Twelve Questions: Bill Nader

Bill Nader was named President and CEO of the Thoroughbred Owners of California this past June. He worked as a senior executive at the Hong Kong Jockey Club from 2007 until then, and was formerly the Senior Vice President and COO of the New York Racing Association. He began his career at Rockingham Park in his native Salem, New Hampshire in 1979.

Most exciting race you watched this year that wasn't Flightline?
Jockey Club Mile on Nov. 20 when Golden Sixty ran down California Spangle with a closing quarter in 21.32. I watched it on tv so not sure if it counts.

One positive change you'd like to see in racing in 2023?
Positive communication from those who enjoy the sport. Words matter. If you love it and you know it, then your words should surely show it.

If you could bring back one racetrack from the past, which would it be?
Rockingham Park, my hometown racetrack. Honorable mentions to Arlington and Hialeah.

Who's the best executive in racing right now?
Me. If I say anyone else, I place myself at unnecessary risk.

If you could have dinner with one historical figure, who would it be?
Martin Luther King

Best advice you've ever gotten?
My Mom – “Just be yourself.”

What does racing look like in 10 years?
Japanese horses will be a big part of the picture in major three-year-old Grade I classics on dirt. Sports betting will be available at most racetracks. The popular racetracks will continue to thrive.

Do we need more tracks or fewer tracks?
Fewer.

Favorite horse of all time (and why)?
Spectacular Bid, for what he accomplished after losing out on the Triple Crown. His four-year-old season was incredible.

Best race you've ever seen?
The 1998 Belmont Stakes when Victory Gallop denied Real Quiet a Triple Crown. That was an absolute thriller.

Hardest working person you've ever worked with?
Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges, CEO of The Hong Kong Jockey Club and IFHA Chairman

All I want for Christmas is…?
To spend it with my daughter Martina in Solvang, California.

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The Week in Review: Penny Breakage a Welcome Change, but Not a ‘First’

When the .69-to-1 favorite returned $3.38 to win at Ellis Park in the first race on July 15, the to-the-penny payoffs represented a massively positive paradigm shift for horseplayers. Under a new Kentucky law that eliminates dime breakage at the state's tracks, bettors will no longer be subject to the disadvantageous, industry-wide practice of down-rounding that, in the above instance, would have sliced the return on that winning $2 wager to $3.20.

Yes, penny breakage looks a bit odd to the eye. But getting used to the concept will be worth it.

The Thoroughbred Idea Foundation (TIF), which spent four years championing this cause and advocating for any industry entity to make the change, estimates breakage at roughly 0.45% of the nation's total handle.

“That suggests breakage totals at least $50 million per year,” a 2018 TIF study reported, explaining that instead of being retained by tracks, states, or purse accounts, the rightful return of that money to bettors has the potential to generate additional wagering. “We estimate the betting churn from breakage to total at least an additional $200 million in annual handle.”

Those increases could nudge even higher if place and show betting suddenly become more attractive (because the returns on those bets will be greater, percentage-wise). In America's competitive wagering landscape, you'd think that other racing jurisdictions would be quick to follow Kentucky's lead.

There's only one misconception about Kentucky's laudable move to penny breakage: It's not a “first” as has been widely publicized.

In fact, Kentucky itself was among a handful of states that mandated penny breakage nearly a century ago, when pari-mutuels first began replacing on-track bookmakers.

In 1927, Kentucky and Maryland were the two only states with legalized pari-mutuels. The takeout rate for both states (in an era when only win-place-show betting existed) was 5%, with dime breakage.

Pari-mutuel machines were in use in other states despite not being explicitly sanctioned. In such cases, the public had zero knowledge of how much takeout and breakage were being raked out of the pools.

“In other states the amount of the percentage depends entirely on the greed of the pari-mutuel officials,” wrote nationally syndicated newspaper columnist Frank G. Menke in 1927. “How much was deducted in Florida last winter by each of the tracks is not publicly known. [One track] is purported to have apportioned 20% for itself, [another] 25%.”

Such aggressive pool-scraping, Menke further reported, was exacerbated by the all-too-common practice of track officials literally grabbing money out of the tills and pocketing it before it showed up in the mutuel calculations. At one Canadian track, he wrote, mutuels officials made a $10,000 error one afternoon by overpaying bettors. It simply made up the difference the very next day by upping the takeout and liberally rounding down the breakage.

“If such an act is not deliberate theft, then what is theft?” Menke asked rhetorically.

When Illinois codified its new mutuels law that went into effect July 1, 1927, it tweaked the percentages that were standard in Kentucky and Maryland. It set the takeout higher (6.5%), but mandated penny instead of dime breakage.

Half a year later, the Louisiana Jockey Club also saw merit in abandoning dime breakage, and the issue was a big enough deal that the New York Times reported on it. Starting Jan. 2, 1928, the Fair Grounds swapped out a 4% takeout and dime breakage and replaced it with a 6.5% take and penny breakage.

Louisiana officials calculated that bettors would receive “the same net return” under the penny breakage system. But their belief was that the betting pools would be more secure because the change “would render impossible any charge or insinuation that the mutuel calculations have been juggled via the amount of the breakage to return on winning certificates a smaller amount than would otherwise have been the case.”

It didn't take long after that for Kentucky to revisit how its tracks calculated breakage.

A front-page story in the Mar. 17, 1928, edition of the Lexington Herald proclaimed that, “The penny promises to come to prominence on Kentucky race courses during the coming season. At the meeting of the state racing commission here yesterday, a rule was introduced whereby breakage in the pari-mutuels shall be to the penny.”

At that time, Kentucky staggered its takeouts based on a two-tiered system that took into account the population base around each track. Churchill Downs and Latonia (now Turfway Park) in the more populated parts of the state went from a 5% takeout to 6.5%. The more rurally located tracks at Lexington, Raceland, and Dade Park (now Ellis Park) went from 7% takeouts to 10%.

“The new rule favors the players slightly,” the Herald reported.

Yet penny breakage remained the norm in those three states for only a relatively brief window of time. The Great Depression was a major factor in quashing the concept.

As finances became tighter, some tracks in the penny- breakage states went out of business entirely. Others pleaded with state regulators for permission to start chipping away at the winnings of horseplayers by raising takeout rates and restoring dime breakage so tracks could retain more rounded-down money. When new states began embracing pari-mutuels as a form of “sin taxes” to raise revenues, they wrote laws stipulating dime breakage, which once again became established as an industry standard.

Barely three months after the huge stock market crash of 1929, the Fair Grounds did away with penny breakage to start its 1930 winter meet. In 1934, Kentucky went to a 10% statewide takeout and back to dime breakage at the request of its track operators. Illinois also abandoned penny breakage.

It's interesting to note that when penny breakage first came into vogue in 1927 and '28, the idea made national headlines. When breakage reverted to dimes, newspapers rarely reported on it.

Writing in 1937 about Fairmount Park, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that, “When the [1927] mutuel bill went into effect, the property immediately became a dead loss. It will be different now,” the article said, with takeout set at 9% and dime breakage once again a windfall for the track.

In 1938, penny breakage briefly resurfaced at Rockingham Park as the result of an oddball standoff between the New Hampshire racing commission and “Uncle” Lou Smith, the track's owner.

The New Hampshire attorney general had ruled that, unlike mutuels calculations in other states, Rock could not deduct its dime breakage until it had multiplied a bettor's winnings on a dollar by the number of dollars wagered.

Smith told the New York Times that such a rule “discriminated against the $2 bettors” who comprised 84% of Rockingham's patronage and provided 55% of the handle.

“We are faced with the alternative of closing our track or giving up the entire breakage to avoid discrimination against the $2 bettor,” Smith said. “We voluntarily choose to give up the breakage,” relying on revenue solely from the track's cut of the 10% takeout.

This required the Rock money room to have 220,000 pennies on hand each day to make exact change. The stalemate was resolved in time for the 1939 summer meet, which opened with a takeout hike to 11% and breakage reverting back to a dime.

New York's racing commissioners advocated for penny breakage when legalizing mutuels there in 1940, but they had to settle for nickel breakage (still a significant improvement over a dime). “The general public pays little attention to breakage,” the New York Times dismissively reported when briefly mentioning the concept in its annual recap of the racing season.

Penny breakage then went into a long, long slumber. History is just now repeating itself.

This time around, here's hoping the bettor-friendly “Keep the change!” mentality takes root and grows.

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Green Mountain Park: Long Gone. Still Weird

There's an iconic hairpin turn cut into the side of Spirit Mountain on the Mohawk Trail in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, and some 50 summers ago this steep, white-knuckle  portion of Route 2 is where my Dad, hauling a one-horse trailer with the family station wagon, had an agitated Thoroughbred kick open the back door and leap to a near-certain death over the edge of the precipice.

As dusk and state police cruisers descended upon the scene, my father, Paul, asked a trooper to have the dispatcher phone nearby Green Mountain Park in Vermont. He knew the stewards would never believe a trainer telling them he needed to scratch because his horse just jumped off a cliff.

That horse–Box County–not only survived, but miraculously jogged back up the embankment, apparently none the worse for wear. “Just like the Lone Ranger's horse,” my Dad–now 15 years retired from training–marvels every time tells this story.

Yet when he got to the top, Box County could not be coaxed into stepping over the guardrail he had vaulted like the Grand National.

Jockey Bobby Marshman, riding shotgun on the 150-mile journey from Rockingham Park so he could pilot his only mount of the night, volunteered to lead the horse down a nearby path to the valley, where my Dad would meet him with the repaired trailer. Marshman and Box County endured a brutal trek through the woods at nightfall, battling swarming mosquitos and then a menacing pack of dogs before a taciturn farmer wondering what all the barking was about let them take shelter in his barn.

Later in the season, horse, trainer and rider would make a return trip around that notorious sharp curve–minus the steeplechase antics–and Box County would win a bottom $1,500 claimer at Green Mountain, cementing his standing in our family's racetrack lore.

I made that same drive last week on the way to enjoy a few days of hiking in the serene little slice of New England where Massachusetts, Vermont and New York intersect. You can't stop and gawk at the hairpin turn–the Golden Eagle Restaurant & Lounge at the bend has blocked off the parking with orange barriers. But the drop-off wasn't the focal point of my exploration.

I was aiming for Green Mountain itself, wanting to pay respects before a teardown destined to happen once the owner and local officials figure out what to do with the land in the aftermath of a 2020 blaze that gutted the long-abandoned, five-story grandstand and clubhouse. It was one of those weird instances in which I was feeling nostalgic for a time and place I had never actually experienced.

 

Why Pownal?

Even by early 1960s standards, when operating a racetrack in America was widely believed to be the equivalent of having a license to print money, it is unfathomable why anyone would choose Pownal, Vermont, to build a horse track. To this day, there are still no interstate highways within 35 miles in any direction.

At the time of Green Mountain's 1963 opening, Saratoga Race Course–before it blossomed into the tourist mecca that we know today–sat an hour to the northwest, while Berkshire Downs, a seasonal, leaky-roof outpost in Hancock, Massachusetts, existed 17 miles to the south. The then-vibrant Massachusetts fairs had half-mile tracks in nearby Great Barrington and Northampton, and the region's commercial Thoroughbred circuit at that time consisted of (in pecking order) Rockingham in New Hampshire, Suffolk Downs in Boston, Lincoln Downs and Narragansett Park, both in Rhode Island, plus Scarborough Downs in Maine.

Despite an audacious $6 million price tag (the equivalent of $57 million in 2022), Green Mountain would vie with Scarborough, Berkshire and the fairs at the austere end of New England's racing hierarchy.

Its developers chose a 140-acre boot-shaped cornfield along Route 7, even though the skinny, oblong lot precluded a one-mile oval from being built. The grandstand got shoehorned 300 feet from the flood-prone Hoosic River, and the backstretch ran parallel to active railroad tracks.

A big reason people believed Green Mountain would flourish was because its highest-profile backer, Lou Smith, said it would. A shrewd dealmaker who cultivated an avuncular, charitable persona, Smith had bought the defunct Rockingham during the Great Depression and turned it into New England's showplace track. “Uncle Lou” was the dean of New England racing, and his ideas and political clout carried tremendous weight, even way out in the boonies.

Vermont has always been an outlier, embracing its iconoclastic reputation. Drill down even further, and you will find that Pownal itself has a centuries-old reputation as the state's epicenter of oddity.

Shortly after the town's incorporation in 1761, Pownal was the site of Vermont's only witch trial. In 1789, a traveling minister described the village this way: “Poor land–very unpleasant–very uneven–miserable set of inhabitants–no religion.”

In 1874, it supposedly rained hot stones that then inexplicably rolled uphill in Pownal, and in the 1940s, the town was the home of one of the nation's most sought-after clairvoyants. By 1960, when the town's quarry and cotton mill had gone belly-up and the tannery was well on its way to designation as a toxic superfund cleanup site, Pownal decided to bet its future on Thoroughbred and Standardbred racing after Vermont legalized pari-mutuel betting.

Chad Abramovich, who writes an engaging blog titled Obscure Vermont, in 2020 described the town like this: “Pownal's always done things a bit differently, in ways that seem to almost be a few shades deeper into the mystic that's masqueraded by a rough enchanting landscape…. Some environs look like they have been untouched by modern headways–like you've stumbled into a deep southern Appalachia…. I honestly don't think that this racetrack project could have happened in any other spot in Vermont.”

Off and running…

The May 24, 1963, opening of the two-month Thoroughbred meet was expected to lure 12,000 fans to take in the racing over the unique 13/16ths of a mile oval, which had an inordinately long stretch of 1,106 feet. But only 4,700 racetrackers showed up, betting only about half the afternoon's projected $400,000 handle.

According to an un-bylined (but very thorough) historical account of Green Mountain at the website Race Tracks of Yesterday and Today, business was so bad that employees were being laid off within two weeks and rumors were rampant that the track would fold. Management sliced purses from the promised $1,800 per race to $1,200, shifted from 2 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. twilight post times, then hit on the idea of trying night racing–but there was a catch.

“Never anticipating to run night Thoroughbred racing, there were only enough lights to cover the 5/8-mile harness track,” the racetrack blog explained. “Three more towers were hastily erected and after a month, on June 24, Green Mountain was running under the lights….. From there things started to pick up, so much so that the planned fall harness meet was scrapped and another Thoroughbred meet would be run.”

Standardbred racing finally debuted in 1964, and Green Mountain trudged along while gaining an offbeat reputation for trying out new concepts. At a time when daily doubles were as exotic as wagering got, the track was among the first to adopt the multi-race Twin Double, and later the Big Perfecta.

But Green Mountain's biggest innovation occurred in 1968, when the Vermont Racing Commission–despite religious objections–granted permission to conduct Sunday racing, unheard of on the East Coast at the time. Enjoying an “only game” monopoly for several seasons, buses from as far away as Philadelphia delivered a huge influx horseplayers up Route 7 every Sunday, winter or summer, harness or Thoroughbred.

Emboldened by the Sunday crowds, Green Mountain staged its first-and-only running of a marquee race–the $15,000 Green Mountain Gold Cup H.–on Oct. 12, 1969. New York-based trainer H. Allen Jerkens shipped in Misty Run for Hobeau Farm, and Ron Turcotte wired the four-horse feature aboard the 3-10 favorite, lopping three full seconds off the track record for 1 1/16 miles.

But Uncle Lou Smith died that same year, and Green Mountain backpedaled as off-track betting dawned in New York in the early 1970s and rival New England tracks added Sunday racing and expanded to year-round schedules.

The Rooney family that owned the Pittsburgh Steelers and several Eastern tracks bought Green Mountain in 1973, keen on ushering in what at the time was thought to be the “next big thing” in pari-mutuel betting–converting the track to also conduct greyhound racing.

For bettors, the greyhound action was billed as non-stop (races every 12 minutes on marathon day/night programs). For Green Mountain management, the overhead costs were ridiculously low ($3,000 in nightly purses for dogs versus $14,300 for Thoroughbreds). On Sept. 24, 1976, Green Mountain received national publicity for becoming the first track in the nation to host three breeds of racing at the same venue in one calendar year, and it was widely (but wrongly) predicted that many other major tracks would follow suit.

No one realized it at the time, but 12 days earlier, Green Mountain had staged its last-ever Thoroughbred program. Jockey Thomas Arroyo fell from his horse and was trampled in the fifth race on that Sept. 12 card, but his death received scant notice in the press because all the attention was focused on Green Mountain's “going to the dogs” ad campaign.

Five miles of heated copper tubing got installed underneath the new quarter-mile configuration so 18 kennels of 40 dogs each could race uninterrupted through the winter. Green Mountain management gave Thoroughbred racing the boot as soon as the calendar flipped into 1977, and the harness horsemen were told to get lost the following year.

Green Mountain persisted for the next 15 years as one of the lowest-level greyhound tracks in the country before ceasing racing for good in 1992. The property changed hands several times and hosted outdoor concert festivals like Lollapalooza during the 1990s, but eventually fell into disrepair and became a magnet for lawless behavior.

Over the decades, souvenir hunters carted off anything worth taking and locals smashed what was left, careening through the grandstand on all-terrain vehicles and setting interior bonfires during all-night drinking parties. One such blaze on Sept. 16, 2020, is believed to have been responsible for the massive conflagration that took 10 fire departments from three states to extinguish.

 

Fast-forward to the present…

Prior to last week, the only previous time I had driven up Route 7 was in 2005, when taking the scenic route from Boston to Saratoga. The stable area had still been standing at that time, and the property was under heavy video surveillance with numerous trespass warnings prominently posted.

Last week, I first saw that the stables had been razed, replaced by a solar panel farm. What had once been the horsemen's entrance on Lovett Cemetery Road was blocked off by concrete barriers, but you could still drive into a portion of the 8,000-car-capacity customer lot about a mile farther up on Route 7.

A couple of battered vehicles were parked at this entrance, and one perturbed graybeard sitting behind the wheel of a lopsided pickup returned my nod of greeting with a scowl and a shake of his head that subtly signaled “no.” I got out and walked over the barriers that kept you from driving over the railroad tracks, then stepped through a series of rusted chain-link fences that had long ago been cut open and/or were falling down. The asphalt was choked with a jungle of weeds and small trees, studded with shards of beer-bottle glass.

I  stepped around a final bend in the road and there it was–the skeletal, rust-flecked shell of the green-and-white grandstand, its massive, plate-glass front windows shattered in a crazy grin of broken, jagged teeth. I figured I was standing at about the top of the homestretch, although it was hard to tell for certain where the racetrack had once ended and the viewing apron began.

I had yet to see a single “no trespassing” sign, and that was going to be my excuse if anyone in authority questioned my presence in the building. But before I could step forward for some interior exploration, I caught a flash of movement along the back perimeter, and got the distinct feeling I was being watched.

I stayed put and snapped a few photographs. Then I looked through the magnified viewfinder and caught a glimpse of three sketchy folks over by the far tree line waiting to see what I'd do next.

Getting caught trespassing into a condemned building might be the least of my concerns if I went inside, I deduced. It was dusk, I was a solo interloper on other people's turf, and I had taken everything of value out of my car and was carrying it with me because I hadn't trusted that unsettling guy in the truck back where I had parked.

I've made some colossally bad decisions at racetracks in my life and saw no reason to add to the list. I took one last, long look at the verdant mountains framing this eerie Thoroughbred relic, knowing that I would likely never have the opportunity to be in this spot again, and left.

I figured Box County had used up my family's allotment of Green Mountain good fortune back in the early 1970s, and I saw no reason to press my luck.

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Kirkpatrick & Co. Presents In Their Care: Lindemann Will Never Forget Her First Horse

Lorita Lindemann was a teenager, an innocent, until one moment changed everything.

She finished her classes and hurried to Rockingham Park to say goodbye to Federal Sin. “Chestnut gelding. White blaze I will never forget,” said Lindemann, recalling her first horse.

She knew the veteran's racing days were over. The parting was made easier because she had been told that he would be adopted as a riding pony. And so she led trusting Federal Sin onto a van, content in knowing that a wonderful new home awaited a horse that meant everything to her.

She later learned the horrifying truth. That van ride ended at a slaughterhouse, where poor Federal Sin met a terrifying end. “You cried and you got over it,” Lindemann said. “But you never forget.”

Her anger, the anguish that accompanied such a betrayal, turned into a passion for keeping other former racehorses from such an awful end. Her dedication to that cause, combined with her skill as an assistant to Joe Sharp, led her to win the Dedication to Racing Award sponsored by the National Thoroughbred Racing Association. The Dedication to Racing Award is part of the annual Thoroughbred Industry Employee Awards created in 2016 by Godolphin USA.

Lindemann, 48, greatly appreciated joining honorees in other categories during mid-October ceremonies at Keeneland. She was selected from among more than 200 nominees. But she said, “That's not what I look for. From the beginning, it was just done from the bottom of my heart, not to get any recognition.”

The same can be said for Michael Blowen, founder of Old Friends, a sanctuary for retired Thoroughbreds that he established in 2003. Lindemann and Blowen are kindred spirits – and then some.

They met when they shared a barn at Rockingham, the Salem, N.H., track that ran its final live race in 2009. An 18-year-old Lindemann taught Blowen, then a Boston Globe writer, everything she had learned from Joseph Gilbert. Although Gilbert was illiterate, the native of Cajun country in Louisiana knew so much about a Thoroughbred's legs that he was referred to far and wide as “Shin Buck.”

Lorita Lindemann with Michael Blowen, whom she met during her days at Rockingham Park in New Hampshire

Lindemann was raised by Annette Fantasia, a single mother. An uncle, Alfred Fantasia, worked in various capacities in the racing industry and provided a strong influence. She never knew her biological father.

For the last 30 years or so, Blowen has filled an aching need for Lindemann. “I was looking for a dad,” she said, “and he was looking for a daughter.”

The absence of adoption papers does not matter to either of them. “It doesn't have to be official,” Blowen said. “It just has to be sincere.”

Blowen also was duped while he was new to racing. “They used to say at Suffolk that some of these horses that were broken down were headed to retirement homes in Maine,” he recalled.

He eventually realized there were no retirement homes in Maine, at least not for Thoroughbreds. Blowen did what he could to help Lindemann cope with the loss of Federal Sin.

“I think that changed her whole life,” he said. “She's never gotten over it. I think that still motivates her.”

Lindemann used to feel as if she was a lone voice when it came to the need for aftercare. “You're a kid and you're a woman. You're 18. Nobody is listening,” she said.

She continues to be exasperated by those who do not concern themselves about the future of their horses once they have given their all and cannot race another step.

“These horses are why we have what we have today — houses, possessions. These horses have done this. Without these horses, we couldn't do this,” she said. “It saddens me that people lose that concept along the way.”

On the positive side, the cause has gained tremendous momentum and a level of financial backing that was once only a dream. When there is a horse in need, Lindemann has developed a reputation as one to call.

“I can't even put a number on the number of horses that she got off the track and put in proper places,” Blowen said.

Lindemann regularly places horses above her needs. She only recently scheduled knee surgery to treat an injury she neglected for the last three years.

“She's dogged. She knows who to call and how to ask for something,” Blowen said. “They all respect her on the backside because she knows what she's doing. She's got everybody's trust back there.”

Lindemann with some of her equine friends

Blowen emphasized that each rescue entails a great deal of hard work and some difficult conversations. “It's easy to feel bad for these horses. It's easy to get emotional,” he said. “But it's really, really hard to dig down and find out where they are, find out how to get them out of a situation and find a place for them. That's the hard part.”

When the going gets tough, Lindemann needs only to think of Federal Sin – and that unforgettable white blaze.

Tom Pedulla wrote for USA Today from 1995-2012 and has been a contributor to the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Blood-Horse, America's Best Racing and other publications.

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