Eddie Truman: No Regrets on the Road He Chose

In this TDN series, we curry lessons and wise counsel from veteran Californian figures who, like gold nuggets panned from the Tuolumne River in the High Sierras, have unearthed career riches on arguably the toughest circuit in the States.

The series started with John Shirreffs and Art Sherman, and continues here with Eddie Truman, who announced his retirement last month.

The land around Mulvane, Kansas, has been flattened as though by some colossal steamroller, and the vast, leafy battalions of maize and wheat and sorghum stretch outwards on and on until the horizon appears to meet another universe entirely.

“Imagine what's out here,” it seems to say (this is the Bible Belt after all). “Go on, take a look.” But before you do, it's best to go equipped with a few basic life lessons.

“I don't know who taught my dad or how he figured it out or what, but we would re-break horses from these other farms around us. Everybody else would get a horse and then ruin them,” said Eddie Truman, when asked where the foundation stones of his long training career were cemented.

He then laid out a formula for how the Truman family successfully rehabilitated those four-legged delinquents on their little Kansas farm. These would have been the years of chrome fenders, subway vents straddled by platinum blonds, and the distant shadow of “Ike” Eisenhower.

“We had a small corral and we would start totally over with them all. We would start lunging then driving them,” said Truman. “By the time we got on them, they were responding to the bit, and he [dad] taught us that you correct them hard and fast, but then let them go and say, 'hey, we'll give you another chance.'

“We didn't buck-break them out or anything like that. This is where dad had the edge–our horses never bucked. No. As soon as we got them out of the pen, we'd take them out in a plowed field. It was deep stuff, so they couldn't do too much. But it really taught us, all of us, to be kind, gentle hands, and to let horses relax–correct them, but then give them a chance. It was good.”

Good for horse. Good for rider. “We learned some really valuable horsemanship that way,” said Truman.

In a neatly ironed plaid shirt and navy-blue jeans, the recently retired trainer cut a relaxed silhouette on a warm early February morning outside the Starbucks in Sierra Madre, a sedate little town just north of Santa Anita, where the treasure lies in the view itself–the painterly backdrop provided by the San Gabriel Mountains that could have been stolen from the set of a John Huston spaghetti Western.

If Mulvane opens out, Sierra Madre leans in. One place easy to leave, the other easier to stay. And Truman has lived in and around Sierra Madre since the 1970s.

At 77, he's as wirily trim as a bantamweight boxer. Thank a lifetime in the saddle–peddle-bike and horse–for that, amid a near 50-year training career defined not so much by the usual barometers of success (Kentucky Derby garland, a laundry list of graded stakes wins), as by a more indeterminate metric, and one that, as a result, is perhaps more readily brushed aside. Especially in an age that covets above all else the religion of certainty.

Sure, he's trained plenty of winners–763 of them, to be exact. “But to see a horse get good and see them just develop, get confidence, that was really fantastic to me–more so than even having a real nice horse that just goes out there and wins every time or runs hard every time,” said Truman, acknowledging what many regard a strength of his approach to training–the prospector's gift for panning gold from grit.

“Maybe they weren't great horses, but they would go out there and perform for you.”

Indeed, two of Truman's most accomplished works are horses that joined him half-made. Go West Marie had shown just fair form on the East Coast before joining the Truman stable halfway through 2014. Under his watch, the daughter of Western Fame won four stakes races and was just a length away from winning the 2015 GIII Las Cienegas S.

He got the best out of Fairy King's son, Casino King, an Irish import who showed up time after time in some ferocious bouts on the turf, including a clear second behind triple Grade I winner Bienamado (Bien Bien) one June at Hollywood Park, a second-place finish in a Grade II at Woodbine and a stakes victory at Remington Park.

But those wayward types, they were the ones Truman really got a tune out of. “I would not actually search them out,” he explained. “But if I liked their form and I saw they were like that, I figured they could be better. Yeah. That would be one thing that I didn't mind at all.

“A lot of times the reason horses are acting up or not performing is because they're hurting. That's a lot of it–something's wrong,” Truman added. “You need to get them happy. Try to get them sound and get them happy again. And then just patience. Patience with horses I think comes down to mainly repetition.”

Ah yes, repetition–10,000 hours of it to make a genius, or so says Malcolm Gladwell.

To illustrate, Truman recalled how one of his last trainees arrived with a pre-existing phobia, one especially ill-suited to the low-drooping lids of Santa Anita's backstretch barns.

“They couldn't get her under the shedrow. She didn't want to go in the stall–she was scared of it,” he explained, cutting a cross with a hand. “Nope.”

Carefully, persistently, Truman and his team successfully weaned the filly from her neurosis.

“After about three weeks, she's going in pretty good. And after about a month, month and a half, she's like a normal horse walking in,” said Truman. “It just shows that time and patience are the key to horsemanship.”

True to his days on the Mulvane flats, Truman preferred to meet challenges posed by his equine Rubik's Cubes hands-on. That he was an accomplished rider didn't hurt. Even into his sixties, Truman could be seen of a morning bobbing on horseback around Del Mar and Santa Anita (sometimes in shorts, to the consternation of anyone with skin on their knees).

Truman's racing teeth were cut out on the dusty country roads of Kansas and Oklahoma, back then the epicenter of Quarter Horse match racing. As it was being laid out, Interstate 35, which cut a slice up through the spine of the country, proved a useful trial-ground.

“I'm getting on these Quarter Horses and they're flipping over, rearing up in the gate. I'm 11 years old. I weighed like 80 pounds or something, 85 pounds wet through. Oh, man–it was years before I was real comfortable in the gate.

“When you think about kids now, they would've locked up our parents. They would have hauled them away in handcuffs. But hey, that's the way it was.”

Truman rode his first winner aged 12, on a Thoroughbred going half a mile. At 16, he followed into the professional ranks his brother, Jerry, already an established jockey. Truman was contracted to the owner of the Chicago Blackhawks.

“They were kind of a gambling outfit, but [trainer] Paul [Kelly] was really a good horseman, very well respected.”

So much so, Truman was leading rider one year at Sportsman's Park.

When the scales became too much of an enemy, he took a year or two jumping from role to role–exercise rider, veterinarian's assistant, patrol judge–to eventually becoming private trainer to an owner called David Kelly in Detroit [no relation to Paul].

“I knew basic horsemanship and being a jockey and understanding the fitness of a horse, the way he's traveling. I was pretty good at that. But still, I hadn't really paid that much attention to the legs before then. I didn't really have the whole thing about training down pat. But I did take really good care of my horses.”

Less than a year in, Kelly's business empire went belly up. Truman was cut loose once more, flinging open the doors to what proved his “Eat, Pray, Love” years. He headed to Europe with little itinerary and even less luggage.

“I was just bumming around, traveling all over, just trying to decide what I wanted to do,” said Truman.

Six months later he was back in the States, headed west to Bay Meadows for a paddock judge position, then south to Santa Anita, exercise riding for a claiming trainer making his name as an unusually astute conditioner of the Thoroughbred racehorse.

“Most of the time it would be all about less,” said Truman, when asked what abiding lessons he took from his time working for Hall of Famer Bobby Frankel.

“Most of the time we'd just jog them. Pretty simple. That's what I often did, too, as a trainer,” Truman added. “Though I maybe carried that too far. I was too conservative sometimes. But he just kind of knew where horses were at, and which horses to go on with more.

“We had some horses you'd think were pretty sore. He'd say, 'go work him.' I would say, 'man, Bobby.' But he just knew. 'Don't worry about it. Go ahead.' And nine times out of 10, it would work out. But I was always scared to death to do that.”

Given the stock in the Frankel barn at the time, it figures that the old racing adage, “keep yourself in the best possible company and your horses in the worst,” was another useful tool that Truman took with him when he eventually set up on his own.

“When I started, we got lucky. We claimed a horse that won like six out of nine races. Claimed another one that won four out of five. We would run them where they belonged. Run them up north,” said Truman.

“That was one of my favorite games: Claim a horse here [Santa Anita, Hollywood Park] while they were in jail, run them up north, win, come back here, run them for what I claimed them for–I'd already won a race with them–and go on. You build up their confidence. Confidence–it's a big thing. People don't understand that.

“Around the barn the next day–maybe the horse gets it from the people being happy, who knows–but that horse is different when he wins than when he loses. He's different. He has more confidence. He might be tired, but he's stronger. And man, get him to win a couple races, they're tough. They'll lay their body back for you. You run a horse over its head too many times, it doesn't matter where you put them, they run just the same.”

Training, of course, is anything but a solitary pursuit. Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it would take a census to count the number of hands that have touched, brushed, ridden, prodded, picked and shod any horse along its route to the winner's circle.

Frankel, it seems, had particular ideas about what that village should resemble. So does his protege.

“If [Frankel] saw a groom wasn't handling a horse a certain way, I think he'd be more inclined just to get rid of the groom instead of taking the horse away from him,” said Truman.

“I kept one old guy with me for about 25 years,” Truman added. “He'd fight with everybody. Cranky? Oh, man. He'd want to get his horses out first. He'd get up at 2:30 in the morning. We'd start at six. Oh man, what a pain. But he loved his horses. Loved his horses. A good horseman. That's a big deal.”

Truman wears the cheerful veneer of your friendly neighborhood postman. He tosses the phrase “oh, man” into the conversation like a frisbee. Breezy optimism suggests he's figured out the pursuit of happiness. But all this personability hides an examining mind–one clearly not shy of turning inwards.

Truman admits he's glad he's not starting out a trainer in today's racing ecosystem. For one, he said, the era of the super trainer has led to the lopsided distribution of horses concentrated among fewer and fewer hands. Good horses especially.

“When I came out here, every barn you walked under, it didn't matter if they had six horses, they had 12 horses, they had 32 horses, every barn had a big horse. Every barn. And that's what I'm talking about when I talk about the distribution. Every barn had a big horse. And now here we are,” said Truman, arguing that California should reinstitute the 32-stall limit per-trainer at each licensed racetrack.

“I really think it's ruined racing,” he said. “I think it hurts everybody.”

He also sees the multi-faceted roles of a modern trainer–data analyst, PR guru, TV personality, navigator of bureaucracies–as an evolution that takes the job further and further away from its core tenets of horsemanship and animal husbandry.

“If you're a trainer, you might have a problem if you don't have a college education,” he said. “Why is that? You need to talk to these people, the owners, the media. You need to post stuff, take pictures of the horses, send them videos of workouts. And so, I think the game's changed. It's definitely evolved into one more focused on the owners, so that the training of the horses is secondary.

“Another thing that I learned later on is that all this stuff we do is meaningless if the horse isn't able to run,” Truman added. “Maybe the odd horse, you can do this or that a little different. But hey, everybody's feeding the same. They're basically training about the same. The horse has got to be able to run. And so don't worry about all this other stuff.”

In stripping the game of some of its starry romanticism, Truman lays out a case for balancing his professional and personal lives, not letting the two intermingle. No social gatherings at the barn. No long evening fireside chats on the telephone, all shop talk with the owners. No busman's holidays, families in tow.

“Charlie [Whittingham]'s favorite saying was, 'owners are like mushrooms. Just feed them shit and keep them in the dark.' But Bobby was the opposite. He would say, 'don't come to the barn, I don't want to talk to you. Don't bother me. I'll see you at the races,'” said Truman, who said his approach hued closer to his old mentor's.

“I didn't want people bothering me at night either–I wanted to spend time with my family. So that's what I chose–that's the road I chose. I said, 'I'm going to enjoy spending time with my daughter and my family. Put my life first and the horses second.' That's the choice I made.”

Does he regret that approach now?

“Hey, I would have loved to have had a horse for the Derby and this and that. But again, that was my own fault, too. I didn't capitalize on the communication with people, with owners.”

Truman recalled the time Ed Friendly, a heavy-hitting California owner-breeder, approached a mutual friend with the offer of sending a squad of horses Truman's way.

“I gave him my phone number,” Truman recalled. “[Friendly] says, 'now, is this your home number?' I said, 'no, I don't give out my home number. I don't want anybody to call me at night.'”

Friendly was unimpressed.

“He told my friend afterwards, 'who does he think he is? I'm going to give him some horses and he doesn't want me calling him?'”

The Friendly horses remained strangers.

As the hot February sun reached its midday zenith, the conversation turned to the legacies of long-passed California trainers–names, institutions that pepper the history books and old Daily Racing Forms, but have slipped from our everyday lexicon, lost amongst the detritus of lives lived in haste.

“I wonder, if you were to walk out here today and ask most of the trainers who Charlie Whittingham is, how many would have a clue? I think they would say, 'oh yeah, he used to be a trainer.' But how many would know why he was a good trainer?” Truman asked, before listing other dusty names. Buster Millerick. Robert “Red” McDaniel.

“Now go out there and see if they know who they are.”

Truman paused, interrupted by passers-by who recognized him, wished him well in his retirement. When they strolled on, Truman quietly gathered his thoughts.

“You never know if it would've worked out anyway,” he said, eventually, still lingering on past chances. “But I wanted to spend time with my family. So, that's the road I chose,” he added. “And I never really regretted my choice that way.”

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CHRB Awards ’24 SoCal Dates, But Warns NorCal Uncertainty Could Be Factor In Final Say

Southern California's racing calendar for 2024 will nearly mirror this year's dates template, with the exception of Del Mar Thoroughbred Club being awarded a fifth week at its fall meet to dovetail with that track's hosting of the Nov. 1-2 Breeders' Cup.

But several California Horse Racing Board (CHRB) commissioners who voted in favor of next year's SoCal schedule at the Aug. 17 monthly meeting made it clear those dates allocations were not to be considered a “rubber stamp” approval that couldn't change at some point in the future.

That caveat was relevant because of the uncertainty unleashed upon the statewide industry July 16 when 1/ST Racing, which owns both Santa Anita Park and Golden Gate Fields, announced that Golden Gate would cease racing at the end of this year.

On Aug. 16, a 1/ST Racing executive said at a meeting of the CHRB's race dates committee, which reports to the full board, that the company might be willing to push back Golden Gate's closure by six months, to June 2024, pending discussions with industry stakeholders about how to best re-work the NorCal schedule in a way that doesn't harm the $30 million investment the company is making to improve SoCal racing.

That Wednesday news about Golden Gate's possible six-month reprieve prompted differing opinions on Thursday between the California Thoroughbred Trainers (CTT) and the Thoroughbred Owners of California (TOC) about how the CHRB should handle its scheduled agenda item that dealt with the awarding of the '24 SoCal dates.

Alan Balch, the CTT's executive director, advocated for the CHRB to hold off on awarding the '24 SoCal dates.

“We believe the entire state is interdependent,” Balch said. “We welcomed the [1/ST Racing] suggestion [Wednesday], not only that they would consider extending northern California at Golden Gate, but that they supported additional racing in the future in Northern California after the closure of Golden Gate. Since the state is integrated, because horses run [on both northern and southern circuits], we strongly urge this board not to allocate southern California dates given the pendency of potential legislation, and for many other reasons, until all the stakeholders can get together [to work out a plan].”

Bill Nader, the TOC's president and chief executive officer, said that it was his group's belief that the “absence of insight in knowing what the north might look like didn't really influence the south.”

Thus, Nader continued, it would be “prudent” to award the SoCal dates on Thursday in order to give “the rest of the country some clarity and completeness that California is still strong and has a vision leading into 2024.”

Bill Nader | Horsephotos

CHRB commissioner Thomas Hudnut said he thought the CTT's idea had merit because delaying the awarding of dates to Santa Anita could be used as an aid in negotiating how 1/ST Racing might help the industry absorb the massive gap it is creating in the NorCal schedule.

“We can't force dates on anybody. But we can withhold them,” Hudnut said. “And I think there is some merit in the suggestion of the CTT to avoid awarding any dates right now. The dates are the 'carrot,' and the 'stick' we have is not awarding them pending people getting their collective acts together…”

After listening to industry stakeholders go back and forth for 2 3/4 hours at Wednesday's dates committee meeting, CHRB commissioners Wendy Mitchell and Damascus Castellanos both expressed concerns on Thursday how some entities didn't seem to be acting with enough urgency considering one month has passed since 1/ST Racing let it be known it would walk away from California's lone commercial Thoroughbred license in the north.

“I've been on this board four years now, and we're really at a crossroads more so than I think we've been [at] in my time here,” Mitchell said. “And I'm very concerned…. It is more urgent than it's ever been to have the industry stay in California.”

Said Castellanos: “Everybody has an idea of working together and doing what they've got to do for the industry. But nobody really came to us [Wednesday] with a plan…. So my concern is the urgency…. We can't force dates on anybody. You guys have got to come up with this…. I suggest, as an industry, get together. Figure it out.”

Eventually, Hudnut moved to defer the allocation of the SoCal race dates until the board's September meeting. But no commissioner seconded his motion, so it died.

CHRB chairman Gregory Ferraro, DVM, took a different approach. He not only made a motion that the board take up the SoCal dates issue right away, but he specified that the '24 dates for that region be “the exact replication of the dates we awarded for 2023, with the exception of the one week” during which Del Mar hosts Breeders' Cup.

Santa Anita, this year's Breeders' Cup host, currently has control of that extra autumn week. Its executives did not lodge any opposition Thursday to Del Mar being granted that week in '24.

Ferraro's motion was seconded. Before the final vote was taken, CHRB vice chair Oscar Gonzales reminded commissioners who might be cognizant of Hudnut's “carrot and stick” analogy that the board still has other resources to act as cudgels of compliance, such as the CHRB's powers to halt any licensee's ability to race at any time, or even to deny a license altogether after blocks of dates have been awarded.

“I mean, we have a lot of latitude as the board, so it's among the reasons that I intend to vote for southern California racing dates knowing that this board has been empowered [to make changes after awarding blocks of dates],” Gonzales said. “I believe we are going to be paying very, very close attention to see how things unfold here over the next few weeks and months.”

The motion to award the '24 SoCal dates then passed, with Hudnut casting the lone dissenting vote.

The exact blocks of SoCal dates were not read into the record prior to the vote. But the template they will follow lines up with year's rotation: Santa Anita from Dec. 26, 2023, to late June 2024; then Los Alamitos through early July; Del Mar through mid-September; Los Alamitos until late September; Santa Anita through late October; Del Mar through the first week of December; Los Alamitos until late December.

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Joint Injections: “Litmus Test” for HISA

Last month, California Horse Racing Board (CHRB) chairman Greg Ferraro scratched a persistent industry itch.

While discussing his thoughts on the rollout of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act's (HISA) drug control program, Ferraro shared his fears that the new federal rules on joint injections were weaker than had previously existed in California.

“It's a step backwards,” Ferraro said. And this regulatory reshuffle, he added, could lead to an increase in California of irreparable musculoskeletal injuries, especially of the fetlock joint.

“California is the point of the spear in terms of dealing with the public and the liability of horse racing,” said Ferraro, advocating for federal adoption of California's joint injection regulations. “I think they should use us as a sort of leader in animal welfare and jockey welfare.”

Ferraro's comments re-ignited a debate that has been simmering away in some fashion or other for decades. Just take the New York Task Force report into the rash of fatalities that bedeviled Aqueduct during the winter of 2011-2012.

“The Task Force believes that the use of systemic or intra-articular corticosteroids may have impaired veterinarians and trainers in accurately assessing horses' soundness leading up to a race,” the report found.

“The Task Force also believes that the use of these medications too close to the race may have limited the ability of the NYRA veterinarians to identify the presence of pre-existing conditions disposed to progressing to catastrophic injury.”

The New York Task Force's findings frame a key bone of contention among trainers, veterinarians and regulators: What is a smart regulatory timeframe for limiting joint injections before workouts and race days?

HISA's joint injection rules bar joint injections within 14 days prior to post-time, and within seven days of an official workout.

In California prior to HISA, the intra-articular corticosteroid fetlock injection rule mandated a 30-day stand down period prior to racing, and all corticosteroid joint injections had a 10-day stand down before workouts.

After those rules were adopted, the number of irreparable fetlock injuries in California had fallen off precipitously. Experts point to this as a prime example of the long-term systemic effects from corticosteroid usage.

Even so, there remains some skepticism within the industry that California had indeed got it right.

Mark Casse | Sarah Andrew

“Thirty days is ridiculous,” said trainer Mark Casse, who argues that such a rule is difficult to police. “What happens is, when you make rules that you cannot really enforce, it only makes the bad guys better because they don't care.”

Another key point in this whole debate? Not all joint injections are made equal.

In the decade since the New York report was issued, veterinary experts describe a shift away from corticosteroids towards hyaluronic acid joint injections, and biologic therapies like IRAP and platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections.

They don't mask injuries the way corticosteroids can and are better at promoting joint health and healing in a way more advantageous to the horse in the long term, say proponents of these therapies.

Nevertheless, these same proponents voice frustration that the rules governing joint injections often treat corticosteroids and biologic therapies as equals.

“A lot of these injections are actually helpful, especially when you're doing PRP or you're putting [hyaluronic] acid in there,” said Casse, about biologic therapies. “I can tell you for a filly like Tepin, we would put acid in her ankles. We probably did it 20 times and she ran for years.”

Corticosteroids

Internationally renowned orthopedic surgeon Larry Bramlage is among those experts who believe HISA has got its rules surrounding corticosteroid joint injections about right.

“I think it is a good approach to being able to treat the joint that has been properly examined,” said Bramlage, who explained that corticosteroid joint injections should never be part of a “routine training program,” no matter the stand down time. “You want plenty of time to reassess the condition of the joint without the corticosteroid masking anything.”

Part of Bramlage's reasoning is how the marketplace for corticosteroids has evolved from high-dose, long-lasting versions like Methylprednisolone acetate–also called Depo-Medrol–to lower-dose, shorter acting corticosteroids like Betamethasone and Vetalog.

What kind of difference are we talking about? “We tend to think in terms of volume injected into a joint,” said Bramlage. Depo-Medrol can come in doses as strong as 40 milligrams per milliliter (mg/ml). Betamethasone, on the other hand, typically comes at a strength of 6 mg/ml.

“The original one–and as it turns out the most harmful one–was Depo-Medrol. When I was a student, we would put as much as two cc's [cubic centimeters] of Depo-Medrol when we were treating a joint,” explained Bramlage.

“But it's very long acting,” he added. “Its crystals are absorbed very slowly, so it can be found up to three months in the joint after you put it in. And that is a big disadvantage.”

Dr. Larry Bramlage | Horsephotos

Bramlage believes that the new wave of corticosteroids continues to play a role in managing the sorts of routine aches and pains that accompany high stress training programs.

“If you let inflammation go unchecked within a joint, it can eat up the articular cartilage. So just leaving a joint seriously inflamed without treating it with anything is also not the best route once you know there is no structural damage,” he said.

And the use of a low-dose, short acting corticosteroid like Betamethasone within a week of a timed workout, Bramlage said, is “a medically sound” approach if the joint has been properly assessed beforehand.

If the corticosteroid is eliminated from the horse's system enough to be undetectable in a test, he added, and the horse is still exhibiting signs of lameness, then there is a strong possibility the lameness is tied to some deeper-seated structural problem. A burgeoning stress fracture, for example, or abnormal bone remodeling. “That is the rationale for the stand down time,” he said.

The modern short-acting corticosteroids “reduce the inflammation and then get out of the way so you can read the joint again,” explained Bramlage. “And if there is a physical injury, a structural problem of some kind, it'll show up again.”

Other veterinary experts in the field have a slightly different take.

Though a corticosteroid won't necessarily show up through testing after seven days, it can still impart a systemic effect on the horse through effects like decreased inflammation in the joint and reduced lameness, said veterinarian Wayne McIlwraith, a distinguished professor at Colorado State University and like Bramlage, internationally renowned in the field.

As an example, McIlwraith cited a study he was involved in from 1997 where researchers studied the effects from triamcinolone acetonide joint injections–drugs which come under the trade names Vetalog or Kenalog. The horses were suffering osteoarthritis in the knee and were injected at 14 days and 28 days after the study start.

“We showed that lameness was significantly reduced at day 70–42 days after the second injection,” said McIlwraith. He described these effects as reduced inflammation in the joint fluid and in the joint lining membrane, as well as beneficial effects on the articular cartilage.

These effects were seen “whether we injected the osteoarthritis joint or we injected the opposite normal joint,” McIlwraith said. “In other words, a systemic effect that was very long lasting.”

McIlwraith and his fellow researchers used the same study design on Depo-Medrol–then considered the most potent corticosteroid available. They found “significant deleterious effects” to the joint cartilage in both the osteoarthritic joint and the opposite “good” joint, he said.

“The bottom line is that all the tissues of the musculoskeletal system are being exposed to the multiple complex effects of corticosteroids,” he said.

The fetlock has long been the Thoroughbred racehorse's Achilles heel. As an example, fetlock failures constituted in California nearly 60% of all musculoskeletal injuries that proved fatal during the 2018-2019 fiscal year, according to CHRB data.

The CHRB instituted its 30-day standdown regulations for corticosteroid fetlock injections on Oct. 19, 2021.

In the 20 months preceding that date, there were 83 catastrophic fetlock failures statewide, according to CHRB data. In the 19 months after that date, there were 24 catastrophic fetlock failures statewide.

Dr. Wayne McIlwraith | Colorado State University

Zeroing in specifically on Los Alamitos, the number of catastrophic fetlock failures dropped from 21 to just three during those two same periods of time bookending the rule change.

California's tightened joint injection rules have been just one part of a suite of stricter drug and equine welfare and safety rules instituted in the state over the past few years.

But for the likes of McIlwraith and Ferraro, the remarkable drop in irreparable fetlock injuries is due largely to one thing–the stricter corticosteroid joint injection regulations.

“I think we can relate this knowledge to our data in Southern California showing that injection not being allowed for 30 days in the fetlock has reduced the incidence of catastrophic injury,” said McIlwraith.

Indeed now, Ferraro advocates for the total elimination of corticosteroid use in all joints in racing and training.

“I would argue, look at our results. We didn't really have a breakdown problem with fetlock joints [in California],” said Ferraro. “In other words, if you're going the corticosteroid route, then that horse ought to be given significant time off, which means sending him to the farm.

“You can't legislate good judgment,” he added. “Corticosteroids in the hands of a wise, experienced equine veterinarian, you could probably do fine with it. But we put in this legislation because we know good judgment is not something that's always [wielded on the] backside.”

Which leads to alternative therapies to corticosteroids.

Biologic Therapies

“What you're trying to do is either slow something down or speed up something, and the goal is to slow the bad stuff down and speed up the good stuff,” said Bramlage, of the role of veterinary intervention with biologics. “[They] don't work by stopping things. They try to augment healing, not only block the mediators of inflammation.”

In explanation, Bramlage pointed to how the joint protects itself from harm and degeneration by naturally producing hyaluronic acid in the joint fluid, along with a class of molecularly heavy proteins called proteoglycan in the cartilage.

White Abarrio | Coady Photography

But corticosteroids hinder the body from producing both hyaluronic acid and proteoglycans. As such, hyaluronic acid is frequently used in combination with corticosteroid joint injections.

“You're essentially artificially adding hyaluronic acid because the corticosteroids are going to slow or stop the manufacturer of hyaluronic acid in the joint when you put them in,” Bramlage said.

When it comes to the use and efficacy of biologic treatments on racehorses, there seems to be a broad and largely favorable consensus among veterinary experts.

“You get your results from them because they stimulate healing within the joint. They calm the membrane down, and they help the cartilage surfaces. In other words, you could say they're a form of nutrient for cartilage, whereas steroids are a toxin to cartilage,” said Ferraro.

Should biologic therapies and corticosteroids joint injections be treated the same by regulators?

“No,” said McIlwraith. He explained that through research and through widespread clinical use, these therapies have been shown to have “uniquely beneficial” and other specific effects, but “no significant” negative effects.

“They are less potent immediately compared to corticosteroids which means that they are not going to be useful if used in an 'inject and race or work soon after' manner, which has been a philosophy of use by some,” said McIlwraith.

But under HISA's current rules, all joint injections are indeed treated the same. This means that biologic treatments like IRAP and PRP injections require the same 14 and seven-day standdowns for races and workouts respectively as corticosteroids.

HIWU has suspended 40 horses from racing for 30 days due to joint injections within seven days of a timed workout. Equibase only publicly maintains 60-days' worth of workout data. With what information is still available through Equibase, at least one horse on the list was injected one day before a workout. But HIWU does not publicly detail what kinds of joint injections were administered to these horses–corticosteroids or biologic treatments.

Efforts are underway to potentially modify HISA's joint injection rules.

A red-lined version of HISA's ADMC program recently shared with the TDN prohibits horses administered a fetlock joint injection from racing for 30 days, and from working for 14 days. For all joints other than the fetlock, the current restrictions–14 days from racing, seven days from working–remain in place.

According to this red-lined version, the rules still don't differentiate between corticosteroids and biologic therapies.

CHRB equine medical director Jeff Blea sits on HISA's anti-doping and medication control (ADMC) committee.

Though Blea was speaking on behalf of HISA, he said his personal opinion was that the federal ADMC program should be altered to mirror California's rules, which allow biologic therapies to be used unrestricted on any joint before a workout.

“We should want to be promoting biologic therapies because I think it's beneficial not only in the short term but the long term,” he said.

At the same time, not all veterinary practitioners agree with all aspects of the CHRB's rules on joint injections. If a horse is injected three times into the same joint within 60 days in California, the horse is automatically placed on the vet's list for 30 days.

This rule went into effect in the state on July 1 this year. And it has curbed Southern California veterinarian Ryan Carpenter's use of biologics, as it fails to distinguish between those sorts of injections and corticosteroids.

Dr. Jeff Bleu | AAEP

“It essentially has eliminated our use of IRAP, which is designed to be done once a week for a loading dose and then monthly after that,” said Carpenter.

“The unfortunate thing is that rule has actually incentivized people to not use biologics and put them back towards corticosteroids,” said Carpenter. “My corticosteroid use has increased since that rule has come in effect and would have loved to have stayed on the biologic route because I think it's better overall.”

When asked about this criticism, CHRB executive director Scott Chaney argued that the 60-day period was specifically chosen to still permit the use of biologic therapies while curbing excessive injections into the same joint.

“Even if it's not degrading the joint, clearly it's not working if you're having to mess with a specific intra-articular space over and over again within a short timeframe,” Chaney said.

More broadly, Chaney's thoughts about corticosteroid use in racing align with Ferraro's.

“Corticosteroids are unnecessary in horseracing,” he said, calling this issue a “litmus test” for HISA. “Our horsemen in California have been there and done it. We're four years into this,” he said.

“But it seems like horsemen around the rest of the country need a 'come to Jesus' moment because they're still clinging to the belief that they need corticosteroids to work a horse or run a horse. That's absurd. Any horseman or veterinarian who tells you that, they do not know what they're talking about.”

`I Would Put This Stuff In The Water'

It turns out the evolution in the use of joint injections in human athletes—and aging athletes in particular—appears remarkably similar to that of the racing world.

Andrew Pearle is the Chief of Sports Medicine at the Hospital for Special Surgery, the country's top orthopedic hospital. He is also a team physician for the New York Mets.

Pearle's area of expertise? The human knee.

“When I'm giving a steroid injection, I typically give 80 milligrams of Kenalog. It's a really good injection, particularly if there's fluid on the knee. It's certainly highly effective. In fact, there was a Nobel Prize given for the development of cortisone,” he said.

But there's a caveat.

“It's got these downstream negative effects with repeated use, and many of us don't like to give more than two shots over a lifetime in a joint,” Pearle said.

Instead, said Pearle, human medicine had moved towards alternative joint therapies like gel shots, PRP and hyaluronic acid.

“I tell patients if I could put this stuff in the water and feed it to everybody,” he said, “I would.”

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CHPC To Fund Economic Breakout Report

The California Horse Power Coalition (CHPC), a growing partnership of Thoroughbred associations, will commit to fund the California breakout report as part of the American Horse Council's California Economic Impact Study, the organization said in a release Thursday.

“The American Horse Council consistently produces the most comprehensive national economic impact studies that showcase the vast benefits that the equine industry brings to communities across the country,” said Josh Rubinstein, President of Del Mar Thoroughbred Club, an American Horse Council member. “As our industry continues to evolve, we are confident that the results will underscore our industry's commitment to advancing California's economy, expanding the travel and tourism industry, and creating a space for friends and family to create unforgettable shared experiences together.”

The American Horse Council's economic impact studies examine the industry's contributions to the national GDP, as well as individual states, which includes employment, volunteers, equid population, acreage and more. Each category is also broken down by sector: recreation, racing, competition and working horses.

“The CHPC mission is to preserve and protect California's vibrant equestrian culture. Funding the economic impact study affirms the coalition's commitment to not only uplift the equine industry but to encourage stakeholders, large and small, to use their voice to advance their shared interests,” said Bill Nader, President and CEO of Thoroughbred Owners of California. “To that end, if you benefit from the equine industry in any capacity at all, I encourage you to fill out the following survey links to make your voice heard.”

Click here to learn more about the economic impact study.

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