Tag: The Paddock

To The Editor:

Regulatory veterinarians who check horses for soundness before a race have the most thankless job on the track, and maybe the most important one.

That's why I feel it's necessary to respond to the Carlos Vaccarezza letter to the editor concerning the vet scratch of his unraced filly, Royal Blood, from a Feb. 18 maiden race at Gulfstream Park. I'm not condemning Carlo in any way and hope that his filly makes it to the races and is successful.

How would you like to wake up every morning and know that decisions you have to make 40 or 50 times a day – in a minute or two and without a whole lot of data – can cost a horse its life and endanger its rider if you don't get it right. How many horses' lives and possibly the lives or health of jockeys have been saved by this procedure?

Are they always going to be 100 percent right? Probably not. But consider what they are dealing with and what they are trying to accomplish. Imagine what it's like to go to a trainer and tell them you're going to scratch his or her horse. And keep in mind how difficult filling these positions has become. It's a real struggle.

I average around 1,400 starts a year and probably 10 times a year we might have a vet scratch. Over the years, I would say 95 percent of those horses that were scratched we ended up having to give them time off after taking a closer look. They weren't perfect and benefited from the additional time.

The vets at Gulfstream Park scratched one of my horses out of a $1-million race on Pegasus World Cup day. I didn't agree with them 100 percent, but I saw where they were coming from and appreciated their concerns. It was fair.

Normally, if you question their decision, they'll bring in another vet for a second opinion and sometimes a third one. In our case on Pegasus day, they allowed our vet to be there during the inspection. I knew the horse quite well and it was not a new issue they were seeing, but I understood it was not worth the risk. The regulatory vets in South Florida have been nothing but professional in my experience.

I've looked at horses at 6:30 in the morning that were sound, but that same horse might not look so good at nine o'clock during a pre-race inspection. There are so many moving parts and things can change quickly.

California racing was ready to fall into the Pacific Ocean after the 2019 crisis of racing fatalities. The Stronach Group and California regulators significantly tightened pre-race and pre-training procedures, and because of those changes they are much stronger today. Not perfect – nothing is – but much improved.

These are horses' lives, these are people's lives, and this is our sport's life at stake. Safety of the horses and riders is the most important issue we face.

— Mark Casse

Ocala, Florida

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If you would like to submit a letter to the editor, please send it to info @ paulickreport.com along with your name, home state, and relationship to horse racing (owner, fan, horseplayer, etc). We will request consent before publication. 

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To The Editor:

On Saturday, Feb. 18, 2023, my first-time starter, a filly named Royal Blood, was scratched by the Gulfstream Park veterinarian for unknown reasons. Immediately after I heard this troubling information that she was scratched, I personally requested my attending vet to check on the filly in the receiving barn at Gulfstream. After carefully examining her, he could find nothing wrong with her so we shipped her back to Palm Meadows training center where I currently stable my horses.

The following day I asked two different vets to check Royal Blood to get more educated opinions about her soundness, yet again both found that she was fine. After consulting with the third different veterinarian, we decided that in order to be 100 percent sure of her soundness we should take some diagnostic images and ultrasound views. After those images were examined, vet number 3 saw nothing telling in the X-rays and ultrasound pictures. So I decided to send the images to one of most renowned and respected vet in the world, one who does not practice on the racetrack. After this veterinarian did not find anything out of the ordinary I decided that I needed to speak up because this is not right. 

Royal Blood has 17 registered, official workouts, including five at Palm Meadows, one at Gulfstream, the remainder at Churchill Downs and other tracks in Kentucky. Under the current rules, prior to a workout horses must be examined and signed off on by a veterinarian. So this filly with no history of any issues has been examined by licensed veterinarians over 20 times during the last six months and only one of them has found any issue, an issue I may add that four other veterinarians do not agree exists on this horse. I left numerous calls and text messages with the Gulfstream Park vet yet it was several days before a response was made. He gave no specific reason for why the filly was scratched.

Basically, Gulfstream Park is letting their track veterinarian operate with impunity, little or no oversight and contrary to the benefit of the track, the horsemen and owners and, most importantly, the horses. This attitude is destroying the little guys, killing the spirit and soul of smaller trainers and owners, and unchecked power in the hands of a few will do nothing but chase away the people that pay to put on the show. Very few owners will be willing to sustain the daily charges of a horse who is placed on a vet list for 14 days before that horse is even allowed to breeze again even if there is no unsoundness found.

In order to get off the vets list not only do you have to work for the track vet in a designated time but they take samples to be sent off for testing that can sometimes take two or three weeks to get the results back. So essentially when the track vet makes a relatively arbitrary decision to scratch a horse, you are forced to miss training time and likely miss several potential races, depending on the results of the tests. So a horse, that in your professional opinion and the opinion of your practicing veterinarians was fit and ready to run, is forced to miss at least a month and maybe more. 

We hear a lot about safety and I agree that it's vitally important but it's also important to maintain a healthy working relationship between those in regulatory positions and the horsemen who are often placed in difficult situations.  If tracks can pay for entertainment and concerts and other non-racing expenditures, why not at least spend some money installing a local laboratory to do limited testing of samples for horses placed on vets lists so that there is no wait time and those horses can get back to racing? Perhaps do more random testing of suspect characters' horses too? 

The economics of racing horses are bad and getting worse. Many trainers can hardly keep their heads above water with their a daily rate, so the only way that they can survive is through purse earnings. Purses need to improve as well and without sufficient entries and healthy field size that won't happen, especially at places like Gulfstream where the purse enhancement from the Calder casino has been lost. 

We hear about problems that tracks and racing commissions have in not being able to find enough veterinarians to take these regulatory positions. After seeing some in action, I'm wondering about the quality as much as the quantity. I also wonder if some don't hold personal grudges against certain trainers that may not always agree with their assessments. I realize that by writing this I may be putting myself in the category of them having a grudge against me, but I'd hope that by speaking up perhaps some of these policies and the people in charge of enforcing them can be reviewed so that we can have a system that protects horses but doesn't overzealously cause financial hardship for no good reason. 

I know HISA is supposed to handle all these issues eventually, but I don't know how it's all going to play out. I have personal knowledge of several horses that weren't allowed to run at Gulfstream that shipped out of town and won races. 

I believe that most of Gulfstream Park management truly has the interests of racing at heart. Aidan Butler, Steve Screnci, Mike Lakow and Billy Badgett are all accessible to speak to horsemen about issues and try to find reasonable solutions. Others in the organization don't seem to be willing to do the same. 

I wish I was a bit younger but I'm getting older and sometimes feel too tired to keep fighting. However, at the end of the day, I will keep standing up for those who cannot fight and can't speak up for fear of retribution. 

If that makes me the bad guy in the eyes of some, well, so be it.

I've been called worse.

— Carlo E. Vaccarezza

Lexington, Kentucky

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If you'd like to submit a letter to the editor, please send it to info @ paulickreport.com along with your name, home state, and relationship to horse racing (owner, fan, horseplayer, etc). We will request consent before publication. 

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Can both sides in a dispute be wrong?

In a word, yes.

Watching the long, drawn-out legal battle between Churchill Downs Inc. and Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert is both painful and tiresome. It's painful because of the way it has taken some of the joy away from what is one of the most exciting times of the racing year: the run-up to the Triple Crown. It's tiresome because of the never-ending nature of the fight between two outsized egos that began following Medina Spirit's positive test for the corticosteroid betamethasone after the colt's first-place finish – and subsequent disqualification – in the 2021 Kentucky Derby.

A quick summary.

One week after registering what would have been an unprecedented seventh victory for Baffert in the Kentucky Derby, word leaked out that Medina Spirit failed a drug test. Baffert flew from California to Kentucky and held a press conference at his barn to deny that Medina Spirit had ever been treated with that drug. He then went on an extraordinarily misguided national television media tour, blaming something called cancel culture, among other things, but never accepting responsibility himself.

“We live in a different world now,” Baffert said during an interview on Fox News. “This America is different, and it was like a cancel culture kind of a thing.”

Baffert was referring to the fact that Churchill Downs Inc. CEO Bill Carstanjen took an immediate step to exclude him indefinitely from their properties when officials there learned of the failed test result. The ban was eventually set at two years, which would effectively keep Baffert out of the Kentucky Derby in 2022 and '23.

This was, after all, the second time in less than a year that a Baffert horse had tested positive for the same drug in a major race under the Twin Spires. The previous failed test was for the 3-year-old filly Gamine, who was disqualified from a third-place finish in the 2020 Kentucky Oaks. He had three other failed drug tests in about a year's time that Baffert blamed on members of his barn staff for urinating in a stall or wearing pain patches that somehow got into the system of two horses.

A few days after learning of the positive test and denying that Medina Spirit had been treated with betamethasone, Baffert discovered that his veterinarian had prescribed an ointment containing the drug to treat a skin rash. That discovery should have taken minutes, not days. The defense put forth by Baffert's legal team was that it was okay to test positive for the medication if it wasn't injected and instead was applied topically. That argument didn't work.

Baffert fought the disqualification of Medina Spirit from the Kentucky Derby, and lost. He fought the 90-day suspension handed him by the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission, and lost. He fought the two-year exclusion from Churchill Downs properties, and lost.

With each revival of legal arguments by his attorneys, more and more people began saying “enough already.” Baffert isn't doing himself any favors with this prolonged fight, and he's not helping the game, either.

But it's not like Churchill Downs Inc. and its management team are sympathetic figures. Look at the way they've treated people in the Illinois Thoroughbred industry, pulling the rug out from under them with the sale or Arlington Park, or how they've bullied Daily Racing Form off their properties. It's not a company that gives you warm and fuzzy feelings.

From the outset, it was clear that Churchill Downs banned Baffert over fears that he was damaging the most profitable racing brand in their portfolio of racetracks and casinos: the Kentucky Derby. Churchill officials, hoping to protect that brand, moved too soon with their punishment, rather than waiting for the board of stewards to investigate and do their job. What they seem to have forgotten is that no one individual has done more to popularize the Derby over the last 25 years than Baffert.

With just over 10 weeks until the May 6 Kentucky Derby, Baffert has an embarrassment of riches in the 3-year-old ranks, including Arabian Knight, the No. 1 horse on many Top 10 Derby prospect lists. The best of those horses are in the process of being transferred to former Baffert assistant Tim Yakteen, who saddled a pair of former Baffert runners in last year's Derby.

If one or more horses from Baffert's barn earn qualifying points and run in this year's Kentucky Derby while under Yakteen's care, they can be immediately switched back to Baffert's barn for the Preakness and Belmont Stakes. If Churchill Downs is thinking “out of sight, out of mind,” when it comes to Baffert and the Derby, they are sadly mistaken. Baffert will be the story on the first Saturday in May, whether he's physically at Churchill Downs or not. It's going to be messy and won't do the Derby brand or the sport any good.

Much of this could have been avoided if both Baffert and Churchill Downs had gathered all the fact and allowed cooler heads to prevail, rather than engaging in a scorched earth war of words through the media and legal system. No one is coming out of this looking good.

That's my view from the eighth pole.

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