Thoroughbred Industry Employee Awards Finalists Named; Ceremony Set For Oct. 15

The finalists for the 2021 Thoroughbred Industry Employee Awards have been announced, including three finalists in six of the seven categories, as well as the winner and runner-up of the Thoroughbred Industry Community Award. This year's Community Award winner is Nick Caras of the New York Racetrack Chaplaincy, with Maryland Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association's Diana Pinones as runner-up.

After a successful virtual Awards Ceremony in 2020, TIEA is excited to welcome the finalists in each of the six categories, along with Nick Caras and Diana Pinones, to an in-person Awards Ceremony held at Keeneland on Friday, Oct. 15, in Lexington, Ky. The weekend includes travel and accommodation for out-of-town finalists, a tour of a local horse farm, dinner for finalists and their connections, and the Awards Ceremony luncheon followed by an afternoon of racing at Keeneland.

The shortlist judging panel, the first of the two judging panels, met on Tuesday, Aug. 17, to determine the finalists in each category as well as the Community Award winner and runner-up. The second and final stage of judging will be conducted as in person interviews with each finalist on Oct. 14.

“From my experience last year on the final judging panel, I knew coming in how tough this was going to be,” said Panel Chair Dr. David Richardson. “Determining 20 finalists from almost two hundred nominations was no easy task, but what a rewarding experience it was to learn about these nominees who have dedicated their livelihoods to the sport we all love. While difficult decisions were made in order to narrow down what is a most impressive field, I think all will see from the list of finalists that we are blessed with an incredible workforce in our industry.

“These awards are incredibly important to our industry and sport. Now more than ever as we navigate a workforce shortage across the country, these awards are an opportunity to recognize and reward the industry's most steadfast individuals. This judging panel took that to heart in determining this year's finalists.

“Thank you to all of the nominators for taking the time to recognize the hardworking people in their lives. I'd also like to thank the National HBPA, TOBA, The Jockey Club, Breeders' Cup, and Godolphin, without whose underwriting and support these awards would not be possible to implement. Lastly, a heartfelt thanks to our media partners – BloodHorse, TDN, Daily Racing Form, TVG, Paulick Report and Fox Sports – for helping to spread the reach of the awards.”

The shortlist panel was composed of Chair, Dr. David Richardson, UofL Chief of Surgery, Louisville Ky.; Jane Buchanan, Bloodstock Agent & Racing Manager, Lexington Ky.; Mindy Coleman, Counsel, Jockey's Guild, Lexington, Ky; and Tom Law, Managing Editor, ST Publishing, Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Their meeting was hosted by the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

This year seven industry organizations came on board as title sponsors of individual award categories with the goal to help spread the reach and impact of the Thoroughbred Industry Employee Awards.

This year also saw the addition of the Support Services Award category to recognize those in the industry who may not work hands on with horses. With the addition of this category, TIEA has the opportunity to recognize and reward more outstanding talent, diligence and commitment at the heart of our sport.

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The winners of the Administration, Dedication to Breeding, Dedication to Racing, Leadership and Support Services Awards will receive a prize of $7,500, with an additional $2,500 awarded to the winner's team at their farm, stable or organization. The two runners-up in these categories will win $2,500 each, with $2,500 awarded to their farm, stable or organization.

The winner of the Newcomer Award will receive $2,000 and a five-day educational trip to Dubai, with $1,000 awarded to their team at their place of work. The two runners-up in this award will receive $1,000 each, and $1,000 will also be awarded to their farm, stable or organization.

As the winner of the Community Award, Nick Caras will receive a prize of $7,500 and an additional prize of $2,500 will be donated to the charity of his choice. Diana Pinones will receive $2,500 as the runner-up in this category.

The 2021 Thoroughbred Industry Employee Awards finalists are:

Katherine McKee Administration Award sponsored by Keeneland

Lori Johnson The Jockey Club
Sue Kenny Herringswell Stables
Kelsey Marshall Eclipse Thoroughbred Partners

Support Services Award sponsored by I am Horse Racing

David Kyle Fasig-Tipton
Katherine Todd Smith Self-Employed, Horse Identifier
Brenda Wilhelm Charles Town Races

Dedication to Breeding Award sponsored by Hallway Feeds

Luis Coronado Machmer Hall
Wayne Howard Spendthrift Farm
Calvin Smith Runnymede Farm, PA

Dedication to Racing Award sponsored by National Thoroughbred Racing Association

Benjamin Betts Ocala Jockey Club, retired
Tessa Bisha Brad H. Cox Racing
Lorita Lindemann Joe Sharp Racing

 Leadership Award sponsored by Hagyard Equine Medical Institute

Joseph Littrell Stone Farm
Robert Turner Stonestreet Farms
Billy Sellers Lane's End Farm

 Newcomer Award sponsored by New York Racing Association

Emily Csenar Taylor Made Sales Agency
Joshua McLemore Keeneland
Olivia Desch WinStar Farm

Thoroughbred Industry Community Award sponsored by Churchill Downs

Winner Nicholas Caras, New York Racetrack Chaplaincy
Runner-up Diana Pinones, Maryland Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association

 

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HeadCheck Health Aims For Blanket Jockey Health Program

One day in the not-too-distant past, a jockey who had taken a tumble at a Mid-Atlantic racetrack was required to get a doctor's note giving him the medical all-clear before he could ride at the same facility. And so, that's what he did.

But rather than head immediately to a physician in that same state, the jockey hopped the border to ride at Laurel Park. After taking his mounts at the Maryland track, the rider swung by the office of Kelly Ryan, co-medical director for the Maryland Horsemen's Health Program.

“He said, 'I need to see the doctor because I need a note so I can get cleared to go back and ride,'” explained Ryan, who declined to name the jockey and original racetrack due to the sensitivity of the situation. “He could have been riding with a concussion and nobody knew.”

The point of this anecdote wasn't to skewer the jockey but rather to highlight a broader and rather more insidious problem: That while huge strides have been made in the arena of equine health and safety in recent years, when it comes to ensuring the health and safety of the folks steering them, the industry leaves much to be desired.

More pointedly, there's a glaring hole that needs to be filled with an easy-to-use, legally compliant and uniform system across the country to track, store, manage, and share vital information pertaining to jockey health. Which is where a system called HeadCheck Health, pioneered and developed for use between Maryland and Delaware, is seeking to act as a plug.

“This is a very important need. It's a very big need,” said Ryan, who added that for too long, the industry has been making excuses instead of fixing the problem. “We're giving them a reason to stop making excuses.”

Ryan isn't overselling the need. Roughly 45% of sports related brain injuries are related to equine sports, while 7% of falls result in concussions.

In a recently published four-year jockey injury study helmed by Ryan encompassing 590 race days and 5,611 races, there were 204 injuries involving 184 separate incidents and 131 separate falls. Out of the 22 head injuries that jockeys suffered during that time, eight were concussions, which worked out to a ratio of 0.18 concussions per 1,000 mounts.

Mix into the ingredients wildly varying concussion protocols, medical staff and medical models from track-to-track, and it soon becomes apparent why proponents of HeadCheck Health are keen to sing the system's praises. “This is going to make collecting information so much easier,” said Ryan. “It's a game-changer.”

HIPAA Compliant

Founded about eight years ago, HeadCheck Health works with all sorts of other sports teams like rugby, football, and hockey–some of them at the elite, Olympic-level–where the risk of concussion is ever present.

“We've gone through it and we know how to make things work,” said Eric VanderHelm, an account manager at HeadCheck Health, who has worked with Ryan and her colleagues to build a platform catering to the specific needs of horse racing.

Importantly for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance, there are various levels of access into the system that differentiates what jockeys and medical personnel–like those from the emergency medical services field, athletic trainers and medical directors–can see in the system, and what clerks of scale, stewards and other regulators are able to view.

The main dashboard provides a simple outline of which jockeys are eligible to ride, and their current health status if not. This is the sort of information anyone acting as a concussion spotter at a track has access to.

Specific health-related information, however, is locked to the jockey and medical experts. And what does this cover? Turns out, a fair bit.

There's an electronic form to input the results of a Sports Concussion Assessment Tool 5 (SCAT5) test, which is a standardized way to evaluate sports-related head injuries.

Other digital forms include an accident report, and a digital clearance note with time stamps. Jockey physical cards–typically a slip of paper riders routinely lose–can also be inputted electronically into the system.

See a more complete presentation of the system here:

 

 

The overarching purpose of the app is to streamline and centralize the collection of vital jockey health data and make important details (ranging from information pertaining to suspected or diagnosed concussions to missing physical notes) available to those who need to see it–jockeys especially, said Ryan.

What's more, “The system is fully HIPAA compliant,” promised VanderHelm.

Jockey Health Information System

Some in the industry who read this will no doubt be familiar with a similar system already in place.

The Jockey Health Information System (JHIS) was launched by The Jockey Club–and integrated into their InCompass system present at nearly all U.S. tracks–some 12 years ago.

But it would be fair to say that the JHIS hasn't been enthusiastically embraced as originally intended. Indeed, the Jockeys' Guild was able to verify only that Keeneland and Churchill Downs are currently utilizing the system.

“It hasn't gotten the support that we would have liked,” admitted Terry Meyocks, president and CEO of the Jockeys' Guild.

Complicated HIPAA laws have made implementation difficult. And while the original intent of the JHIS was for approved medical personnel to input the information, said Meyocks, the huge disparities in medical staffing levels between tracks led to the riders taking on much of that responsibility themselves–a dynamic replete with potholes associated with language and technology barriers, and good old-fashioned apathy.

Varying concussion protocols at different tracks also hindered the effectiveness of the JHIS, with some tracks still to implement them.

Indeed, the ARCI has a model rule regarding concussion protocols, requiring a track to have on-site trained personnel to diagnose and assess concussions, for example, and established return-to-ride guidelines.

But according to Jockey's Guild attorney Mindy Coleman, Maryland, Delaware, Colorado, Washington State, and Oklahoma are the only states where these model rules have been both adopted and enforced, while NYRA is working with New York Institute of Technology to adopt concussion protocols as a house rule.

“If everybody's serous about concussions, which I think they should be if they're worried about liability, I think it would be in the industry's best interest to come up with something, whether it's through InCompass or HeadCheck,” said Meyocks.

The Future

HeadCheck Health–a much more sophisticated and dynamic tool than the JHIS, say its proponents–isn't yet the finished article, with technical wrinkles still being ironed out.

Nevertheless, the individuals behind it are now looking to start expanding the system beyond the Maryland and Delaware borders.

As they do, they, too, face some of the same issues that hampered the rollout of the JHIS, namely the Swiss cheese distribution of trained medical staff across the nation's tracks. But HeadCheck Health has the potential to circumvent some of these barriers.

For one thing, it opens the door to things like baseline concussion testing via telehealth consultations, meaning that a trained physician could perform a virtual assessment on a jockey in a completely different state (provided that physician is licensed in the rider's state, explained Ryan).

Importantly the software can be tailored to the individual needs of a track or jurisdiction, said VanderHelm. “It's a matter of them telling us what they need to have in the system to make sure it's compliant, but we can tweak it to make it work.”

Ryan sees other uses for HeadCheck Health. With a centralized database detailing falls and injuries, for example, it could also be used to run important data, potentially identifying trends to make tracks safer, she said.

Proponents of the system also downplay the costs. “It's really not very expensive–I haven't faced any pushback on the financial investment,” said Andy Belfiore, project manager with Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association. “I think people are more concerned about personnel, who's responsible for entering the medical information.”

In other words, for the system to work as effectively as it could and should, it needs buy-in from all stakeholders. “The heart of doing that is going to be up-front,” said Belfiore. “Once you've got those jockeys entered into the system, it becomes a much easier task for everyone.”

Which is why some industry figures are looking at the recently inked Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act (HISA) as a potential compliance vehicle for HeadCheck Health that's broad-based and enforceable.

“The HeadCheck Health program developed through Dr. Ryan's leadership in Maryland represents the ongoing effort to prioritize health and safety for horse and rider. 1/ST RACING has led nationwide reforms and is pleased that our industry is moving towards uniform regulations,” wrote Steve Koch, The Stronach Group's senior vice president of racing, in a statement.

“As we look to the future, it is reasonable to anticipate that that HISA would use a program like HeadCheck Health, that focuses on head health for jockeys, as a foundation for establishing and expanding a program of this nature across U.S. racing jurisdictions.”

Note: The Association of Racing Commissioners International is hosting a briefing on the HeadCheck Health system Monday, Mar. 15 at 1 p.m. ET. Register for the briefing here.

Anyone interested in the HeadCheck Health program can contact Kelly Ryan at: kdryan13@gmail.com.

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New Maryland Whip Policy Starts Six-Strike Count at Quarter Pole

Effective Aug. 1, from the quarter pole to the finish wire, Maryland jockeys will be limited to six whip strikes–either overhanded or underhanded–with no more than two of those blows in succession without giving the horse a chance to respond. Prior to the quarter pole, jockeys will be allowed an unlimited number of strikes, provided they are delivered in an underhand manner, which is considered less harmful to horses.

The Maryland Racing Commission (MRC) unanimously voted to approve the policy modification during its Thursday teleconference meeting. It’s based on a regional idea proposed in May by the Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association to create uniformity in whip rules among the mid-Atlantic tracks, although each state’s racing commission still must choose whether to adopt the recommendations either in part or in whole.

MRC executive director J. Michael Hopkins explained that for right now, the voting-in of the new policy is to be a guide for Maryland stewards, similar to the way the current discretionary policy that got implemented in January at Laurel Park (10 strikes total, no more than three in succession) is being used.

For the new policy to be backed by an official MRC rule, Hopkins said, the commission must next craft a proposed schedule of penalties that will have to be voted upon at a future meeting.

“The intention is not to limit the use of the whip, but bring it more under control,” Hopkins said.

Hopkins added that Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, and West Virginia are the other regional jurisdictions where the new policy is expected to be acted upon and possibly implemented.

In crafting the mid-Atlantic policy, Hopkins said industry stakeholders took into consideration that jockeys have different safety and horse-encouragement needs depending on the size of each racetrack. What is appropriate on ovals less than a mile in circumference–like at Charles Town or Timonium–might not be right for the wide, sweeping turf course at Colonial Downs.

After the vote, during the public commentary session, Steve Koch, senior vice president of racing for The Stronach Group, which owns Laurel Park and Pimlico Race Course, said his company does not support this particular initiative because it looks “quite different” from what has been proposed in a number of other jurisdictions, and thus does not promote the desired goal of nationwide uniformity.

Mindy Coleman, an attorney representing The Jockeys’ Guild, also voiced objections after the vote was taken. She said the policy was “too restrictive and limits the jockey’s ability to communicate with the horse and encourage [it] to achieve its maximum placing.”

Coleman added that, “We’re willing to agree to the proposal if the rider was allowed to use the riding crop [without limitation] in the underhanded fashion to the eighth pole, and restricting the use of the riding crop six times in the overhand fashion throughout the race.”

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