HISA | Horse Racing Free Tips

Letter to the Editor: John Sikura

The case of Bob Baffert has been, sad but fascinating to watch. It has served to be the perfect foil for agenda-driven companies and organizations to attach a face to 'the cause.' Due process and the right to defend oneself with veracity is the foundational tenet of this country. It protects citizens from overreaching by entities such as Churchill, NYRA and others banning Baffert from running at their tracks until adjudication is reached–not dictated. The actions of Churchill Downs clearly prioritize what we already know, which is that the value proposition of the Kentucky Derby is their one commitment to racing. The serial monetizing of racetracks, and devotion to casino and historical racing revenue leave them without a credible position except as very good drivers of CDI stock value. The leading face of racing is excluded from racing at Churchill and cannot earn Derby points while the premise argument (veterinary-prescribed topical skin cream) has proven to be validated. Will the NYRA now reverse itself or cling to its ban? Admonished by a judge for sidestepping due process and a new hearing scheduled to decide the right of Baffert to race at their tracks, this new evidence is assuredly exculpatory for Baffert. What about The Jockey Club? They have taken a lead position on HISA and have committed to exposing cheats while fairly dealing with violations. They joined the NYRA suit in their brief and therefore should publicly state a position. This is a good test for them as well.

I wish to make my position clear that I am against all forms of cheating or illegal drug use. Those convicted of such should face the harshest of penalties. I also believe that jealousy and innuendo without proof are unfair and tarnish the reputation of our game and can cost people their careers. Ignoring thresholds of therapeutic drugs, inconsistent withdrawal times, human error or environmental contamination is not realistic testing. The intent should be to eliminate all illegal drugs from our game and deal with 'positives' in a manner which attaches penalties uniformly and fairly. I hope and trust that HISA will accomplish all of this and more.

In the interim, the Baffert barn is responsible for following the rules and protocols of racing in each jurisdiction he races and that is not debated by me. I do contest the piling on in advance of final proof and draconian punishment of banishment as commensurate penalty for the 'violations.' None have included illegal drugs and none have tested at a threshold to enhance performance.

I close by admitting that it was probably best if this letter was not written and I said nothing publicly. Bob Baffert has been a friend and an important part of my life and business so you can question my objectivity. I would counter by saying that those who know me know I speak candidly and without adherence to public opinion or consensus. I don't absolve him of being responsible for his barn, I only write the letter as his detractors have been vocal, organized and many. I for one wish to tilt the scales and offer my support.

The post Letter to the Editor: John Sikura appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

Source of original post

Ken McPeek Talks 2YOs, HISA, Lasix, Training Future On Writers’ Room

The story of a high-quality Thanksgiving weekend of racing at Churchill Downs was undoubtedly Ken McPeek, who sent out four impressive winners on Saturday's all-2-year-old Stars of Tomorrow card, including GII Kentucky Jockey Club S. hero Smile Happy (Runhappy) and 'TDN Rising Star' Cocktail Moments (Uncle Mo), to follow up a six-length victory by his Envoutante (Uncle Mo) in Thursday's GII Falls City S. Tuesday, the thoughtful McPeek sat down for an expansive interview with the TDN Writers' Room presented by Keeneland to talk about his loaded barn of promising juveniles, how much longer he sees himself training, his thoughts on the first proposed rule set of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act and more.

Despite having two graded stakes winners over the weekend, one could argue Cocktail Moments was McPeek's most impressive runner at Churchill. Drifting all the way up to 26-1 off a modest worktab, the $190,000 Keeneland September graduate dropped all the way back to 10th in the 12-horse field before steadily advancing while wide on the turn. Taking charge in mid-stretch, the Dixiana Farms colorbearer put on a show in the final furlong, rocketing away to a 9 1/4-length romp.

“That was a pleasant surprise,” said McPeek, this week's Green Group Guest of the Week. “But I'll tell you, she had been training fantastic going into the race. Typically when we get a young horse ready, we don't force the issue. We let them come [around]. I like to get a race under their belt. I'd almost call the first race a schooling race. I tell the rider to take a little bit of a hold, settle, wait, wait, finish. When they do that, they take dirt in their face, they've got all this adversity, and you lose races doing that, but you also teach them. The young horses that we've gunned away from the gate, they don't learn as much as the ones that take dirt, learn to negotiate the traffic and finish. Well, she finished alright. She came like a bullet. She's been a really happy filly the last couple of weeks, but to be able to predict that first time out is difficult.”

Already with a trio of winners Saturday, Lucky Seven Stable's Smile Happy cemented the day as one to remember for McPeek, settling off the pace and blowing past 7-5 chalk Classic Causeway (Giant's Causeway) in the stretch to a 3 1/4-length score in the Kentucky Jockey Club. That was the second victory in two starts for the $185,000 Fasig-Tipton Selected Yearling buy, who joined fellow graded stakes winners Rattle N Roll (Connect) and Tiz the Bomb (Hit It a Bomb) in the McPeek barn as potential GI Kentucky Derby contenders.

“This horse has out-trained just about every horse he's worked against,” McPeek said. “He's a very physically imposing horse to be around, and he's fast. I stretched him out long the first time and he handled it like a pro, and to beat some of the horses he ran against second time out–he's got the mind of a good horse. I think there's still some fitness that's needed there too. We're going to shelve him for a little while, and I think you're going to see an even better horse when we get to the spring … He's got an interesting pedigree. There wasn't much black type, the first three dams were practically blank. But his second dam is by Relaunch, third dam by Graustark, fourth dam by Bold Ruler, and Funny Cide is under his fourth dam. We're really excited to have him.”

The conversation later turned to McPeek's increasingly impressive training resume. Starting in 1985, his career took off in the 2000s and the 59-year-old now boasts over 1,800 winners and over $95 million in total earnings. Asked to reflect on his career, McPeek went on to break a bit of news in saying he doesn't plan on training for all that much longer–with a caveat.

“I'm probably most proud of finding a lot of these horses at auction, even for modest prices,” he said. “The first 10 years that I trained, I struggled, but I convinced Roy Monroe to let me buy yearlings for him. The first yearling I bought was a Lord At War (Arg) filly that ended up running first, second or third in 15 stakes in her career for Roy and me. Then he let me buy [millionaire and 1995 Derby second] Tejano Run, who launched me. Training horses is not rocket science, but you've got to get good horses to train, and I'm in a unique stage right now where people are giving me bigger budgets. But I'm still buying for what I call the under-50 [thousand] people. I still like working the back end of the sales. I'll wear out a pair of tennis shoes. And Dominic [Brennan] is probably deserving of as much credit as me, because he's been in the trenches with me for 30-plus years. He's one of those unsung heroes–a rock-solid Irish horseman … But I'm going to lay something out there that I don't know if most people want to hear or not. I'm going to do this for 10 or 11 more years. I'm going to train until I'm 70. Unless, of course, I have horses like I've got in the barn right now. But I'm looking at doing it until I'm 70 and then I'd like to work horse auctions for people worldwide.”

Asked for his thoughts on the early HISA rules as proposed by the United States Anti-Doping Agency, McPeek offered, “I think it's fantastic stuff. I think they need to unify the licensing. If I get a driver's license in Kentucky, I can drive all over the country. And then allow reciprocity to take effect when you have a violation. These rules need to be streamlined, there's no question. They need a horseman on those committees making those decisions that has the power to say, 'Hey, wait a second, time out, you're going too far.' But at this point, there aren't horsemen sitting on those, and that bothers me.”

Elsewhere on the Writers' Room, which is also sponsored by Coolmore, West Point Thoroughbreds, Lane's End, XBTV and Legacy Bloodstock, Joe Bianca, Bill Finley and Jon Green discussed the implications of Gun Runner breaking the earnings record for first-crop sires and looked forward to an intriguing GI Cigar Mile H. card Saturday at Aqueduct. Click here to watch the podcast; click here for the audio-only version or find it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

The post Ken McPeek Talks 2YOs, HISA, Lasix, Training Future On Writers’ Room appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

Source of original post

Letter to the Editor: Hold On, The Ride is About to Begin

There's good news and bad news coming. The good news is that the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act solves the persistent problem of inadequate funding to police the sport. The bad news is that decisions coming soon by the HISA Board may jeopardize millions of dollars of existing public support now allocated for this function.

Collectively the U.S. states invest over $100 million to regulate racing and wagering. That money comes in large part from taxes generated by the industry and fans. Commissions fight every year to ensure that adequate resources are available to do the job. Sometimes they succeed, often they don't.

The law's authors solved this issue by giving HISA authority to self-finance by assessing new fees. The implementation challenge was how to maintain existing state investment and infrastructures to minimize new costs on a sport struggling to compete in a dramatically changing world.

As the details of the proposed new program trickle out from the standing committees, there appears to have been little consideration as to how to maximize things already in place and paid for by the states. Those investigating, prosecuting and adjudicating violations will no longer be paid with public funds. The micromanagement of equine medical directors and regulatory veterinarians may result in shifting responsibilities and costs to racetracks or the HISA itself. And lastly, concerns about undefined but mandated testing program costs are already causing some states to consider privatization to turn it all over to HISA. Note: the states don't fund or do this for other sports.

Since mid-August, the ARCI has quietly held “implementation calls” with HISA and USADA staff for 31 states to identify potential obstacles early that need to be overcome. Additionally, state regulators were not allowed to participate in or even observe the work of the HISA standing committees, a decision that left the development of less costly options to avoid loss of public funding until the last minute as the FTC is eager to receive the formal submission.

Perhaps HISA Chair Charles Scheeler said it best at The Jockey Club's August Roundtable: “This program is going to cost money, and it's going to cost more money than the industry has traditionally allocated for services such as these.” Very true, except that the bulk of the money is not allocated by the industry, but rather by the states who can shift it elsewhere especially if someone else can pay.

Normally, when the federal government partners with a state to operate a program, a financial incentive of matching funds is provided. No such incentive exists here. A growing number of State officials above commissions are asking “What's in it for the State to continue to pay for any of this now that this new entity can pay for it?”

All this is modeled after the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority where that industry has no choice but to comply. That's true here as well, except that HISA authors ignored reality and erroneously defined state commissions as a racing industry constituency. They are not.
HISA has no power to force a state to do something it doesn't have the personnel, money or desire to do, even if the commission is willing. In fact, the more HISA seeks to micromanage and replace rather than improve, the more they push a state to walk and shift existing funding elsewhere to do things like fill potholes.

Only the HISA Board can mitigate the extent to which that happens by what they submit to the FTC. Otherwise, the day the details are released as to how this is paid for and by whom will be remembered as a nuclear blast whose fallout will be felt far and wide by many people who thought all this looked good on paper.

Ed Martin
President, Association of Racing Commissioners International

The post Letter to the Editor: Hold On, The Ride is About to Begin appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

Source of original post

Bobby Flay Talks Breeders’ Cup Triumph On Writers’ Room

Still riding high from a scintillating victory in the GI Breeders' Cup Juvenile Fillies Turf with fast-finishing Pizza Bianca (Fastnet Rock {Aus}), celebrity chef, restaurateur and owner/breeder Bobby Flay joined the TDN Writers' Room presented by Keeneland Tuesday afternoon. Calling in via Zoom as the Green Group Guest of the Week, Flay appreciated the significance of winning on racing's biggest stage with a homebred, teased a potential Royal Ascot trip with Pizza Bianca and discussed how he would approach racing's marketing challenges and more.

Flay made a huge splash at the 2014 Tattersalls October Sale when going to 1,250,000 guineas (around $2,122,050 U.S.) to purchase a regally-bred daughter of Galileo (Ire)–the highest-priced filly sold in the Northern Hemisphere that year–he named White Hot (Ire). But the filly never made it to the races. Flay could've cut his losses and sold the mare back at auction, but instead held onto her to breed, putting trust in her pedigree, and she rewarded him with a Breeders' Cup winner as her first foal.

“She has a lights-out pedigree,” he said. “She's by Galileo, she's a half to Pour Moi (Montjeu {Ire}), who won the English Derby, and that's just the beginning of the pedigree. It goes on for pages. It's a Coolmore family. And one thing about buying into a Coolmore family, those guys are so focused on making their families better and better that they're going to spend money all over that pedigree until the end of time. So I made that bet. I took a leap of faith and it didn't work out. The horse never ran, just wasn't good enough. But I knew I was going to keep this horse for the rest of her life. My feeling was, at some point, the blood will show up. If it's that good, something has to happen, directly or indirectly, that's going to help your family. But you have to be patient. You may have to invest more money actually to continue to breed, but at some point it will work. And I obviously did not expect it to work with the first foal, but it did. It's all gravy from here on out.”

Flay has become a breakthrough celebrity and, as a result, a de facto ambassador of racing. He was asked about how receptive people in his world are to the sport and what can be done to introduce more potential owners and bettors into the game.

“There's only one way to do it. You have to expose them to it,” he said. “If you ask me for a recipe and I just hand you a piece of paper or tell you to go download something off a website and you make it, it's going to be one way. But if I actually show you how to do it, it's going to come out differently and probably better, because I'm showing you as opposed to telling you. It's the same thing for racing. If I tell people about my experience, they're like, 'Oh yeah, that's great.' I take people to the big events, because I want them to see racing at its best, see the best horses and the biggest crowds, and then they're hooked. They're like, 'I can't believe I've never done this before.' I hear that all the time. Every year, I take about 25-30 people to the Belmont Stakes. Half of them have never been to a race before. They become racing fans.”

Elsewhere on the show, which is also sponsored by Coolmore, West Point Thoroughbreds, XBTV, Lane's End and Legacy Bloodstock, the writers discussed their takeaways from last week's interview with Travis Tygart and Tessa Muir of USADA, debated whether or not Lasix-free racing is a big deal anymore and addressed potential remedies for the wagering public in situations like the Breeders' Cup Juvenile Turf mess. Click here to watch the podcast; click here for the audio-only version or find it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

The post Bobby Flay Talks Breeders’ Cup Triumph On Writers’ Room appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

Source of original post