Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony to be Held August 5

The National Museum of Racing will induct the 2022 Hall of Fame class Friday, Aug. 5 at Fasig-Tipton. The event is slated to begin at 10:30 a.m. Tom Durkin will serve as the master of ceremonies. The event is open to the public and free to attend. The ceremony will also be broadcast live on the Museum website at racingmuseum.org. A stellar class of inductees comprises the 2022 ceremony, namely four-time Eclipse Award winner Beholder (Henny Hughes); Hillsdale (Take Away), who is also the first Indiana-bred in the Hall of Fame; 1984 Eclipse Turf Female Champion Royal Heroine (Ire); and G1 Queen Anne S. conqueror, two-time Eclipse Award winner Tepin (Bernstein). Trainer Oscar White is the sole human inductee along with Pillars of the Turf James Cox Brady, Marshall Cassidy, and James Ben Ali Haggin.

Several current Hall of Famers will take part in a special autograph signing at the Museum on Saturday, Aug. 6 from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. The following members are scheduled to participate (subject to change): Braulio Baeza, Mark Casse, Ramon Dominguez, Janet Elliot, Earlie Fires, Sandy Hawley, Richard Mandella, Jose Santos, Gary Stevens, and Nick Zito. For $25, fans will receive a commemorative 2022 Hall of Fame induction weekend poster for the members to sign. There will only be 100 posters for this event and they are available on a first-come, first served basis. Admission to the Museum will be free from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m.

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2022 HOF Class Headed by Beholder, Tepin

Eight new members have been elected to the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame, including Eclipse Award winners Beholder (Henny Hughes) and Tepin (Bernstein) in the contemporary category, both chosen in their first year of eligibility. The other members of the class of 2022 are divisional stalwarts Hillsdale (Take Away) and Royal Heroine (Ire) (Lypheor {GB}) and, via the Historic Review Committee, Classic-winning trainer Oscar White.

Among the Pillars of the Turf, owner/breeding/official James Cox Brady, track announcer and official Marshall Cassidy and renowned owner/breeder James Ben Ali Haggin will also be honored.

The new inductees will be honored 10:30a.m. Friday, Aug. 5 at the Fasig-Tipton sales pavilion in Saratoga Springs, NY.

The ceremony will be broadcast live on the Museum website at www.racingmuseum.org. The event is open to the public and free to attend.

Beholder, a winner of three Breeders' Cup races for trainer Richard Mandella, earned four Eclipse title–2-year-old (2012), 3-year-old (2013) and Older Female (2015-16). The winner off 11 Grade Is, the Spendthrift Farm runner retired with 18 wins from 26 lifetimes starts and earnings of $6,156,600.

The Eclipse earning turf mare in 2015 and 2016, Robert Masterson's Tepin won 11 graded/group races, including winning efforts facing males in the G1 Queen Anne S. at Royal Ascot and the GI Woodbine Mile. The winner of 13 races from 23 starts, the Mark Casse trainer retired with over $4.4 million in earnings.

Indiana-bred Hillsdale enjoyed his best season at four in 1959, winning 10 of 13 starts, including the San Carlos S., San Fernanado S., Californian, Hollywood Gold Cup and American H. A winner of 16 stakes at 11 different tracks, the Martin Fallon Jr. trainee retired with in excess of $600,000 in earnings (ranking him in 13th all-time at that time).

Campaigned by Robert Sangster in the U.S., England and France, Royal Heroine won 10 (eight stakes) of 21 career starts for earnings over $1.2 million. Among her chief victories in Europe for Sir Michael Stoute are the Prix de l'Opera at the Princess Margaret S. at Royal Ascot. In the U.S., she added wins in the GI Breeders' Cup Mile, GI Hollywood Derby, and GI Matriarch S. while under the care of John Gosden.

Representing the human inductees, Oliver White, who trained exclusively for the Jeffords family, won 706 races, including 104 stakes. Included among his top runners, Horse of the Year One Count, Ch. 2-year-old and Classic winner Pavot and Ch. 3-year-old Filly Kiss Me Kate.

Chairman of NYRA for eight years during the 60s, James Cox Brady also enjoyed success as an owner, campaigning the likes of champion War Plumage and graded stakes winners Casemate, Secret Meeting, Landlocked and Artismo. From 1938 through 1970, Brady's horses won 234 races with earnings on over $2 million. He also served as a steward and vice chairman of The Jockey Club and the Thoroughbred Racing Association. Additionally, he was one of the original directors of NYRA and a founding director of the Monmouth Park Jockey Club.

An exercise rider of flat and steeplechasers in his youth, Marshall Cassidy is credited with devising the modern stall-style starting gate, improving the photo-finish camera system, inventing the electric timer and introducing saliva testing and pre-race veterinary exams. He also served as director of racing for NYRA from 1963 through 1968 in addition to a position as executive secretary of The Jockey Club.

Attorney and rancher James Ben Ali Haggin made his fortune investing in mining, making him one of the wealthiest individuals in the country at the time. Establishing a breeding center on Rancho del Paso near Sacramento in 1873, he was responsible for Hall of Famers Firenze and Salvator. Establishing a stable in the east in the mid 1880s and later purchasing Elmendorf Farm in Kentucky in 1897, Haggin also campaigned Classic winners Ben Ali and Tyrant. He is also credited with the purchase of Hall of Famer Miss Woodford, in addition to having bred top horses including Africander, Sir Walter, Tournament, Waterboy and Tradition.

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Heleringer: Will The Absolute Insurer Rule Save Racing … Again?

“Doped” horses. “Hopped” horses. “Drugged” horses. Cheating. Indictments. Scandals. Let the bettor beware.

Those terms don't describe the current conditions in horse racing, but the overarching problems that dogged the sport nearly 90 years ago when racing had basically no reliable security system in place to protect the betting public. As is the case today, horse racing in the United States had no national governing body that set uniform standards and rules to police the sport. (Thankfully, this will finally change on July 1, 2022, with the federally mandated Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority.)

Until his death in 1924, August Belmont Jr. could unofficially govern the game by the sheer force of his name and prestige — he had created the concept of a racing commission in 1895 and then persuaded a New York legislature dominated by Republicans to enact it into law. (Belmont was a staunch Democrat.) But at his passing, there still was no effective means – no proven scientific process – to combat racing's biggest challenge: how to detect and thwart the cheaters, the unscrupulous horsemen who drugged horses to reap huge “scores” at the betting windows.

Joseph Widener, in an attempt to both reform a sport he loved and, less altruistically, protect the sizeable investment he was making in the total transformation of Hialeah Park in south Florida, dispatched Marshall Cassidy in 1934 to France to study the post-race drug-testing system of a horse's blood/saliva the French racing authorities had conceived to police their own game. Cassidy brought the system back to the United States and installed it for Widener at Hialeah (overcoming a brief but bitter strike of horsemen in the process).

That single act, with stout punishment for offenders, copied nationally by a burgeoning racing industry that couldn't build racetracks fast enough, may have single-handedly saved the sport of horse racing from itself. The fans that fueled this explosive growth could now push their money through the windows with some degree of confidence they were betting on an honestly-run sport.

The simple, uncomplicated standard that governed was called the “absolute insurer rule.” The person doing the “absolute” insuring was a horse's trainer of record. It didn't matter if that trainer was (theoretically) on a three-year shuttle to Mars, if he ran a horse during that time anywhere in America and was the listed trainer of record; he was totally and exclusively liable for the consequences of any failed post-race drug specimen ­­– not the groom, the hotwalker, a veterinarian, or even the familiar “disgruntled former employee.” Confirmed “positives” meant, automatically, the DQ of the winner, loss of purse by the owner, and a fine/suspension or both for the trainer. But how would the reviewing courts interpret such a unique guilty-until-proven-innocent standard? The answers were not long in coming.

In a landmark case with a number of similarities to the current Bob Baffert imbroglio, in late 1945, prominent trainer Tom Smith, the man who had trained the immortal Seabiscuit, was suspended for an entire year by New York's racing board after one of his grooms had been observed in the paddock at Jamaica spraying a “substance,” later confirmed as ephedrine, into the nostrils of Smith's horse. (Smith wasn't even at the racetrack that day.) In a battle of experts sure to be reprised when the Baffert hearing begins, Smith's expert testified the ephedrine's effect on the horse was “negligible” while New York's chemist believed the drug “might [key word] affect a horse … by increasing its respiratory capacity.” The racing board's harsh penalty was upheld by New York's appellate court. (Smith was even ordered to pay the board's court costs of $50.)

But, at least initially, no other state was inclined to follow New York's lead. Perhaps as a consequence of the strong (but widely unpopular) sanction meted out to Tom Smith, Maryland's highest court – barely two months after the Smith decision was handed down – affirmed a lower court's decision declaring Maryland's own absolute insurer rule unconstitutional. Trainer J. Dallett “Dolly” Byers had a winning steeplechase horse at Pimlico test positive for “benzedrine,” a stimulant. Echoing Mr. Baffert's initial defense after Medina Spirit's positive for betamethasone, Mr. Byers testified at his hearing that he was totally innocent and had no idea how the prohibited drug got into his horse's system. Byers' defense, complete with character witnesses, was found unavailing and he received the same one-year suspension that Tom Smith had gotten. A reviewing trial court threw out the suspension and the law/regulation on which it was based, calling the rule's “conclusive presumption of guilt” a “great vice.” A unanimous Maryland court of appeals affirmed and went even further: “This irrebuttable presumption [of guilt under an absolute rule] destroyed the right of [Byers] to offer evidence to establish his innocence. If this is 'just,' then the term 'unjust' has no meaning.”

Florida's Supreme Court weighed in the following year (1947), striking down that state's own absolute standard in the Baldwin case, holding for the first time anywhere that a horseman's license was “a valuable property right” that could not be suspended without due process of law, i.e., without some finding of guilt based on evidence not a mere violation of an automatic rule.

But just when it looked like the absolute insurer rule was going to be ruled off, California's Supreme Court upheld the beleaguered standard in 1948. In a 5-2 decision that the two dissenting justices called “un-American,” the majority reinstated a six-month suspension of trainer W.L. Sandstrom's license after his winning horse at Del Mar, Cover Up, tested positive for a “caffeine-type alkaloid.” Sandstrom's sanction, said the high court, was not “unreasonable, arbitrary, or capricious” since the absolute rule upon which it was based “was designed to afford the wagering public a maximum of protection against race horses being stimulated or depressed” and was a “reasonable exercise of California's 'police powers.'”

Over time, the Sandstrom decision became the consensus view of nearly every court that considered constitutional challenges to racing's single most important rule. (Both the Byers and Baldwin cases were eventually overruled.)

With the hiring of Spencer J. Drayton in 1946, wooed away from the upper leadership of the FBI, and his national efforts to “clean up racing” with the Thoroughbred Racing Protective Bureau (TRPB) that included the agency's aggressive enforcement of absolute insurer rules, horse racing became a major recognized sport in the United States, as honestly-run and incorruptible as humanly possible. The game enjoyed its “golden age” thereafter up through the 1970s.

The question must be asked, in the crucible of the serial Bob Baffert “medication” controversies, which supplanted the serial Rick Dutrow “medication” controversies, can horse racing survive in this country without a drug-testing system that is NOT based on the strict enforcement of an absolute insurer rule that the betting public can rely upon with the utmost confidence?

While every horseman's constitutional right to due process of law must be protected, at the same time, does the sport's leadership seriously believe that the wagering public (or their elected representatives) will tolerate a drug-enforcement apparatus that, far from the zero tolerance standard it adopted barely a dozen years ago (and has obviously been discarded), permits a chaotic system that allows excuses, explanations, and prevarications for drug positives that are only limited by a licensee's imagination? Exactly how is the public interest served if horsemen can plead, not just in mitigation, but as an affirmative defense, “environmental contamination,” transferred lidocaine patches, innocent applications of ointment, and wide-open-to-varying-interpretations how many picograms of a “therapeutic” (but nevertheless prohibited during races) medication “affects” a horse's performance during a race that lasts perhaps a minute and a half?

Now that the abandonment of the former “absolute” standard is on full display in the aftermath of a positive drug screen of the winner of the world-renowned Kentucky Derby, with the attendant incalculable damage to horse racing's “brand,” is it time once again to resume the strict application of an absolute insurer rule to save an industry that employs tens of thousands and is enjoyed by millions?

Bob Heleringer is a Louisville, Ky., attorney, former racing official and author of the legal textbook Equine Regulatory Law, the second edition of which will be released later this year by the University Press of Kentucky.)

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Marshall Cassidy, 75, Former NYRA Track Announcer, Passes

The New York Racing Association, Inc. (NYRA) mourns the loss of Marshall Cassidy, who served as its track announcer from 1979 to 1990. Cassidy, who died Sunday at the age of 75, was noted for his enduring accuracy and even-keeled delivery.

Cassidy, who later served as a patrol and placing judge in New York, was a member of NYRA's elite fraternity of track announcers. Serving as backup announcer during much of the 1970s to Dave Johnson and Chic Anderson, Cassidy took over as NYRA's lead announcer after Anderson's death in 1979.

In addition to his duties on the NYRA circuit, Cassidy called races throughout the 1980s on television for CBS, ABC, NBC and ESPN. He was succeeded at NYRA by Tom Durkin in 1990.

“Marshall Cassidy was incredibly skilled at his craft and a true ambassador for thoroughbred racing in New York,” said NYRA President and CEO Dave O'Rourke. “Marshall was a friend to so many, especially in Saratoga, where he could so often be found mixing it up in the press box or talking to fans in the backyard. We mourn his loss and offer our condolences to his friends, family and colleagues past and present.”

Durkin praised Cassidy's unique delivery and accuracy which he said rivaled that of Fred Capossela, NYRA's race caller from 1934 to 1971.

“Marshall had a voice that belonged in the Hall of Fame. He had a resonant baritone and his timbre was perfect,” said Durkin, who was NYRA race caller from 1990 to 2014. “In terms of New York announcers – and this is the highest praise – he was on an even par with Fred Capossela. The most important thing for a racetrack announcer to be is accurate. And for that, Marshall was peerless.”

John Imbriale, NYRA's current race caller, also remembered Cassidy for his accuracy and his distinctive style.

“Nobody was more accurate than Marshall,” said Imbriale. “His call of Easy Goer's Belmont Stakes win will be remembered forever.”

Cassidy also mentored Imbriale in the 1980s at Aqueduct, often critiquing and analyzing his practice calls and teaching him the ropes of a profession that few ever master.

“He was very supportive and really took the time to help me,” Imbriale said of Cassidy. His help was extremely important.”

Cassidy was a member of a distinguished multi-generational family of racing officials in New York. His maternal grandfather, Marshall Whiting Cassidy, was a race starter and later a steward, who eventually became racing director for NYRA's predecessor agencies, and later the executive director of The Jockey Club. Cassidy's maternal great-grandfather, Marshall (Mars) Cassidy, was also a fixture in New York racing as a race starter, the first to use a barrier to start a race, and immortalized in coverage by Damon Runyon.

George Cassidy, Cassidy's grand-uncle, was also a race starter, serving for upwards of 50 years, mostly at NYRA tracks, before he retired in 1980.

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