Tag: The Paddock

Scott Chaney, executive director at the California Horse Racing Board, has a message for commissioners in other states – you are not exempt from what happened to us.

“2019 was probably the worst thing that ever could have happened to us, but at the same time it was one of the best things,” Chaney said in a presentation at last week's convention of the Association of Racing Commissioners International (ARCI).

Chaney looked back on the time period of Santa Anita's well-publicized fatality spike as a “watershed moment” for racing in the state, from which he believes the sport has grown.

One of the most important things to understand for regulators outside of California is that the 2018-19 season wasn't that much of an outlier in terms of the fatality rate, which the CHRB has been tracking for several decades. 2019 finished the year with 128 fatalities, even factoring in the perceived “spike” early in the year, while 2018 had had 146. The difference, of course, was the attention from mainstream media, which magnified the impact of every death.

Under intense pressure from the public and local and state politicians, Chaney recalls the commission took a “all hands on deck, kitchen sink-type approach” to passing new safety regulation. He said the state has seen 30 new welfare-related regulations in the last two years, which is an incredible rate.

“We didn't know what we were doing when we started … which is not a great approach to regulation,” he said. “Usually you'd want to have some scientific evidence behind new rules.

“But the governor said racing was going to end if we didn't do something.”

In that initial scramble, Chaney said he saw reduced resistance from interest groups like jockeys' and trainers' organizations that would historically push back at new restrictions on medication, whip use, or other regulations impacting their membership. In the moment, everyone just wanted to see the sport keep going.

In 2021, the state of California had 71 fatalities, only 20 of which came during racing events. Its rate is about half the national average, which as far as Chaney is aware, is the lowest in the country.

Roughly three years from the crisis, Chaney said there are a few changes he looks back on as being the most impactful in improving equine fatality in the state:

• The entry review panel, which screens entries for horses who may be at elevated risk for severe injury based on the horse's medical, training, and racing history. At first, Chaney admitted, the panel scratched a lot of horses, which didn't go over well with horsemen. Then, trainers modified their programs and the panel didn't feel it needed to scratch as many horses. This probably hurts the entries, Chaney admitted, but the panel can feel confident the horses who do start are safer.
• Restrictions on drugs, intra-articular injections, and shockwave, along with veterinary exams required ahead of workouts and races. While these things may have reduced risk for individual animals, Chaney said the regulatory changes to veterinarians' role also allowed a more important, fundamental shift in the veterinary business model on the backstretch.

  “Veterinary medicine on the backside has always been a medication, prescription-driven endeavor,” he said. “That's how vets make money. You prescribe medication. What we've tried to do, both intentionally and as an ancillary benefit, is change that to a more diagnostic-based [endeavor]. Vets are out there to diagnose problems and prevent them, rather than fix them afterwards and prescribe medications. But veterinarians have to be paid for that, too.”

  While veterinarians initially resisted the idea that they may have to charge for examinations (which is traditionally not done in the racing world), Chaney said they too saw the benefits to this business model shift.

• Taking veterinary reports electronic was also a big deal for California regulators. Chaney said this may seem more like a logistical victory than a welfare victory, but it actually allows regulators to do better research on the medical behavior going on at the racetracks, since digitization enables better data analysis.
• Then there were changes Chaney said had met with resistance before, like whip regulation and longer pre-race Lasix administration times, which finally went through in the aftermath of the intense public scrutiny.

  “I don't know of any evidence out there that suggests overusing your crop leads to injury, but it's perception. We have a citizenry in California that cares about this,” he said.

  “I am in a state where using medication for racing is not possible. I understand there's an animal welfare argument to be made [regarding Lasix]. It just doesn't work in California because the story becomes 'They're drugging horses in order for them to run.'”

 

In future, Chaney said regulators in California aren't necessarily prepared to rest on the laurels of improved numbers. He said they're even considering “crazy” ideas like opening a veterinary pharmacy at each racetrack to better monitor and control prescription drug use, or even training in both directions to make horses' use of their bodies more symmetrical.

Chaney echoed sentiments of California racetrack practitioner Dr. Ryan Carpenter in a presentation at last year's Tex Cauthen seminar: there may have been a learning curve for veterinarians and horsemen with some of these changes, but everyone got on the same page when the future of the sport was threatened. And, just as importantly: while California may be a socially more liberal place, both believe the public outcry that happened there over racehorse deaths could happen in other places, too.

A lot of people, Chaney said, “think 'California is the left coast, they're progressive out there. Whatever's going on out there doesn't apply to us.

“I don't view it that way,” he said. “I view it as one of two ways: either we're the miner's canary – this is what's coming to other states. Or we're the first domino. If animal welfare advocates, the fringe ones, are successful in making racing go away, the next state is easier.

“What's happening in California is relevant to everyone else.”

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It's been 13 years since racetracks and tote companies said they solved the issue of odds changing throughout the running of a race. Yet at least one prominent racetrack still has a problem posting final odds until a minute or more after a race has started.

In the fifth race at Tampa Bay Downs in Oldsmar, Fla., on Friday, April 15, the number four horse, Chill Haze, was installed a 30-1 longshot in a field of seven runners carrying a $5,000 claiming price in a mile and 40-yard contest. In three one-turn sprint starts at Tampa Bay Downs in January and February, Chill Haze was never less than 20-1 odds and he beat one horse in those three races. after showing early speed and stopping.

Transferred from trainer Enrique Amado to Rafael Romero, Chill Haze was dropped from $6,250 claiming to $5,000 and stretched out to two turns. None of his four career wins came around two turns, though he'd been tried at longer distances before.

In the April 15 race, jockey Lexander Sanchez gunned Chill Haze out of the starting gate and quickly took the lead. The odds displayed on the race video shortly after the start showed him at 12-1, bet down considerably from his 30-1 morning line.

In another 10 seconds, the odds on Chill Haze were 10-1 as he led into the backstretch. He maintained a comfortable advantage down the backside, but 35 seconds after being listed at 10-1, the odds were suddenly just 6-1.

Ten seconds later, with Chill Haze still leading over over 7-5 favorite Bourbon Wisdom, the odds dropped a final time, t0 7-2, making this one-time 30-1 outsider the third choice in the betting.

It took 65 seconds from the start of the race for the final odds to be posted.

Chill Haze put away the favorite, but second betting choice It's Fate ran him down in the final sixteenth of a mile to win by three-quarters of a length. Chill Haze paid $5 to place and $3.20 to show.

A similar incident occurred at Tampa Bay Downs in the eighth race on March 30, when front-running Ideal Breeze defeated the 6-5 favorite R Love On the Run in a six-furlong race at 12-1 odds. It took over a minute for the video to display his final odds, having started the horse at 18-1. then 19-1, then 14-1 and finally 12-1.

When asked about that incident, Peter Berube, the track's vice president and general manager, said he was awaiting a response from tote provider Amtote on some “cycling issues.” Berube insisted there is no betting taking place after the start of a race.

Those issues were said to be fixed way back in 2009 when many tracks were experiencing similar delays in posting final odds, and suspicions about “past posting” – betting after the start of the race – were running rampant. Adding fuel to those suspicions were occasional instances where an official would forget to hit the “stop betting” button or there were technical glitches that permitted some bets to be placed after the start.

My suspicion at the time was that racing had moved into the 21st century while relying on 20th century technology to process bets from an increasing number of locations within North America and from offshore wagering companies. Compounding the problem in recent years are the computer assisted wagering accounts that can dump a massive number of bets into the pools in the final seconds before betting is closed.

The solution in 2009 was to speed up the cycling of bets into the host track's pool, shortening the cycle time from 30 seconds to 10 seconds.  Many tracks opted not to display odds on the video screen until 10 seconds into a race, at which time almost all of the bets had been processed.

Another issue at that time was lack of synchronization between the totalizator odds and the video display software. That was supposed to be fixed, too.

It's not acceptable for odds to change more than a minute into a horse race. It leads to suspicions and questions about the integrity of the betting pools from horseplayers. They have a right to be suspicious. This is something that needs to be fixed once and for all.

That's my view from the eighth pole.

The post View From The Eighth Pole: Horseplayers Have A Right To Be Suspicious appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

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I spent the first couple of days of this week attending the Association of Racing Commissioners International (ARCI) conference. As always, it was an incredibly educational experience, with great presentations from racing commission officials and veterinarians, as well as staff from the new Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA) about the transition to come.

It has become standard in these types of meetings in the last few years to sprinkle in references to the challenge of racing's public perception, which is hung broadly on “the media.” Sometimes I imagine these little sidenotes, which as you may guess are often very critical, are aimed at trade media like the Paulick Report, and other times the speaker is probably thinking of mainstream media, who have a very different knowledge base when it comes to horse racing and very different directives. That happened here too, mostly in the context of the need to steer the conversation around racing fatalities or drug scandals.

One speaker – Dr. Scott Palmer of the New York State Gaming Commission – pointed out that many people don't find the rate of racing fatalities, which are usually expressed as a figure per 1,000 starts, all that compelling outside the industry. Every time a horse dies, it's a liability for the sport even if the rate is slowing down, which Palmer seems to think a little unfair.

“When you talk about controlling the narrative, we're having people beat us over the head for a single horse death,” said an indignant Palmer. “It's a body count, folks.”

I don't resent Palmer's suggestion that racing needs to place at front and center the significant progress the sport has made in improving equine safety, but that's the priority of a public relations agency and not a news outlet. (And I'd strongly suggest racing entities do more to develop relationships with public relations professionals.) I do resent the implication that reporters like myself are willfully ignoring good news in favor of the bad or taking some kind of perverse pleasure in each new death, regulatory failure, or other horror. Honestly, the barrage of them in recent years make me tired and increasingly worried about the future of the business on which my livelihood is based.

His visible frustration dovetails nicely with the same questions our staff get to our inboxes, social media timelines and, in less comfortable moments, in face-to-face conversations with someone I've just met: Why don't you guys ever publish any positive news?

I've been responding to this on an individual basis for years, but the time has come to create an evergreen reference post for this.

First of all, I have a lot of trouble with the suggestion that news is “positive” or “negative.” In my experience, this is a description of how a story makes a reader feel, and that's a highly individual, emotional response which can vary widely between people. Facts are facts; as long as I've done my job as a reporter and those facts are accurate, I believe facts to be neutral. Your feelings about them are neither universal nor something I can control.

Laying aside the problem with this positive/negative classification for a moment, we at the Paulick Report actually do make an effort to publish stories most people would consider “positive.” A staggering number of them, in fact. We even had a series called Good News Friday which we ran for many years, followed by OTTB Showcase, which examined a different aftercare story each week and still run a monthly column from Jonathan Horowitz on his journey with his OTTBs. We did a series of profiles on barnyard companion animals, and continue to run monthly profiles of the grooms, exercise riders, and assistant managers who make our sport possible. We do lots of other occasional series looking back at horse racing's rich history. (See some of those here and here.)

(The series that have not continued ran out largely because the companies that sponsored them shifted their advertising money elsewhere. So if you want to see Barn Buddies make a comeback, please feel to reach out to our advertising director because I really miss writing it.)

And you know what? We get far, far less traffic on those feel-good stories when compared to reporting on drugs cases, the federal indictments, contentious disqualifications, etc. Readers say they want more of this content, but when it's presented to them it seems they don't really want what they say they want. As a web-based publication, we've always been keenly aware of our analytics, and this trend has been true for our entire existence. It's not going to stop us from doing “positive” content, because we believe in balance and while these pieces take up resources while providing comparatively less return than other types of content, we think these warm and fuzzy stories are just as important as the tough ones.

But remember, dear reader – you control your Facebook and Twitter feeds, as well as your inbox. Thanks to social media algorithms, you will see more and more of the type of news you consume. If you want to see more of these “positive” stories, vote for them with your traffic. Make their click count more appealing to publications and advertisers, and make the dreaded social platforms serve them to more of your friends.

After finishing up at the ARCI conference, I went back to my home office and contended with reporting on the arrest of a stakes-winning Quarter Horse trainer who was captured in two videos beating one of his horses while it was tied to a tree … which, in case you wondered, doesn't exactly put me in a positive mood with regard to people generally, let alone the industry which nurtured this guy for many years.

The thing about stories like this which upset people and which are upsetting to report is that my not having reported it would not have erased its having happened. We could have ignored this incident, or others that have sparked outrage within or at the racing world. But that horse would still have been victim of abuse whether or not I wrote a story about it, and a successful, licensed trainer would still be facing a court date on a felony charge and a summary suspension. And, lots of people would still have seen and been horrified by the video, which made the rounds on social media for several days before I knew about it.

I think that in reality, most readers come to us because we've built a reputation for being unafraid to look critically at complicated or difficult topics. We do so with the hope that shining light on the dark corners of equine sport will urge people in all positions – including regulators like Palmer and others at the ARCI conference – to continue pushing for improvements to make the sport safer, cleaner, and more ethical for its participants and fans. By examining what went wrong in a given situation, we have a much better and more specific idea of what can be done to prevent recurrence. This, we believe, is the best and most effective way we can help the sport we love, and serve our readership.

The post Why Do You ‘Only Write The Bad News’? And Other Musings appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

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The Bob Baffert “case” — the collection of errors committed or allowed to happen under the trainer's watch — is extremely important to the survival of horse racing in the United States. Why? Because for the first time in memory, a well-connected actor in the Turf Sport found himself unable to manipulate a get-out-of-jail-free card to exploit the system.

Historically any number of high-profile individuals over the years have used their friends in high places to wriggle off the hook and avoid major penalties, suspensions or fines as a result of having broken the rules.

In racing the given is that well-connected individuals will never have to suffer the indignities foisted on horsemen that have not cultivated important relationships among stewards, racetrack owners, racing commissioners, leaders of horse racing organizations, veterinarians in strategic positions and wealthy political donors in order to ensure that someday, when a favor is needed, it will be there for them.

I will freely admit that I never thought Baffert would be anywhere near the trouble he got himself into. I thought he was too smart, cunning and methodical. And, if caught, I never thought his web of friends in high places would fail to keep him from being subjected to the penalties others have had to deal with.

My take on the Baffert dust-up is that the rules he was penalized for breaking were Mickey Mouse minor violations, none of which individually would have gotten him in the hot water he is in now. We all have our opinions of what Baffert may or may not have done, but my guess is that if Baffert had been caught engaging in other, more serious activities it would have landed him in far greater trouble and with a considerably lengthier ban.

But where Baffert went wrong was that his arrogance, borne out of years of racing officials allowing him to slip off the hook, caused him to be sloppy. And it is just that sloppiness in total — the whole mess of minor offenses over a relatively short period of time — that created enough of a negative picture of the white-haired Arizonan to make him vulnerable.

And then, to make matters critically worse, Baffert went and poked the bear. He messed with the brand of the most important entity in horse racing in North America—the Kentucky Derby—run under the historic Twin Spires at Churchill Downs.

Baffert wrongly assumed, for once, that because of his impact on the Run for the Roses and the Triple Crown he was bigger than the game. He reckoned that he was too important for higher-ups in racing, especially in Kentucky, to lay a hand on him. Well sports fans, he found out differently when Churchill Downs banned him for two years and the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission issued Baffert a 90-day suspension, then denied him a stay while he appealed it.

Getting back to the original question, why is the Baffert thing so important, especially at this time? Because racing is going through an unofficial trial, if you will, and the jury is the American sporting public, supported strongly by animal lovers and admirers of fair play in athletic contests.

These public factions, a loosely cobbled group that conducts personal evaluations after watching evidence unfold in the media (both traditional and social), has pretty much had enough of Baffert and his antics. They have found him guilty and they want to make sure that justice is served. If they do not feel that adequate justice is delivered in favor of the animal, rival contestants, horseplayers and fans, they will write off the game as rigged and simply not worth playing or watching any longer.

Along with other like-minded participants in different positions of the racing industry I have fought long and hard to create a level playing field. As one of those in the forefront of pushing for the federal legislation that led Congress to create the group now known as HISA (Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority), I for one realize the importance of holding someone like Baffert to account for his misdeeds. For my part, I consider the most essential aspect in the creation of HISA is to have a body that will uphold the integrity of our sport no matter how well-connected or powerful an individual may be.

It is a testament to the importance of the concept of the Kentucky Derby and what it stands for, both in and out of racing, that even before HISA took hold, somebody in the industry showed the public that the current leaders of the Sport of Kings placed sport and the well-being of the horse above the most powerful trainer in the modern history of North American racing.

When HISA is fully up and running, we in racing should be able to count on the actions that led to Baffert's ban and suspension becoming commonplace.

Barry Irwin is the founder and CEO of Team Valor International

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