mitch mcconnell | Horse Racing Free Tips

NTRA President, CEO Rooney Joins Writers’ Room Podcast

Tom Rooney, a former Congressman, a lawyer and an Army veteran, was hired to take over as the top man at the NTRA because the NTRA Board knew he could make a difference in Washington. Some two years later and with the swinging pendulum that is the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act (HISA), Rooney has his hands full. This week, Rooney sat down with the team on the TDN Writers' Room podcast presented by Keeneland to discuss what he and his staff are doing to advocate for the sport. Rooney was the Green Group Guest of the Week.

The NTRA is pro-HISA, which means that Rooney was working behind the scenes to lobby lawmakers to back legislation in which language that covered HISA was changed so that it would satisfy issues brought up by a federal appeals court that declared that HISA was unconstitutional. Had the language not been changed, HISA very well could have been dead. Rooney said his efforts included discussions with both Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer. Ultimately, the NTRA and pro-HISA forces got their wish.

“[Schumer and McConnell] both recognized that it was important for our industry to have uniform standards and to have racetrack safety and accountability and integrity for us to move forward,” Rooney said. “We made it incumbent upon those two men especially that we needed this language fixed and we were able to get it done despite a pretty good opposition with regard to people that opposed HISA. So we had to work very hard to make sure that we pressed the issue again with those two men and the rest of the members that were going to vote that had problems with it. I was making phone calls days before to members of the Senate that I'm friends with explaining this to them. A lot of people just didn't know what it meant. They thought it meant more of a government overreach rather than something that would help our industry. And I think that once they understood that, they moved on to the next thing.”

Despite his success, Rooney said he was worried that his efforts would fall short.

“I was not optimistic at all,” he said. “I think I told the people on the phone call that we met with on a daily basis or a weekly basis that we probably had a 5% chance of success.”

The key now, is whether or not the new language will mean that the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals will be satisfied when it comes to the constitutionality issues and allow HISA to proceed.

“I'm confident and that's because I think that we addressed exactly what the court's problems were,” Rooney said. “There is going to be litigation and there's going to be shots taken in other parts of the bill that don't have to do with the ruling. I don't think that those are fatal. And even if they were ruled against, I think that they could be separated without having to try again with a legislative fix, which would be even more difficult with this Congress.”

Looking to the future, Rooney said horse racing needs to join forces with sports betting websites so that their customers can bet on racing and be exposed to the sport. Currently, most on-line wagering on racing is restricted to the traditional ADW outlets like TwinSpires, TVG and XpressBet and sports bettors do not have access to racing.

“The one thing that I'm focused on which will help reach the next generation is what I can do at the federal level to try to get what's called a single wallet on the sports betting apps,” he said. “One of my biggest focuses for the sake of the gambler is to try to figure out a way to integrate horse racing, which, as you all know, was the only legal sport in our country to gamble on for the longest time. And now we're competing in certain states with all sports. FanDuel is one of my board members, and we were able to work with them to get horse racing on a FanDuel shared application. So you don't have to go off one app to get on another one…I remember my son asking me, 'Dad, who's going to win the Kentucky Derby? And then he's like, 'Why can't find it on my app?'”

Elsewhere on the podcast, which is also sponsored by Coolmore, the Kentucky Thoroughbred Association, the Pennsylvania Horse Breeders Association, XBTV and https://www.threechimneys.com/ West Point Thoroughbreds, Zoe Cadman, Randy Moss and Bill Finley discussed the GIII Sham S. and the incredible amount of depth the Bob Baffert has in the 3-year-old male division. Baffert finished one-two-three in the Sham and has three of the top seven horses in T.D. Thornton's Derby Top 12. There was also talk of the 2022 year-end statistics released by Equibase in which purses were up by 10.92 percent even though handle fell, by 0.87 percent. The group noted that, unfortunately, the growth of purses is attributable not to growth of the sport but solely to outside revenue from casino games. The podcastended on an upbeat note with a discussion of the remarkable recovery of jockey Joree Scriver after it was feared she was paralyzed in a spill at Sunland Park.

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Taking Stock: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of 2022

Sergio Leone's 1966 masterpiece, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” was the last and best of a trilogy of Leone spaghetti westerns that upended the traditional genre.

Before Leone and other Italian directors like Sergio Corbucci set about redefining the Old West in Europe, traditional domestic westerns featured clean-cut leads like John Wayne, Alan Ladd, Gregory Peck, Gary Cooper, and Jimmy Stewart in films by directors like John Ford and Howard Hawks that clearly delineated the good from the bad and ugly. Not so Leone, who made the genre surreal and messy, and for him the good wasn't as easily distinguishable from the bad and ugly.

Clint Eastwood, Leone's star, was an anti-hero gunslinger with five-day stubble on a perpetually squinting face, a cigarillo between his lips, and a signature poncho draped over his tall frame.

When he flipped the poncho over his left shoulder, he was ready to draw the Colt Navy holstered on his thigh, and when he did, any gunfight was over in the blink of an eye. He was faster than fast–and unbelievably so.

Racing in 2022 was messy and surreal and was a Sergio Leone film in my mind, not a John Ford movie with clear-cut heroes and bad guys. Flightline was the star, playing the Eastwood role. No one was faster.

Here's the year's Good, Bad, and Ugly, boiled down in three acts.

The Good
The Good was Flightline (Tapit), wasn't it? He was good, but not so in the traditional sense for some, because he didn't race often like their racing heroes from the past. His detractors have grumbled, too, that he's not competing in 2023 because his connections are cashing out on his massive stud value. Some conspiracy theorists on social media have gone so far as to insinuate the $4.6 million share purchased by an undisclosed buyer at auction at Keeneland was engineered by the colt's ownership group to inflate his value. In reality, the share was bought fair and square by Travis Boersma, the billionaire co-founder of Dutch Bros. Coffee, with Coolmore the underbidder. In fact, Boersma has since purchased another share in Flightline.

As for how good Flightline was, the results of the recent Gl Malibu and Gll San Antonio add to the tale: Taiba (Gun Runner), beaten 8 3/4 lengths in third by Flightline in the Gl Breeders' Cup Classic, won the former by 4 1/4 lengths; and Country Grammer (Tonalist), second by 19 1/4 lengths to Flightline in the Gl Pacific Classic, won the latter by 4 1/2 lengths. At the time, the Pacific Classic impacted me in a way I haven't felt in a long time, and when Lane's End asked me to write the entry for Flightline for its annual stallion brochure, I wrote of that race in particular and said, in part:

He was a hot Santa Ana wind blowing in from the San Diego mountains that day. He not only fried the competition in the Pacific Classic but also the ability to think straight in the immediate aftermath. It was difficult to coherently put into words what was seen and felt as Flightline crossed the line. There was something unsettling about it, something that asked, “Is this real?”

Joan Didion, that great American writer from California, once said this about the Santa Ana winds: “The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf. The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called 'earthquake weather.'”

Didion's words capture the otherworldly essence and collective disbelief of what was witnessed at Del Mar. It had been, after all, only Flightline's fifth race. Previously, he'd dominated a field of Grade l winners by six lengths in the one-mile Gl Metropolitan H. at Belmont. His only other stakes outing before the Met Mile came in the seven-furlong Gl Malibu S. at Santa Anita, which he won by 11 1/2 lengths.

In the days following the Pacific Classic, as the magnitude of accomplishment settled in, journalists waxed lyrically about Flightline's performance, but the most telling verdicts came from unsentimental makers of figures and ratings: 126 from Beyer, the fastest in almost 20 years and the second-best ever; -8 1/2 from Thoro-Graph, the best in its history; -2 from Ragozin,
an indicator of highly elite class; and a ranking of 143 from the internationally respected Timeform, which places Flightline tops among American horses of all time and within range of the publication's highest-ever weighted horse, Frankel, at 147.

Flightline was clearly special.

The Bad
The handling of HISA was bad–twice over. There's no way to sugarcoat this. The bill was first passed without industry consensus when Sen. Mitch McConnell, Republican and then Majority Leader in the senate, tacked it on to the year-end spending bill in 2020, and after a part of it was found unconstitutional last year, Sen. McConnell, now Minority Leader, once again attached an amendment to it to the spending bill last month with corrective language that's supposed to address the issue the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found objectionable, which is that government power was delegated to a private entity without adequate government supervision.

Sen. McConnell, in this role, plays the part actor Lee Van Cleef did in the Leone film, the hired gun Angel Eyes. Part of the entry for Angel Eyes in Wikipedia reads: “A ruthless… mercenary… always finishes a job for which he is paid.” Who hired–lobbied is the polite word–Sen. McConnell? Pro HISA advocates, including The Jockey Club, a mostly Republican organization. And why is this ironic and even surreal? Because many of the constitutional issues being litigated in courts around HISA are anti-Republican stances about states' rights and regulatory measures. And many of the federal justices ruling on these issues were named to the bench by Republican Presidents, whose appointments were supported by Sen. McConnell and most Republicans.

What happens if another conservative judge rules against HISA in one of several suits on the table at the moment? You already know: Sen. McConnell will be back to tack another amendment to the spending bill a year from now. He's got plenty of Democrats in the senate who will support him on this, but his own party is highly critical of him for putting forth measures that are anathema to conservatives.

Sen. McConnell and his posse should have had this right from the beginning, with industry consensus and a clear understanding that any challenges to HISA would come from McConnell's own party and be adjudicated by justices put in place by them.

The Ugly
Who will be the champion 3-year-old colt of 2022? Will it be Epicenter (Not This Time), who won one Grade l race last year, or will it be Taiba, the winner of three? I tweeted this recently from the WTC company account, @Sirewatch:

“In the matchup for Eclipse 3yo between Epicenter vs. Taiba, the winner is Ron Winchell. He owns Epicenter and is a major shareholder in Gun Runner, the sire of Taiba.”

Winchell is a leading man from a John Ford film, a John Wayne type of winner.

Taiba is owned by Amr Zedan, a Saudi businessman, and trained by Hall of Famer Bob Baffert, both of whom are Sergio Leone characters, perhaps a composite in this case of the Eli Wallach role of Tuco, a wanted Mexican bandit in “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”

Things certainly got ugly for Zedan and Baffert after their Medina Spirit (Protonico) tested positive for betamethasone after the 2021 Gl Kentucky Derby, and events have snowballed from there, including the Churchill Downs ban of Baffert and the subsequent lawsuits filed by Zedan and Baffert in response. All of this translated to negative publicity and quite likely cost Medina Spirit an Eclipse Award.

The champion 3-year-old colt of 2021 was Godolphin's Essential Quality, who won two Grade l races, the same as Medina Spirit. Except Medina Spirit also defeated older horses by winning the Gl Awesome Again – something his rival didn't do – and finished ahead of Essential Quality the two times they met, in the Derby (Essential Quality was fourth) and the Breeders' Cup
Classic (Medina Spirit was second to Knicks Go and Essential Quality was third).

The resilient Zedan and Baffert are somehow back again with Taiba, but how will voters respond this time? Will they snub Zedan and Baffert again and go with Epicenter, who had a fine campaign that included a win in the prestigious Gl Travers? Or will they jettison both dirt colts and go for Godolphin's Modern Games (Ire) (Dubawi {Ire}), who won two Grade l races on turf against older horses? Don't scoff, there's been some chatter about that on social media among potential voters.

Owner and handicapper (and economics professor) Marshall Gramm recently noted on Twitter the similarities of Taiba, Epicenter, and Modern Games to the trio of Snow Chief (three Grade l wins), Ferdinand (one), and Manila (three, all on turf) from 1986. Snow Chief won the Eclipse that year, but Manila, an outstanding turf horse, was the best of the three. Back then, however,
turf racing didn't have the same stature it now seems to hold with some voters.

These days it's hard to agree on anything. Consensus is elusive. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly are seemingly interchangeable, depending on viewpoint. And facts seem to matter less than opinion. That's the chaos that Leone captured in 1966, and it's very much alive now.

Welcome to 2023.

Sid Fernando is president and CEO of Werk Thoroughbred Consultants, Inc., originator of the Werk Nick Rating and eNicks.

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Nine States to McConnell: Hands Off HISA In ‘Lame Duck’ Session

The attorneys general from nine states on Thursday implored United States Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell not to use the end-of-term 'lame-duck' session of Congress to ram through legislation that would tweak non-constitutionality issues with the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act (HISA) by burying the measure within a much larger bill.

“It has come to our attention that you are considering proposing language related to HISA in the Defense Spending Authorization Act or other end-of-year legislation,” the AGs wrote to the senior senator from Kentucky in a Dec. 8 letter. “We urge you not to do so. HISA has already caused enormous upheaval in our States. A lame-duck session is not the time to slip new language into legislation amending HISA in response to [a recent court ruling]. Indeed, language that attempts anything other than repealing this ill-advised legislation will only make a bad situation worse.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on Nov. 18 ruled that the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act (HISA) is unconstitutional because it “delegates unsupervised government power to a private entity” and thus “violates the private non-delegation doctrine.”

On Dec. 7, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit heard arguments in a similar case that also seeks to reverse a lower court's decision to dismiss a constitutional challenge of HISA.

The state of Louisiana's AG spearheaded the effort. Also signing the letter were the AGs from Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas.

U.S. Trotting News was the first media outlet to publish the letter.

The letter continued: “As enacted, HISA disrespects [the] system of dual sovereignty. HISA's very purpose is to take away a regulatory power individual States have exercised since the Founding–to oversee and regulate horse racing within their borders–and give that power exclusively to a private agency.”

The HISA Authority “is exercising federal regulatory powers without any meaningful restraint, oversight, or adequate time for notice and comment, rushed rules that displaced existing State laws governing horse racing and exposed jockeys and horses to unsafe conditions,” the letter stated.

“Adding insult to injury, the Authority required all participants in the horse racing industry to pay assessments to cover the cost of enforcing HISA's dangerous and poorly thought-out private rules. As a final blow, the Authority attempted to cannibalize existing State personnel to implement and enforce the rules it enacted,” the letter stated.

At a later point, the four-page plea continued: “If you seek a resolution that settles controversy in the industry, then you should organize discussions between all industry participants that would identify and address everyone's concerns with HISA instead of making a surprise amendment to HISA now. Several of our states are engaged in litigation regarding problems with HISA beyond the private nondelegation issue, and amendments cannot avoid continuing, costly litigation unless they are carefully tailored to resolve all concerns.”

Two years ago this month, when McConnell was the Senate majority leader, he was instrumental in making sure HISA got passed by tucking it into a massive, year-end government funding bill that included a $900-billion COVID-19 relief package.

“Enacting HISA in 2020 in vital national legislation that had nothing to do with horse racing is part of why it failed so miserably,” the Dec. 8 letter stated. “Amending HISA in the Defense Spending Authorization Act with no notice to industry participants or States will merely repeat the same flawed approach.”

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Congressmen File Amicus Brief In Support of HISA

The lead congressional sponsors of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act (HISA), Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Representatives Andy Barr (R-KY) and Paul Tonko (D-NY), have filed a 14-page amicus ('friend of the court') brief in response to a lawsuit filed by the National Horsemen's Benevolent and Protective Association and some of its affiliates, challenging its constitutionality.

The brief lays out the reasons why HISA is necessary to protect and preserve the future of horse racing, deliberations in Congress over the course of several years that included input from all sectors of the horse racing industry–which resulted in broad, bipartisan support for the bill–and the reasons why HISA is, in fact, constitutional. HISA was signed into law by President Trump in December 2020.

“The National Thoroughbred Racing Association (NTRA) commends Sen. McConnell, Rep. Barr and Rep. Tonko for their forceful defense of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act of 2020,” said NTRA President and Chief Executive Officer Alex Waldrop. “The need for a national body to enforce stringent integrity and safety standards for Thoroughbred racing has never been greater. Organizations and individuals representing virtually every segment of our industry are committed to working cooperatively with the HISA Authority and its standing advisory committees to assist the Authority in carrying out its federal mandate to propose to the Federal Trade Commission for that agency's adoption an innovative, affordable federal regulatory system that prioritizes first and foremost the safety of horse and rider and the integrity of our sport.”

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