Madeline Auerbach | Horse Racing Free Tips

Ninth Thoroughbred Owner Conference Panel Focused On Breeding To Win

The ninth panel in the online Thoroughbred Owner Conference series held Tuesday, Nov. 2, featured a panel devoted to breeding Thoroughbreds who discussed the research and factors they consider when making breeding decisions. The conference series is hosted by The Jockey Club and the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association and presented by Bessemer Trust, Dean Dorton Equine, Stoll Keenon Ogden, and Stonestreet Farm.

Moderated by Carolyn Conley, “Breeding to Win” featured owners/breeders Madeline Auerbach, chairperson of CARMA (California Retirement Management Account) and a member of The Jockey Club, and David O'Farrell, manager of Ocala Stud and vice chairman of the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association. Also on the panel was Dr. Barbara Murphy, head of Equine Science at University College Dublin, who specializes in equine reproduction and developed the Equilume Light Mask, which has become a useful breeding tool within the Thoroughbred industry. The session was sponsored by Centennial Farms and Equilume.

To start the discussion, Murphy explained the thought and science behind the Equilume Light Mask and how light, specifically blue wavelengths, affects reproductive and growth hormones.

“If you provide lighting to the pregnant mare early in the year, you also have an improvement on her breeding efficiency in that she will cycle back sooner after she foals and she will foal closer to her due date,” Murphy said. “By giving the mare light, she turns on growth hormones, which stimulates the foal to develop at the normal pace.”

Auerbach and O'Farrell spoke about the differences in breeding to race and breeding to sell, the importance of selecting your breeding stock, and ensuring your horses are in the right hands.

“It's the most wonderful thing in the world to see a horse you bred win a race,” Auerbach. “But be careful, make sure you know what you are doing, and, once again, get as much advice as you can, but remember it's your decision and the buck stops with you and starts with you.”

“It's easier to breed to race than it is to breed to sell because racing you can breed to horses and get runners, but they might get ugly horses,” O'Farrell said. “You can't sell ugly horses.”

When discussing conformation, O'Farrell stated that it is very important but is not everything.

“For the most part, I think we just have to understand what physical qualities your mare has and what they are lacking and what the stallions may have and what they are lacking and try to be sensible about it,” he said. “You can't be too nitpicky. You have to consider all things including conformation, but I don't think it's everything.”

Talking about the importance of choosing a stallion, Auerbach noted: “It is just as important to study your mares, study her origins, and then start thinking about stallions. Don't put all of your eggs in one basket.”

“I would agree with that,” O'Farrell said. “Put a lot of effort into understanding your mare and what she's capable of.”

Before the Q&A session, the panel touched on the importance of aftercare.

“Everybody in the supply line, the people that buy them, the people that race them, everyone as a hand in making sure that they contribute to aftercare,” Auerbach said. “Everyone has a hand in pitching in and being responsible so that these horses, when they get out of racing, that there is a place for them, that there is somewhere that they can go and live out their lives.”

The next and final session of the series will focus on aftercare and is scheduled for Tuesday, Dec. 7, at 2 p.m. ET. It is sponsored by Canterbury Park and Gainesway Farm.

All sessions will be recorded and made available to registered guests. There is no registration fee for the live or recorded virtual conference series, but registration is required. Registration information and schedules are available at ownerview.com/event/conference or by contacting Gary Falter at gfalter@jockeyclub.com.

OwnerView is a joint effort spearheaded by The Jockey Club and the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association to encourage ownership of Thoroughbreds and provide accurate information on aspects of ownership such as trainers, public racing syndicates, the process of purchasing and owning a Thoroughbred, racehorse retirement, and owner licensing.

The need for a central resource to encourage Thoroughbred ownership was identified in the comprehensive economic study of the sport that was commissioned by The Jockey Club and conducted by McKinsey & Company in 2011. The OwnerView site was launched in May 2012.

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CARMA: Holding Its Own in Tough Economic Climate

Last year when facing a massive budget shortfall, the umbrella organization overseeing the fate of California’s retired racehorses dodged a metaphorical projectile.

“We were just so overwhelmed by the support we got for CARMAthon by the racing community,” Lucinda Lovitt, executive director of the California Retirement Management Account (CARMA), said of a fundraising event held last year at Del Mar on Pacific Classic day. “Everybody on the board–especially those on the event committee–was blown away.”

Due to the fact that CARMA is primarily funded from purse contributions by owners, trainers and jockeys, a racing calendar decimated by the pandemic coupled with an already attenuated race-week meant the organization was facing a roughly 30% budget deficit for the year.

“That takes my available money for grants from something like $280,000 to $190,000,” Lovitt added. “It was huge to have that reduction.”

In the end, the CARMAthon raised approximately $120,000–an amount neither Lovitt nor her fellow board members dared to hope likely beforehand. And it meant that, come the end of the year, the organization was “able to hold its own” financially, she said.

Nevertheless, with the pandemic having set to daily life with a battering ram, busting apart an economic status-quo long underpinning the industry, CARMA is bracing for another fiscal rubble-field in 2021 by asking some tough questions of itself and the organizations it helps sustain.

“As we saw in 2019, it is critical for the racing and breeding industry to demonstrate that they have a plan for horses once they’re finished with that part of their career,” said Lovitt. “The general public will accept nothing less than absolute assurance that we’re taking care of these horses once they’re done racing.”

At the same time, this component of the industry “still doesn’t get the attention it needs and it still doesn’t get the funding that it needs,” Lovitt warned. “We’re still struggling to create real meaningful funding sources–continuous funding streams–for transitioning these horses from the racetrack to second careers and finding homes for them to live out the rest of their lives.”

Broadly speaking, CARMA is broken into three main parts. There’s the grant component–the one funded through purse contributions–through which the organization meters out hundreds of thousands of dollars to various aftercare facilities each year.

In the benighted year of 2020, CARMA decorated about 20 different organizations with some $300,000 in total–the year prior, the total amount distributed was some $80,000 more.

“We had some very hard conversations about not only the immediate need of providing grants to aftercares that desperately need help, but also having to look at the long-term stability of the organization and being able to prepare for what may or may not happen in 2021,” said Lovitt.

The second component is their placement program, sustained almost entirely through The Stronach Group (TSG) matching the purse donations generated from races run at Santa Anita.

The gauntlet thrown down by a global pandemic, leading to a raft of closed doors, makes the organization’s bread-and-butter hands-on placement work–akin to shaking hands and kissing babies–infinitely harder. Yet, CARMA managed to find new homes for nearly 50 horses, which is comparable to previous hauls–this, when the program halved the usual number of horses it manages at any one time from 20 to about 10. “Fifty horses [re-homed] when you’ve got only 10 or 12 at a time is great,” she said.

Still, being able to put eyeballs on horses on the backstretch and at lay-up facilities is “what we miss the most,” said Lovitt. “We miss physically being able to see and touch that horse–stand in front of the trainer and talk to them about that horse, taking pictures.”

CARMA’s third main spoke concerns fund-raising–which is where last year’s CARMAthon swooped in like an avenging angel.

“We needed an idea,” said Billy Koch, CARMA board member and the driving force behind the event. “So, I said, ‘We need to raise money and we have to pretty much do everything virtually, why don’t we do a telethon?’ They used to do it in the past for charities.”

The idea to hold it on Pacific Classic day was Del Mar and TVG’s, Koch said. “We were going to do it on the Sunday after,” he said.

As for the grand count, “I’ve got to tell you, the people of Del Mar and TVG and the entire horse racing community is to be credited,” he added. “They really stepped up.”

Which leads to the year upon us–one that has started as inauspiciously as the last one ended, with COVID-19’s iron grip on the industry just as suffocating.

Will there be another CARMAthon this year? Maybe. But when it comes to fundraising, the trick, says CARMA board members like Koch, is to keep changing the menu all the while ensuring the ingredients are fresh.

“I don’t like CARMA to run the same thing every year, only because you wear people out with the same events,” said Madeline Auerbach, who founded the organization roughly 12 years ago. “We’re always looking for the next new, wonderful idea.”

But what if that wonderful new idea doesn’t materialize as desired? The economic Sword of Damocles hovering over the industry the past 12 months has led Auerbach to a place of tough reflection.

“It made me realize how vulnerable we all are,” she said. “I think last year is the first time I’ve really felt as if we needed an exit-strategy for the day that, if it comes when we don’t have racing any more, how these horses are going to be supported.”

As such, Auerbach sees the role of a governing board–the group of individuals charged with guiding each individual non-profit aftercare–as foundation stones to the resiliency of each organization through the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

“You’re not going to last very long–you’re not going to be around for very long–without a board capable of taking on the responsibility that most people who run rescues can’t do,” she said. “When you’re running a rescue, it’s all you can do to make sure that the lights stay on and the horses get fed.”

As someone similarly slogging away from the trenches, Lovitt is only too starkly aware of what a vastly changed industry landscape means on a day-to-day basis for CARMA. And while donations are always going to prove a useful safety-net for the organization, there’s an impermanence to charity that makes long-term sustainable goals slippery.

“What we’re going to be looking at in 2021 are additional new–new to us–sources of continuous funding,” Lovitt said, pointing to what is currently an industry-wide remeasurement of the purse-strings.

“This is truly going to be a year in which aftercare, but I’m guessing the entire racing community, takes a long look at how things are funded,” Lovitt continued. “How do we pay for things? How do we continue doing the things that we do? We’re going to have to take a long hard look at that.”

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View From The Eighth Pole: Veering Off Into La-La Land

I seriously doubt if trainer Bob Baffert or anyone in his stable knowingly gave scopolamine to Justify prior to his victory in the Grade 1 Santa Anita Derby on April 7, 2018. But the drug showed up above the threshold limit in post-race testing for both the eventual Triple Crown winner and for Hoppertunity, another Baffert runner, who won the G3 Tokyo City Cup the following day at the Arcadia, Calif., track.

Scopolamine has found its way into California hay supplies via jimson weed, so it's not unreasonable to conclude the positive test was a result of environmental contamination. It's also unlikely that the drug's presence at a low yet impermissible level had any impact on performance.

But rules are rules.

According to California Horse Racing Board rule 1859.5 (Disqualification Upon Positive Test Finding), a positive test of drugs in classes 1, 2 or 3 (as defined by the CHRB) “shall require disqualification of the horse from the race in which it participated and forfeiture of any purse … regardless of culpability for the condition of the horse.”

In April 2018, scopolamine was a Class 3 drug under CHRB rules.

CHRB members, meeting in executive session on Aug. 23, 2018, circumvented those rules by voting to not pursue the matter, acceding to the recommendations of the CHRB's equine medical director, Dr. Rick Arthur, and the board's then-executive director, Rick Baedeker.

There is an old expression that “we don't know what we don't know.” In this case, we don't know how many previous times the board took such actions, stopping an alleged medication violation before it reached the stewards for a hearing. We do know the CHRB has prosecuted numerous cases of positive drug tests that any rational person would assume resulted from environmental contamination.

So what was different about this case?

For starters, by the time this came before the CHRB in August 2018, Justify had a) won the Triple Crown, b) had his breeding rights sold for a record $75 million, and c) been retired from racing. He was also trained by a Hall of Famer who had become the “face” of the sport.

Additionally, there was a can of worms labeled “Derby Points” that some might try to open if Justify was disqualified from the Santa Anita Derby, a race that gave the son of Scat Daddy the points needed to qualify for the Kentucky Derby field.

So the CHRB voted behind closed doors to end the investigation and successfully tamped down what could have been an embarrassing situation – until a September 2019 report by Joe Drape in the New York Times exposed what had happened.

There's another old expression that “it's not the crime, it's the coverup.” Scopolamine positives have been called before in California. Trainers were not sanctioned but their horses disqualified. No one likes when that happens, but it's a matter of following the rules. Maybe the rules need to be changed to accommodate environmental contaminations, but until that happens it isn't right for regulators to circumvent the rules they don't like.

The New York Times article hit as California racing was trying to recover from the high-profile equine fatality spike at Santa Anita earlier in the year that thrust the sport in the national spotlight in a most unflattering way. The handling of the Justify case only poured gasoline onto the regulatory fire.

The controversies riled the office of Gov. Gavin Newsom and dominoes started falling at the CHRB. Chuck Winner had already stepped down as board chairman when the Justify story broke. Vice chair Madeline Auerbach resigned from the board when she was passed over to chair the organization. Executive director Baedeker announced that he was retiring and other staff positions changed. New appointees came from outside the industry and without direct investment in racing or conflicts of interest.

Mick Ruis, who owned Santa Anita Derby runner-up Bolt d'Oro, sued the CHRB in January 2020, claiming he was entitled to the $600,000 first-place money from the race. In July, Ruis reached an agreement to settle the lawsuit when the CHRB said it would file a complaint to conduct a purse disqualification hearing on Justify. That hearing, which also included a complaint filed on Hoppertunity's positive test, was conducted on Oct. 29.

Here's where things start veering off into La-La Land.

The three stewards, John Herbuveaux, Kim Sawyer and Ron Church, did their due diligence sifting through the evidence and testimony. They put together a lengthy findings of fact and timeline, including making note that scopolamine changed from a Class 3 drug to Class 4 months after the Santa Anita Derby and Tokyo City Cup were run. The stewards did all the things you would expect them to do when conducting a hearing of this type and then making a determination.

Then they took the ultimate copout. No matter what the evidence was, no matter what the rules stated, they dismissed the complaint “because the CHRB has already ruled on this matter, in executive session, at the Aug. 23, 2018, meeting.”

Are you kidding me?

Unless this was some kind of carefully orchestrated kabuki theater involving CHRB members, staff and stewards to go through the motions of a hearing in order to satisfy the terms of the settlement agreement with Ruis – which seems highly unlikely – the final order by the stewards is mind-boggling.

If the stewards felt as though the matter was dismissed in August 2018, why did they go to the trouble of conducting a hearing? Couldn't they have sought clarification from legal counsel at the CHRB as to whether or not the matter was settled?

The order by the stewards may not be the final word. Attorney Darrell Vienna, representing Ruis, pointed out that California's Business and Professions Code, section 19517, states the CHRB “may overrule any steward's decision other than a decision to disqualify a horse due to a foul or a riding or driving infraction in a race, if a preponderance of the evidence indicates any of the following:

“1) The steward mistakenly interpreted the law.

“2) New evidence of a convincing nature is produced

“3) The best interests of racing and the state may be better served.

“…Furthermore, any decision pertaining to the distribution of purses may be changed only if a claim is made in writing to the board by one of the involved owners or trainers, and a preponderance of the evidence clearly indicates to the board that one or more of the grounds for protest, as outlined in regulations adopted by the board, has been substantiated.”

Within hours of the decision by the stewards to dismiss the complaint, Vienna filed a claim with the board on behalf of Ruis, asking for the CHRB to overrule the stewards.

The ball is back in the CHRB's court, but these are not the same CHRB members who opted to bury this matter in August 2018.

That's my view from the eighth pole.

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