into which they will have invested millions of pounds.”

The UK's Gambling Commission examined in-race wagering in September of 2016, but determined it wasn't an institutional problem for the industry: “In-play betting does not appear to generate specific additional risks to the licensing objectives as long as betting customers are sufficiently aware of their position and the respective positions of other players and the betting operators. We do not consider it necessary to intervene to prevent some players using technology to gain an advantage in terms of speed of information, provided it is clear to all players that this can be done.”

McCool argues that the advantage he gains via drone footage is part of what makes him a professional gambler.

“It's all about what edge you can get,” McCool told Wired. “You need an edge. You can't class yourself as a professional gambler if you've not got an edge. If you haven't got an edge, you're just a gambler; somebody betting on bingo and Peruvian netball.”

Callaghan Suspended, Fined For Shockwave Violation

Trainer Simon Callaghan has been suspended for 15 days and fined $5,000 for treatingthe unraced 3-year-old colt Federal Bureau (Medaglia d'Oro), a $1.2-million KEESEP buy, with three shockwave therapy treatments within 30 days prior to a workout, according to a Santa Anita board of stewards ruling dated Oct. 17. The suspension runs from Nov.14, 2021, through Nov. 28, 2021.

As a term of ruling, Callaghan is suspended from all CHRB premises, and “all licenses and license privileges of SIMON CALLAGHAN are suspended and pursuant to California Horse Racing Board rule #1528 (Jurisdiction of Stewards to Suspend or Fine),” according to the stewards' ruling.

Equine shockwave therapy is a treatment widely used on the backstretch for soft-tissue, musculoskeletal and bone problems such as sore shins.

Shockwaving also carries with it concerns over its analgesic properties, which can last up to three days post-treatment. Last year, the CHRB extended the post-treatment window for breezing from 10 days to 30.

The TDN texted Callaghan for comment but didn't receive a response before publication.

The post Callaghan Suspended, Fined For Shockwave Violation appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

Source of original post