It's been over 30 years since The Jockey Club and North American racetracks formed Equibase to be the Thoroughbred industry's official record keeper and database. The company not only collects racing data, but supplies it to past performance providers like Daily Racing Form and Brisnet, advance deposit wagering companies, and also distributes or sells its own products to horseplayers and fans.
Kyle McDoniel was recently named president and chief operating officer of Equibase, which is based in Lexington, Ky. A racing fan while growing up in Arkansas, McDoniel remained enthusiastic about racing as his career path took him into management positions in the sports data industry at ESPN, FOX Sports, Yahoo Sports, and Sportradar.
Creating “phone friendly” past performances, incorporating GPS technology into data collection, and competing for customers in the sports betting world where data is plentiful and free are just some of the issues McDoniel will have to address in the coming months and years at Equibase. But he brings considerable experience to the position from the sports world, where fantasy games and more recently legalized sports betting have put a premium on data that helps gamblers make their wagering decisions.`
McDoniel joins Ray Paulick and bloodstock editor Joe Nevills in this week's edition of the Friday Show to discuss the opportunities and challenges Equibase faces.
Watch this week's episode of The Friday Show below:
The mainstream media's interest in racing-related fatalities spilled into a different region last week as NJ Advance Media published an extensive investigative feature about equine deaths and welfare concerns at Monmouth Park in New Jersey.
Racing insiders could no doubt spot some errors – the original version of the story attributed Ruffian's fatal breakdown to the flight of a bird from the infield, and indicated SGF-1000 was used to reduce horses' heart rate – but the overarching premise was similar to coverage of the spike in fatalities this spring at Churchill Downs and several seasons ago at Santa Anita Park. Reporters found that Monmouth's fatality rate has risen over the past three seasons and that last year it tracked higher (2.05 deaths per 1,000 starts) than the national average (1.25 per 1,000 starts).
The authors (totally fairly) also point out that Monmouth was the haven for former trainers Jason Servis and Jorge Navarro, who both pleaded guilty to a felony and whose wiretapped conversations revealed they made friends with security personnel at various tracks to avoid being found when doping their horses. They note the decline in on-track attendance and handle, and the desperately-needed cash infusion casino revenue and state subsidies brought to prop up the racing business in New Jersey. It's not the same as the obituaries mainstream media wrote for Greyhound racing in the past few years, but there are certainly similar themes.
You could criticize the article for describing in detail (as so many mainstream pieces have done) the horror of the moments in which a horse falters and is swept up by tarps to hide an anxiety-riddled end to their life. But in reality, that's what stays with people. That's what sticks out to a reporter who's delving into our world for the first time, and it's probably what sticks out to a fan, too.
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Plenty of thinkpieces have already been written on the problem of risk and injury in racing; I don't need to rehash the agony of the simultaneous truths that the industry must work to get its fatal injury rate down to 0, while knowing that there is no way to remove all risk from a high-impact equine sport.
I was as much concerned about the depiction of life on the backstretch for horses as I was about the details provided about their deaths.
“Some jockeys encourage horses with kissing sounds and feed them apples or carrots; others chide them as idiots, whip them harshly and pull their chains. Safety measures have vacillated of late. In 2021, the New Jersey Racing Commission banned whipping by jockeys, which was the most stringent restriction in the country; in 2022, the ban was rescinded. During this summer's meet, there is a 4-year-old gelding who races under the name U Kant Whip It, and chart writers refer to whipping as “urging” in their summations. If the animals do not move into starting gates by choice, crew members lock arms and push them forcefully. Horses spend nearly 23 hours per day in 12 x 12 stalls.”
Racing spends a lot of time and money worrying about the most obvious public relations problem – racing and training-related fatalities. But the watchdogs, the public, the mainstream media and the animal rights groups have their pick of problematic welfare issues they can point out when they choose to. I think most insiders assume aftercare is the other big problem we may have in the eyes of the public, as ex-racehorses or former breeding stock still end up in bail pens around the country, but the way active racehorses live may eventually be a liability, too.
Horses living at many racetracks do indeed spend most of their day in a stall, as many track locations don't typically allow for turnout. This is not unique to horse racing; many gaited horses live for years with limited turnout, and certain types of show horses stay on the road for weeks at a time in temporary stabling and don't see fresh grass. It's clear horses can survive this way, as evidenced by the thousands of horses that retire from the racetrack each year and live many more years in a different job.
Veterinarians and academic researchers alike will tell you that part of the remedy for so many common medical problems in horses – colic, ulcers, stereotypic behaviors, arthritis, and more – is to increase turnout time. Horses' bodies are evolved to graze on forage in mixed social groups for most of each day, and the way we manage many of them is totally counter to this. This has been shown over and over in research and in practical affect for years; the fact of it is really not something that people in other equine sports question anymore. Racehorses are not the only horses who experience these health problems, and they don't experience them only because they're stalled for prolonged periods, but one of the most basic components of their day is associated with an increased risk of these problems, and there's just no getting around that.
If you've been on the backstretch, you've likely seen a wide range of horsemanship there. I've seen riders, grooms, and starters who are poetry in motion, praising a horse for their effort or quietly and calmly teaching them about something new and challenging. Some of the best work I've seen with horses has been in the Thoroughbred industry – but so has some of the worst. As smart phones allow people to record and opine on everything, it's going to get harder to excuse the gate crew that ear twitches an unwilling participant into a race or a rider that loses their temper in the morning. Bad horsemanship isn't just present in racing either of course, but it's one more layer on top of other, much larger problems that someone can use to say, 'See what these horses live with? The whole system's broken.'
I'm not sure what the answer is here. Training centers are a great place to allow horses some turnout time, but they can also be a place people will go to be out of the reach of regulatory or racetrack authority, so they're not a perfect solution, either. Owners can prioritize good horsemanship when they hire a trainer, but they have no way to know the qualifications of every person that will put hands on their horse, let alone control for it. But one thing I do know – the worst kind of public relations challenge is one that takes you by surprise. We have to assume there's more where this came from.
Jack Knowlton, operating manager for Sackatoga Stable, joins Ray Paulick and bloodstock editor Joe Nevills on this week's Friday Show to reminisce about Eclipse Award champion Funny Cide, the popular New York-bred gelding who took the racing world by storm in 2003 with victories in the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes before Derby runner-up Empire Maker turned the tables on him in the Belmont Stakes before a rain-soaked crowd of 101,864 at Belmont Park.
Funny Cide died earlier this week after experiencing complications from colic. He'd been a star attraction at the Kentucky Horse Park's Hall of Champions in Lexington, Ky., since 2008.
Knowlton talks about the formation of the partnership with some old friends from high school, the use of school buses to transport the Sackatoga partners to the track when Funny Cide made his Triple Crown run, and the tremendous publicity the horse brought to racing.
He also hails the work trainer Barclay Tagg and assistant Robin Smullen did to keep Funny Cide competitive and sound through 38 starts over six racing seasons, beginning with a 14 3/4-length maiden win in September of his 2-year-old year up to a three-length victory in his finale in a stakes at Finger Lakes at age 7. Knowlton is a strong advocate for Tagg's election to the National Museum of Racing Hall of Fame.
Watch this week's episode of The Friday Show below:
But it's one horse winning one race that I can credit for giving me the opportunity to spend summers in Del Mar.
I'll be in the stands for Friday's opening of the 84th summer season at the track Bing Crosby made famous, all because of a gigantic upset in a major race more than 50 years ago – before I'd even heard of Del Mar. It's allowed me to witness history “Where the Turf Meets the Surf”: Dare and Go's upset of Cigar in the 1996 Pacific Classic; the first Del Mar Breeders' Cup in 2017; Flightline's unforgettable performance in the 2022 Pacific Classic, winning off by 19 ¼ lengths; and much more.
To get to Del Mar, as the track's signature song goes, I've taken a plane, taken a train, taken a car. (My first trip there was on a motorcycle, but there's probably too many syllables for Crosby and his songwriting partners to have gotten that into the lyrics).
In truth, though, I've been riding a horse here for most of the 45 years I've been attending Del Mar.
Let's go back to Feb. 13, 1971, when a Cal-bred 4-year-old named War Heim sprang a massive upset in the Charles H. Strub Stakes at Santa Anita. Named after the track's founder, the mile and a quarter Strub culminated a series of three races for 4-year-olds that began with the seven-furlong Malibu and continued with the 1 1/8-mile San Fernando. (The San Fernando and Strub are no longer run, and the Malibu was moved to December, where it's become the final Grade 1 race of the year for 3-year-olds.)
I was a senior in high school in northern Illinois in 1971 who hadn't discovered horse racing yet and probably spent that February weekend shoveling snow. But my future father-in-law, Bill Watts, was at Santa Anita with his wife, Helen, and he'd either gotten a tip or had a hunch about War Heim. He never would say how he ended up betting on the horse.
Trained by Dale Landers for Hazel Huffman, War Heim was a son of Slipped Disc who came into the Strub off a decent third at 37-1 odds in the San Fernando. He wasn't an unproven horse, having won a division of the Del Mar Derby the previous year, but that was on grass. The Strub was on the dirt.
With regular rider John Sellers in the saddle, War Heim maintained a good position in the early going of the Strub and entered contention going into the far turn, then swept wide around the turn to engage the front-running Hanalei Bay for the final quarter mile, getting his nose in front of that foe just at the wire.
War Heim paid an even $100 to win, $29.60 to place, and $11.20 to show as the second longest price in a field of 10 led by the previous year's Travers Stakes winner, Loud.
To this day, I don't know how much Bill put on War Heim in the Strub, but there was no exacta, trifecta, superfecta, pick 3, etc., so it had to be a significant bet on the nose to win. And that's exactly what he got.
Two days later, while the country was celebrating the Presidents Day holiday on Feb. 15 (then it was just called Washington's Birthday), Bill took Helen and daughter Carol down the coast to Del Mar in hopes of finding a house to rent for the summer racing season. They'd been renting up the road in Oceanside previous years and wanted to get a little closer to the track.
Realtor Chiquita Abbott disappointed them at first, saying she wasn't aware of any rental properties at that time. Abbott, who recently authored a book, “To Del Mar With Love, Chiquita,” added that she did have a little “plain Jane” bungalow in the beach colony for sale that was steps from the beach and a short walk to the racetrack.
The “plain Jane” Del Mar bungalow as it looked in 1971
Bill won enough on War Heim to make a down payment on the house, which was priced at about what you can buy a modest new car for today.
Whenever he would later see John Sellers at the races, Bill would always say, “There's the guy who bought our house.”
For years, Bill and Helen rented out the house to faculty from nearby UCSD, then occupied it for the summer months. They did some renovations and eventually moved to Del Mar full time from the Los Angeles area when Bill retired from his career with Merrill Lynch.
They didn't miss a day of racing in Del Mar until age finally caught up with them. Both are gone now, and I can say I've never met two people who had more of a passion for racing than Bill and Helen.
The house that War Heim and John Sellers bought would eventually be passed down to Carol, who I'd met in 1980 while we both worked at Daily Racing Form in Los Angeles. We were married in 1983, and after moving to Kentucky in 1988, Del Mar became the summer vacation destination for us and our kids each year. Now it's our second home.
