Tag: The Paddock

The American Graded Stakes Committee is not doing the Thoroughbred breed any favors.

As I've written before, when the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association in the early 1970s undertook the worthwhile mission of ranking the best races with a Grade 1, Grade 2, or Grade 3 designation, there was not a single race at less than one mile for horses 3-year-olds and up among the 63 contests given Grade 1 status. To repeat: There were zero Grade 1 sprints for horses aged 3 and up.

The seven-furlong Vosburgh, a Grade 2 race when grading began in 1973, was elevated to Grade 1 status in 1980 – the only sprint for horses 3 & up rated at the highest level by the committee.

In 2022, 17 sprints (races under one mile for 3 & up runners) received Grade 1 status from the committee among the 98 total Grade 1 races. By comparison, France has three Group 1 sprints, Great Britain six, Ireland one, and Japan two among major racing countries in the Northern Hemisphere. The U.S. has more Grade 1 sprints that those four countries combined.

Winning a Grade 1 race greatly enhances a male horse's opportunity to stand at stud. It's not automatic, especially if that Grade 1 sprint victory came on turf, but it's a seal of approval from the group that determines which races are the most important in this country.

By increasing the number of Grade 1 sprint races, the committee is de facto blessing stallion farms to stand more sprinters at stud. But is that necessarily a bad thing?

This is a bit of a chicken and egg question. Are stallion farms standing more sprinters because that's what commercial breeders want, or is it because that's what yearling buyers are looking for, and mare owners are merely responding to market demand? And are those buyers, especially those shopping for colts, eyeing yearlings that look fast and racy  in hopes of winning a Grade 1 sprint to secure that next stallion deal? And how much of a role do racing secretaries play in this? If they're mainly writing races for sprinters…well, that's what owners and trainers will buy.

Emphasizing sprint speed over stamina or soundness is just one area where the Graded Stakes Committee has fallen short.

There are far too many Grade 1 races restricted to 2-year-olds (15 in 2022, including seven for fillies) and 3-year-olds (27 in 2022, including 12 for fillies). The opportunity to win Grade 1 races at 2 or 3 encourages owners of these horses to rush them off to stud, instead of showing that they can prove themselves against older runners over a period of time and at longer distances. France and Great Britain each have five Group 1 races for 2-year-olds, while Ireland and Japan have three each.

In my opinion, the only Grade 1 races for 2-year-olds should be at the Breeders' Cup: the Juvenile, Juvenile Fillies, Juvenile Turf, and Juvenile Fillies Turf.

A similar restructuring should happen for 3-year-olds. Only the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont Stakes should be Grade 1. All of the pre-Triple Crown races for 3-year-olds are run within a few weeks of each other, allowing horsemen to pick and choose to find the easiest path to Grade 1 success. Downgrade them all to Grade 2. You could make an argument that the Travers and/or Haskell still qualify as Grade 1, but those races are deep into the racing season when 3-year-olds should be ready to take on older runners. And there should be no Grade 1 sprints for 3-year-olds.

This weekend, Parx Racing will offer two Grade 1 races restricted to 3-year-olds, the Pennsylvania Derby and the Cotillion for fillies. Later in the year, the Hollywood Derby at Del Mar, and the Malibu and La Brea at Santa Anita, are restricted to 3-year-olds. No major racing country in the rest of the world runs these restricted races so late in the season. None of those should be Grade 1, in my opinion.

So if this is a problem, what is the solution?

For starters, the committee members would be well served to take their heads out of their data-filled notebooks for a few minutes and have a genuine discussion about whether their actions are helping or hurting the breed. Because so many American Graded Stakes Committee members are active in the commercial breeding market, which is quite successful based on the hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions at recent yearling sales, I find it doubtful they will see any problems through their rose-colored glasses. (Original Graded Stakes Committee members in the 1970s, incidentally, were less engaged in the commercial market.)

But should profits from stud fees and yearling sales be the determining factor in whether the Thoroughbred breed itself is going in the right or wrong direction? No.

It's been 50 years since the Graded Stakes Committee was formed. In the mid-1970s, runners averaged over 10 starts per year. Average starts per runner now stands at six. It's not a good trend line.

Like anything in racing, the reasons for horses today having compacted careers with fewer starts over shorter distances is multi-factorial. Some things will be difficult if not impossible to change. That's not true of the Graded Stakes Committee. All it takes is some conviction and leadership.

That's my view from the eighth pole.

The post View From The Eighth Pole: Sprinting Off To The Breeding Shed appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

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In 1975 I was in graduate school, living in New York. It was just two years after Secretariat's Triple Crown and his appearance on the cover of Sports Illustrated, two years after Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in America, three years after Title IX barred discrimination based on sex. Billy Jean King had just defeated Bobby Riggs in the “Match of the Century” and everywhere in New York women were sprouting buttons bearing the name “Ruffian,” in anticipation of the upcoming match race between the great undefeated filly and Foolish Pleasure, that year's Kentucky Derby winner: the women's liberation movement had embraced the magnificent thoroughbred as one of their own. The race, watched by over 20 million on TV, and Ruffian's tragic death shortly thereafter, marked not only the end of feminism's romance with horse racing; it also marked the beginning of our sport's slow, continuous, decline.

Of course the decline in horse racing can't just be blamed on that awful July day at Big Sandy: increasing competition from other sports for consumer attention, expanding competition for the wagering dollar, the endless cheating and drug scandals, the deaths on some of racing biggest stages – Go for Wand, Eight Belles, Barbaro – and, more recently, the growth of computer assisted wagering, are all part of it, but what is undoubtedly true is that aside from bullfighting, horse racing is the only legal competitive sport where death is an accepted part of the game, and if you've been to Spain recently, you know how that's going. Greyhound racing died because of the public perception that the sport is cruel, and the perception of horse racing as cruel is also reaching a crescendo. There is almost no one in the mainstream media who supports our sport.

I just listened to Steve Byk's Aug. 31 podcast with Bill Casner and Steve Crist, and as much as I respect Crist – he's wrong.

Horse racing is on the precipice, if not of immediate extinction, of irrelevance, and the recent breakdowns of Maple Leaf Mel and New York Thunder on two of racing's biggest days were not just, as Crist states, one-in-a-million incidents – there were nationally televised breakdowns at all three Triple Crown races (the headline of my local paper, covering the Preakness, was “Baffert-trained horse euthanized at Pimlico.”) Every year I watch the Kentucky Derby, with 20 young, inexperienced horses all vying to save the same ground, with bated breath and I think – We are one tragedy away from going the way of the Greyhound.

I've been a horse racing fan all my adult life. I've owned racehorses. At one time I attended live racing fanatically and I supported myself financially through law school wagering on the horses. And I can tell you that seeing a horse break down is among the most heart-wrenching of experiences. The letter by Pamela Wood, explaining why she is leaving the sport, is emblematic of those who walked out of Saratoga ashen-faced those two days – we are losing those people forever to a sport that is already rapidly declining and desperately struggling to create new fans.

You're wrong, Steve – those of us who love the sport should panic. If panic makes us act, panic we should.

I question how much can be done to significantly minimize the risks to an 1,100-pound animal running 40 miles an hour, exerting maximum effort, on legs as thin as one's wrist. Maybe our sport, like bull fighting and jai alai and Greyhound racing, has run its course. But I do believe we can try and that, yes, reducing deaths by even one in a thousand starts is important – if for no other reason then to stem the public perception that we do nothing to make our sport safer. And I don't know, and doubt if right now anyone truly knows, if the solution is synthetic racing surfaces, better policing, more comprehensive pre-race inspections, less breeding for speed and more for soundness, or any of the other answers that have been proposed, none of them, by the way, mutually exclusive.

But what I do know is that we haven't come to this crisis point suddenly. It's been building for decades. Racetracks have been closing everywhere and the dollars wagered by true fans – not by computer-driven syndicates – is in virtual free fall. And our sport, fractured, galvanized by narrow, short-sighted self-interest, on life support and kept alive by racinos and the computer syndicates, has failed again and again to even address the most basic question – how do we unify stakeholders so as to create a framework that will allow us to come to a consensus as to how to make things better? There's a crisis, usually precipitated by tragedy, there's handwringing and talk of the incremental improvements we've made, and then another crisis, and then more handwringing and more talk. And after loving this sport for almost 50 years, and watching its slow, seeming inexorable decline, I've lost faith that anything will change.

I hope someone will prove me wrong.

And that's my view, Ray, from the eighth pole.

Fred Abramowitz
Fan/horseplayer/former owner
Fort Collins, Colo.

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The post Letter To The Editor: ‘Those Of Us Who Love The Sport Should Panic’ appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

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