In “Making Claims,” Paulick Report bloodstock editor Joe Nevills shares his opinions on the Thoroughbred industry from the breeding and sales arenas to the racing world and beyond.
If it feels like just yesterday when Irish trainer Gordon Elliott rankled the racing world over his photo straddling a dead, prone horse, you're not off by that many yesterdays.
Elliott's six-month suspension for conduct unbecoming to the sport finished this week, and the interview he gave the Racing Post ahead of his return was eye-opening for a few reasons.
First, it sure doesn't seem like he spent a lot of time on true self-reflection during his half-year away. His self-described “lowest moment” had nothing to do with the shame he brought upon himself, his barn, and the sport on a global level, but for the horses that left his barn during his suspension that won elsewhere. He makes two attempts at a genuine apology in the Racing Post interview, and they're both in the direct vicinity of statements about how good he is at training winners, and how he'd like to get back to doing that.
Tell me you're only sorry you got caught, without telling me you're only sorry you got caught.
Second, it was revealed that he only lost about a dozen horses from his yard during the suspension. For some trainers, that could be a back-breaking defection, but Elliott has had 1,000 or more starts in each of the past five years. He lost some good ones, but 12 horses won't interrupt the flow when he returns to the racetrack.
There are several layers of blame to go around for the Gordon Elliott situation – before, during, and after the photo was released.
The center of it is, of course, Elliott himself. For a sport like horse racing that struggles with public perception, an unforced error like his is unforgivable. It will be used as fodder to tear down horse racing's credibility for years to come – much longer than the six months he spent away. The next layer is the person behind the camera, head lad Simon McGonagle. It's hard to tell your boss to stop being a bonehead, but commemorating the occasion with a photo and a snappy caption suggests at least one other person in that inner circle thought this was fine.
Once we leave that atmosphere, we come to the people who could have done something about it in the aftermath, and chose to punt the football.
The Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board had a chance to show that documented desecration of the horse should have career-threatening consequences. Instead, they handed him six months – most of it during the slow part of the National Hunt season, save for the Cheltenham Festival – and praised themselves in the press release for how thorough their unannounced welfare inspections have been.
Then, there are the owners that Elliott praised for sticking with him through the suspension. If he only lost a dozen horses, then it seems most owners did stick with him.
Whether they'd admit it or not – whether they care or not – by remaining in his barn, those owners have endorsed the notion that if their horse dies in training, Elliott is perfectly within his right to use the event as a lighthearted photo opportunity.
The Gordon Elliott situation, and how it was handled, is frustrating for anyone that thinks a horse deserves better, living or dead, but what takes it to another level is the fact that we've seen it all before.
Negative actions come down to individuals making choices, but it's those two parts of the outside layer – the regulators and the owners – whose response can turn those actions into a culture in a barn, a backstretch, and ultimately an industry. It takes a village to raise a villain, and this industry has turned it into a science.
The Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board's relatively light touch on Elliott calls back to any number of instances where racing commissions had the ball set on the tee for them to prove the sport won't tolerate behavior ranging from irresponsible to abusive, and instead chose the most uninspired option. When a decent lawyer and a feckless racing commission can “aw, shucks” the consequences of a serious offense into a minor inconvenience, the horsepeople that choose to misbehave have little to sway them from doing it again.
Be truthful, when is the last time you've seen a horseperson stare down a career-altering suspension for something heinous or habitual and thought, “that's definitely gonna stick”?
What's infuriating about horse racing's regulators is their enabling of bad actors can come in so many shapes and sizes. The due process of appeals and stays of suspension are frustrating from the outside, but they are a necessary part of the system. However, when a regulator neuters another regulator trying to create consequences that might actually change the culture of the sport, it ventures into craven territory.
Who can forget the reflexive disgust shown by the Delaware Thoroughbred Racing Commission when they watched the video of trainer Amber Cobb hitting a tied horse with a rake, then the sudden change in tone when they reduced the stewards' recommended suspension of two years down to two months because she was just so darn articulate?
Who else felt unsatisfied when the Arkansas Racing Commission gave back practically everything to Bob Baffert after lidocane positives disqualified Charlatan and Gamine from their wins, and the justification from the board essentially came down to “we don't even really like these rules, and we hope the feds come in and clean this mess up”?
In both instances, and in others under far less of a microscope, the regulators seemed swayed by information that pulled them away from the root issue at hand, and turn on the complainant. Whether they did it or not became a secondary issue. Not every whistleblower is going to be a reliable one, but when scrutiny turns into mockery and dismissal, it emboldens future offenders and gives pause to future whistleblowers. Again, this is how cultures are created.
Of course, for every time a racing commission has shot itself in the foot to let an alleged villain get away, just as many do the wrong thing through inaction.
There are a lot of cards in the “How Does THIS Guy Still Have A License?” deck, but for the sake of moving things along, consider Marcus Vitali.
Vitali has been handed suspensions that he served to term, but he didn't let that get him down. Instead, he found ways to keep training horses and have them run in the names of others, like Wayne Potts or Allan Hunter.
It's been harder for Vitali to find places to race since he came back from his most recent time on the bench last year, but commissions in New York, Pennsylvania, Texas and Arizona have licensed Vitali in 2021 after he was alleged by the Maryland Jockey Club – owners of Pimlico and Laurel Park – to be running horses in other trainers' names. His alleged accomplice, Potts, is having the most lucrative season of his career, running mostly in New York and New Jersey.
In the places where they've had the door slammed in their faces, it was usually because racetracks barred the trainers on their own volition, independent of any commission ruling. The problem is, a private property expulsion doesn't have the same reciprocity among other jurisdictions as a state-level one, leaving it up to track-by-track judgement calls, sometimes in response to public outcry.
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Through his cross-country trek in search of a racetrack that would have him, Vitali has maintained the unyielding support of some owners, including Carolyn Vogel's Crossed Sabres Farm. Nothing short of blind support would explain why the New Hampshire-based owner would not only stay with a trainer after dragging her into multiple paper training incidents and suspensions, but then entrust him to take her string to the claiming ranks at Turf Paradise – far away from the East Coast tracks where her runners were normally seen.
Again, this is how a culture is made. In a business of independent contractors, employment is endorsement, and permissive or oblivious owners can give oxygen to problematic behavior. If a trainer keeps getting supplied with horses, it's hard to get rid of them. Gordon Elliott will return to business as usual because operations like Bective Stud just kept buying horses for him to train when he got back.
It was hard not to notice who was still running horses with Baffert after the trainer announced that Medina Spirit had tested positive for betamethasone in this year's Kentucky Derby and put the sport under one of the ugliest national spotlights it's ever seen; even after it limited the places where their horses could run. As it stands right now, the expensive 2-year-olds that have kept entering Baffert's barn won't be able to run in next year's Kentucky Derby if they stay there.
It still wasn't enough for some owners to walk away. If they don't feel shame for having their names tied to scandal by association, their trainers have no incentive to feel any different.
We should all be so lucky to find that kind of loyalty in our lives.
But, that's the culture.
Individuals feel emboldened to push limits – or have a chat astride a dead horse while your buddy grabs a shot for Snapchat – because the consequences aren't enough of a deterrent, or they'll likely be walked back if they get too harsh, and too many owners are fine to go along with the ride out of some sense of loyalty, even if it drags them down with it.
It keeps happening because the people in a position to do something let it happen. It keeps hurting because we know it'll happen again.
More than ever, the world outside our sphere is watching and learning, and they're figuring out that Gordon Elliott wasn't the only one sitting on that dead horse.
The post Making Claims: Racing’s Villains Have Too Many Enablers appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.
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