I don't know if the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA) will succeed or not. But it seems unfair and sort of strange to pick it apart and pass judgment after only a month and nine days, especially by someone who played a valuable role in helping get the HISA legislation passed.
Starting anything from scratch is tough. I don't know why Joe Gorajec (a smart, respected and good guy who has been a member of the Humane Society's National Horseracing Advisory Council) is picking things apart when all the pieces are not yet in place.
HISA is a federally legislated start-up that was born out of a need to prioritize horse safety above all else. HISA also addressed a fear that industry haters were gaining too much political and public clout. Remember Santa Anita in the winter of 2019? Powerful people were whispering that it was time for horse racing to go the way of the circus. Those racing and training deaths led directly to the legislation that created HISA.
Joe makes worthwhile points. But why so soon? Can we give HISA six months or a year to create a functioning office, then take a close look at what they have or haven't accomplished?
(Full disclosure: I am also a member of the HSUS National Horseracing Advisory Council.)
– Allen Gutterman, Los Angeles, Calif.
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For as long as I've been in racing, the leaders of some horsemen's organizations have insisted that any regulatory change on drug policies will cause the sky to fall.
“You can't take a therapeutic medication like anabolic steroids away from us or we won't have any geldings left to race,” I remember hearing a Kentucky Horsemen's Benevolent and Protective Association officer saying in the 1990s. Anabolic steroids may have a place in post-surgery therapeutic treatments for horses but the drug was widely being abused as a performance-enhancer given to healthy horses to build muscle mass.
Even when baseball's steroids scandal erupted nearly 20 years ago, change was slow to come to racing. We went from virtually no limits on anabolic steroid use in some U.S. racing jurisdictions to “regulating” the drug in ways that trainers and veterinarians quickly learned how to circumvent, making fools of the regulators.
Thankfully, despite the opposition from some horsemen, steroids now have been effectively banned from racing. Geldings are doing just fine without the drug. The sky did not fall.
It did lead trainers and veterinarians to find a substitute drug that could achieve a similar outcome. Clenbuterol became the drug of choice for many trainers, not because of its therapeutic value to treat airway obstruction as intended, but because it had an anabolic steroidal effect on muscle mass.
During Congressional testimony 10 years ago, a National HBPA officer called clenbuterol “probably the best drug that's come out in 30 years.” He was right. It was an especially good drug for trainers who were willing to push the envelope and make it part of their feed program. Win percentages soared among some horsemen who became super trainers overnight, thanks to clenbuterol. Because it has been so widely abused, clenbuterol is also in the process of being eliminated against the wishes of many who have relied on it as a performance-enhancer.
Twenty years ago, horses racing in Kentucky could be administered up to five drugs on race day, including two non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, one corticosteroidal anti-inflammatory, and two anti-bleeding medications.
I repeat: up to five drugs on race day were permitted.
When the Kentucky Racing Commission began discussions to eliminate most of the race-day treatments (Banamine or flunixin was quite popular), you'd have thought the world was coming to an end. The whining and hand-wringing from the Kentucky HBPA was something to behold.
Treating aches and pains with powerful anti-inflammatories four hours before a race was considered “good for the horse.” We now know that those drugs may conceal musculoskeletal conditions that can lead to fatal injuries. Administration of anti-inflammatories was pushed back from four hours, to 24 hours, to 48 hours.
The sky didn't fall, but the percentage of fatal injuries did.
Ten years ago, a couple of sunbelt states were still permitting race-day administration of a corticosteroid, Solu-Delta-Cortef (prednisolone sodium succinate), because the local HBPAs convinced regulators the drug prevented heat stroke. The drug's label said it was a fast-acting agent useful in alleviating lameness. Another reason the drug was used right before a race, an equine veterinarian told me, was because it has a calming effect on nervous horses. In other words, a performance enhancer.
Horsemen's groups argued elimination of Solu-Delta-Corfef on race day would lead to horses passing out right and left during the summer heat.
That didn't happen. The sky did not fall.
We've heard the National and local HBPAs and their trainer members hyperventilate about eliminating race-day Lasix (furosemide). They warned us about jockeys having blood-splattered riding pants because of horses hemorrhaging during the stress of competition.
Horses do bleed, many of them even when treated with Lasix. In some cases, there is evidence of external bleeding from the nostrils. But when 95 to 100 percent of horses are given this drug on race day while the rest of the racing world can live without it, something doesn't add up.
The sky has not fallen because race-day Lasix has been eliminated in 2-year-old races and stakes in some racing states.
And now in all their wisdom, various HBPA affiliates are lining up in court to oppose the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority. In a court filing in support of Louisiana litigation aimed at stopping HISA from being able to enforce its regulations, the various horsemen's groups say that HISA rules “post a clear and present danger” to their “ability to participate in the horseracing industry without suffering economic ruin.” They claim HISA rules “undermine the integrity of the sport.”
That is complete hogwash.
The groups that signed off on this court filing are being disingenuous. Rather than help the industry move toward sensible national rules that will create a level playing field for racing participants and present a sport the public can accept, they seemingly would have the industry return to the dark ages of anabolic steroids, clenbuterol, and race-day painkillers. And they want regulators at the state level that they can control.
Just before I made the trip north to Saratoga, the Keeneland Library held another of its duplicate book sales. These are famous in our household and are the source for a very extensive racing library in our basement, most of which we haven't read but find as helpful reference material. I imagine the wonderful staff at the Keeneland Library are happy to see me coming because I tend to pick up the material no one else is really interested in. This year, it was a pair of pamphlets containing the proceedings of the Jockey Club Round Table from 1965 and 1966.\
I could write an endless series looking back at old texts from racing regulatory meetings. There's something for everyone. The odd ideas we used to have about veterinary medicine, before imaging and research caught up to the modern era. The really good ideas that turned out to be kind of messy once someone tried to implement them. The really good ideas that I'd still like someone to try.
But mostly, what I usually think is that in racing more than any other world, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Most people would agree that the sport's stars are quite different from the 1960s, when Kelso ruled the world, and Buckpasser and Dr. Fager did their best work. But parts of the agendas for these meetings can (and have) appeared in modern times.
In 1965, Thomas Deegan Jr., gave a presentation titled Public Relations in Thoroughbred Racing. The focus then was about the same as it is now but the framing was different.
“We have to build constantly a groundswell of favorable public opinion because while Thoroughbred racing is the largest spectator sport, and attracted 40,827,872 persons in '64, there are many more millions whom it has not attracted yet, but who are a voice in public opinion,” Deegan said.
(For reference, Deegan was best remembered as the organizer of the World's Fair in 1964-65 and served as a principal advisor to Lyndon Johnson. Understanding the public mindset was a basic tenet of his career.)
“The public image of Thoroughbred racing today is at the highest level it has ever attained,” he continued. “Sports writers throughout the country have praised racing as the best supervised of all sports. Yet this has made no impression whatsoever on the legislators. In all my experience of more than 40 years in the sport I have never known of a member of a legislature to defend racing or praise it as a clean sport. How can racing extend its public relations to impress legislators as having benefits other than a cow that can be constantly milked?”
The aim of public relations in racing is still the same, but now it so often feels like an attempt born out of desperation as the sport fights not to be cancelled. The number of people coming to see the sport live isn't anything like 40 million anymore, and it's truer now than ever that there are more people who don't watch than people who do.
In the category of 'good ideas' though, Deegan touted the introduction of a closed circuit television into the press box at New York Racing Association tracks that would encourage the stewards to review decisions with the media. As I sit in the press box now, I can tell you there are TVs showing the track feed, but the stewards most definitely do not come in here and explain their decisions to us.
The following year, there was a topic discussed with some fervor which will be familiar to the modern trainer or farm manager – the challenge of recruiting and keeping staff.
While many people in the business want to call this a modern problem (often followed by the refrain of 'people just don't want to work anymore'), the hardboots at the table in 1966 would tell you differently. Mostly, they seemed focused on losing 'boys' – a shorthand for 'exercise boys' – who would learn to gallop on the track and leave for the racetrack once they got good. But several attendees mentioned equal challenges with keeping grooms, too. More than one bemoaned child labor laws and legal requirements to keep kids in school. Another suggested that owners, who still hired barn staff on contracts in those days, should band together and come up with one unified pay rate so those paying more wouldn't be able to steal staff off everyone else. (Which doesn't seem…legal?)
But mostly, the conversation came back to the same back-and-forth it does today.
“I don't think that you'll ever get any high type people to want to work around the race track because a man can go in the factories and make $2.50 an hour and work 40 hours a week, and nobody now wants to put in seven days a week from six o'clock in the morning until six o'clock at night, especially when he is running a horse,” said Jack Price, trainer and operator of Dorchester Equine Preparatory School. “You are not going to get good people and interested people to do this because of the opportunities. I think if we want to develop a higher type of help they would have to work a decent number of hours. We'll have to compete with industry that way and pay that money.”
Until the current labor crisis, most farm and track jobs are six days a week instead of seven, but the point remains – people have choices now with defined hours and more time off. Price talked about the desire he'd noticed for workers to go home and spend time with their families, instead of sleeping in the tack room or a dorm. In a way, the discussion is similar today; the workforce as a whole wants to have a life outside of work, and a job with horses makes this challenging. For a long time, racing has solved this problem by relying on an immigrant labor force who are living far from their families and want to make as much money as they can to send home. But even that band-aid is beginning to show wear.
In 1966, there were still horsemen who disputed this idea that people want a work/life balance (though it wasn't called that yet).
“In the area we are in we have had an 800% increase in light industry which is attracting a lot of these boys out of high school with vocational training programs,” said Daniel G. Van Clief, breeder and owner. “It has not affected our help on the farm because the ones who work on the farm or on the race track are a certain type person and it isn't going to change very much. Like Bull [Hancock] says, some of them may go on to college, but the rest of them stay with you and their sons stay with you … our labor problem isn't any worse than what it was twenty years ago except for the accelerated number that are going on to college, even with the 800% increase in industry in our area.”
Instead, Van Clief suggested, the solution was to recruit young people out of school by emphasizing the great benefits to working on the farm – including pension plans, which Van Clief mentioned were standard at his farm. It's been a long time since I worked on the farm, but I'm not sure that's necessarily been the standard up until recently, and I know it's not at the track.
I don't know whether to be cynically discouraged or greet some of these repetitions with tongue-in-cheek enthusiasm. While we've made progress on some issues facing racing in the last 60 years, it's startling how many topics keep coming up, and how many of the same things keep being said about them.
On the other hand though, racing has lived on despite this reinvention of wheels. I've read other voices from racing stakeholders past – Louis Wolfson's treatise from 1986 is a good example – that also identify familiar problems, sometimes predicting certain doom without solutions, and still we are here. I'm not sure I think we have another 60 years of the same discussions left in us, though. This year, after watching the livestream of the Round Table, I'm hoping stakeholders may take a spin through some of the old ones, too.
John Sadler has had some very good horses throughout his 45-year training career, going back to the speedy roan filly, Melair, who upset Preakness winner Snow Chief in the 1986 Silver Screen Handicap at Hollywood Park. He's saddled the winners of 44 Grade 1 races and his runners have earned in excess of $139 million. Champions Stellar Wind and Accelerate have called his shedrow home.
But none has generated the excitement surrounding the undefeated Flightline.
“I've never had one like this,” Sadler said. “A lot of horses in my career I've had to train them up. This one, we just drive him in the speed lane. He's got tremendous ability.”
A 4-year-old son of Tapit who because of a freak barn accident didn't begin his racing career until April of his sophomore season, Flightline has won his four starts by a combined 43 ½ lengths – all under jockey Flavien Prat. First came a maiden win at Santa Anita in April 2021 that he won by 13 ¼ lengths. That was followed in September by a 12 ¾-length allowance score. He ran away to an 11 ½-length win in the G1 Runhappy Malibu Dec. 26, then was a six-length winner of the G1 Hill'n' Dale Met Mile on Belmont Stakes day at Belmont Park June 11. His Beyer Speed Figures for those races were 105, 114, 118, and 112, respectively.
Next up is the G1 TVG Pacific Classic at Del Mar going a mile and a quarter on Sept. 3. The San Diego county seaside track's premier race – which Sadler has won three of the last four years – will be Flightline's first try around two turns and what his trainer hopes will be a stepping-stone to the G1 Breeders' Cup Classic, to be run Nov. 5 at Keeneland in Lexington, Ky. Sadler won the 2018 Classic at Churchill Downs with Accelerate.
Flightline has been working steadily since July 9, with two half-mile drills followed by five furlongs from the gate in :59.40 on July 30 and a best-of-morning five furlongs in :59.00 on Aug. 6. He'll be on the track at 6:30 PT Saturday morning, Aug. 13, for his next breeze.
“The next two works are the distance works,” said Sadler. “He'll go six, out a mile on Saturday and then he'll work again next Saturday. Then he'll have one easy work before the Pacific Classic.
“The training has been centered on getting him to relax to go the big distance,” he continued. “Flavien was pretty adamant after the Met Mile. I didn't ask him, but he said, 'John, distance will be this horse's friend.' So it's just about getting him to relax. The one work we did from the gate we just wanted to get him to shut off and sit behind another horse a little bit. We don't want to work him in company too much because it can get him a little excited.”
Unlike his first three wins, Flightline had to overcome some obstacles in the Met Mile.
“He didn't break, he had trouble, and they were race riding him pretty good, which is their job,” said Sadler. “To overcome that so easily in his fourth start shows you how talented he is.”
Flightline was bred in Kentucky by Jane Lyon's Summer Wind Equine, which stayed in as a partner after West Point Thoroughbreds bought the colt for $1 million at the 2019 Fasig-Tipton Saratoga Yearling Sale on the recommendation of bloodstock agent David Ingordo. The other partners are Sadler's longtime client, Hronis Racing LLC, along with Siena Farm LLC, and Woodford Racing, the latter a partnership founded by Bill Farish Jr. of Lane's End, which consigned Flightline to the Saratoga sale.
Based on his eye-catching racing performances and a pedigree whose female family traces back to the Phipps Stable's blue-hen mare, Blitey, Flightline is worth $50 million or more as a stallion prospect, sources have estimated. Sadler said no decision has yet been made about whether Flightline will race in 2023 as a 5-year-old.
“A lot of people may presume, because of his value, that it's a done deal,” said Sadler. “Everybody I've talked to in the partnership said we'll evaluate it at the end of the year.”
Sadler indicated Lane's End, which stands several of his former trainees (Accelerate, Catalina Cruiser, Gift Box, and Twirling Candy), has the inside track for when Flightline does go to stud. He said offers from other stallion farms to buy Flightline have been “through the roof.”
Trainer John Sadler
Flightline “never hid his talent,” Sadler said, recalling a phone call he received from April Mayberry, who taught the colt his early lessons in Ocala, Fla. “She called the first time she breezed him and said, 'John, I got goosebumps.'”
Horses like Flightline can put considerable pressure on trainers, but Sadler calls it “a good kind of pressure, the kind that makes you want to get up early and get to the barn each morning.”
He describes Flightline as a horse that can be tough to gallop in the morning. “He's a handful to ride, but Juan Leyva, my assistant, rides him and does a beautiful job,” said Sadler.
Winning a fourth Pacific Classic in five years would be a remarkable accomplishment for Sadler, who ranks second all-time in Del Mar stakes victories and second by overall wins at the seaside track. Bob Baffert leads both categories. Sadler has won training titles at Del Mar, Santa Anita, and Hollywood Park. His first Del Mar stakes win came with Olympic Prospect in the 1988 Bing Crosby Handicap.
Sadler's previous Pacific Classic wins came with Accelerate in 2018, Higher Power in 2019, and Tripoli in 2021. Yet when asked about his recent success in the race, he lamented about the “one that got away,” when Twirling Candy lost by a head to Acclamation in the 2011 Pacific Classic.
If Sadler is feeling extra pressure from having a horse like Flightline in his barn, he isn't showing it.
“I'm in a good stage of my career,” said Sadler, who turned 66 years old on July 30. “I'm a veteran now, been through a lot of campaigns and think I'm well equipped to handle the pressure. My stock has gotten better as I've gotten older. I've got some high-powered 2-year-olds this year, some nice horses.”
And then there's Flightline.
“It will be fun to see what happens these next two races,” said Sadler. “Then we'll see about next year.”
