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HISA CEO at Symposium: ‘To External Threats, We Need to Speak in One Voice’

Lisa Lazarus, the chief executive officer for the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA), on Tuesday made an appeal for sport-wide unity with United States racing on the cusp of a Jan. 1 roll-out of HISA's Anti-Doping and Medication Control rules.

“I want you to think about what this sort of change is going to mean for the industry,” Lazarus said. “It's going to look and feel different, and it's going to allow us to say to those that are our detractors, to those that doubt horse racing is clean, 'Look, we now have a rigorous, comprehensive program that is uniform; where laboratories are harmonized.'”

Lazarus made her remarks as part of the kickoff to the 2022 Global Symposium on Racing hosted by the University of Arizona Race Track Industry Program in Tucson, Arizona. She briefly acknowledged, but did not dwell upon, the looming legal fight that HISA faces that could derail its very existence.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on Nov. 18 ruled that HISA is unconstitutional, and the Sixth Circuit Appeals Court will hear oral arguments Dec. 7 in a similar case that also seeks to reverse a lower court's decision to dismiss a constitutional challenge.

Although petitions for legal stays, rehearings, or potential actions by Congress are all in play for the near future, HISA is otherwise operating in business-as-usual mode until an expected Jan. 10 mandate gets issued by the Fifth Circuit to enforce its order. So in that spirit, Lazarus kept her Dec. 6 remarks forward-focused.

“One of two things are going to happen,” Lazarus said. “Either we're going to be able to show, and I think we will, that the vast majority of racehorses are competing clean. And if we have [drug] positives, we'll be able to show that we're now taking significant action, that we're now on our own initiative cleaning things up. So this, to me, is a game-changer.”

Lazarus said she would like industry stakeholders to think of HISA as a “stabilizer.” She gave the analogy of a stable stock market, in which that stability allows growth to occur.

Lazarus also mentioned a couple of ways in which she didn't want stakeholders to think of HISA: Not, she said, as an entity “making rules that complicate people's lives. Not to being sort of a top-down regulator. But genuinely helping to grow the industry through creating uniformity; through creating this protective sheath around issues of integrity and safety.”

Wrapping up, Lazarus underscored the need for unity.

“We need to be united as an industry. We can fight, and scream, and yell, and debate and malign behind closed doors. But to the outside public, to the external threats, we need to speak in one voice,” Lazarus said.

“This is our moment in time. This moment is very unlikely ever to replicate itself,” Lazarus said. “We can't lose this moment in time.”

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Keeneland Catalogs 1,509 Horses to January Sale

Keeneland has cataloged 1,509 horses–broodmares and broodmare prospects, yearlings and horses of racing age as well as stallions and stallion prospects–for the 66th January Horses of All Ages Sale, which will cover four sessions from Jan. 9-12, 2023.

The January Sale catalog now is available online at Keeneland.com. Print catalogs are scheduled to arrive in the mail the week of Dec. 19.

“Because the January Sale is held at the crossroads of racing and breeding seasons, the auction is a terrific opportunity for horsemen to plan for the future, whether they are breeders who seek broodmares and broodmare prospects for the coming breeding season or owners and trainers focused on the track who want to obtain newly turned yearlings and horses of racing age,” Keeneland Vice President of Sales Tony Lacy said.

Denali Stud, agent, will handle 54 horses cataloged in the Dispersal of successful New York breeder Patricia Generazio. Among them are stakes winner Mischievous Dream (Into Mischief) along with Pure Bode (Bodemeister) and Marquet Legacy (Gio Ponti), who are all cataloged as racing or broodmare prospects.

The most recent graduate of the January Sale to excel at the highest level is Regal Glory (Animal Kingdom), who captured the GI Matriarch S. Sunday for her third Grade I win of the year. In addition, stakes winners of 2022 who were sold as yearlings at the January Sale include Grade I-winning juveniles And Tell Me Nolies (Arrogate) and Blazing Sevens (Good Magic) as well as MGSW Interstatedaydream (Classic Empire).

Each session of the January Sale begins at 10 a.m. ET. The schedule is as follows, with Book 1 settling Monday-Tuesday, Jan. 9-10 and Book 2 going Wednesday-Thursday, Jan. 11-12. The entire January Sale will be livestreamed at Keeneland.com and will be aired on the FanDuel Plus App. Scott Hazelton will report periodically on the first two sessions on FanDuel TV.

The January Sale catalog includes mares in foal to prominent stallions and emerging young sires. Among them is Charlatan, the leading covering sire at Keeneland's November Breeding Stock Sale. Additional covering sires include American Pharoah, Army Mule, Audible, Authentic, Bolt d'Oro, Constitution, Essential Quality, Girvin, Good Magic, Gun Runner, Hard Spun, Justify, Kitten's Joy, Knicks Go, Liam's Map, Medaglia d'Oro, McKinzie, No Nay Never, Not This Time, Quality Road, Sharp Azteca, Uncle Mo and Vekoma.

Among the sires of yearlings in the catalog are Audible, Authentic, City of Light, Constitution, Curlin, Good Magic, Gun Runner, Justify, Maclean's Music, McKinzie, Not This Time, Omaha Beach, Quality Road, Uncle Mo, Vekoma, Volatile and War of Will.

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Chan Pleads Guilty to Single Felony Count in Plea Deal

The New York-based veterinarian Alexander Chan, facing three felony charges related to drug adulteration, misbranding, and wire fraud conspiracies for allegedly injecting purported performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) into racehorses trained by co-defendant Jason Servis and then hiding the billing for his services, cut a plea bargain with the government Monday.

Chan's deal involved waiving indictment and pleading guilty to a single superseding information charge of drug adulteration and misbranding in exchange for the other charges against him being dropped, a format that is similar in substance to deals that other convicted defendants in the wide-ranging doping conspiracy case have agreed to with government prosecutors rather than face a trial by jury.

Chan had signaled his intention to plead guilty last Thursday, when he asked for and was swiftly granted a Dec. 5 change-of-plea hearing in United States District Court (Southern District of New York).

That decision seemingly left Servis as the lone remaining high-profile defendant in the case to go to trial as scheduled Jan. 9. But news broke Friday that Servis, too, is seeking a plea deal to adjudicate his own trio of felony drug misbranding and conspiracy to commit fraud charges. There was no update on the court docket with regard to Servis's case status as of early Monday evening.

As part of his plea deal, Chan will also have to pay the feds a forfeiture of $311,760. The money judgment represents the value of “any and all drugs that were adulterated or misbranded when introduced into or while in interstate commerce or while held for sale…” according to court documents filed Dec. 5.

Chan's sentencing will be Apr. 13.

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Attorneys Sanctioned in X-Ray Case Against Hagyard

Two attorneys representing Midwest trainer Tom Swearingen, who filed a class-action lawsuit in February 2019 alleging that Hagyard Davidson McGee Associates had been falsifying dates on radiographs for over a decade, have in a rare judicial move been ordered to repay the defendants' legal costs in the case, according to a decision dated Dec. 1 out of the Fayette Circuit Court in Kentucky.

In her decision, judge Julie Muth Goodman determined that Swearingen's attorneys, Mason Miller and William Rambicure, had violated civil rule (CR) 11 in bringing the case against four Hagyard veterinarians without “reasonable inquiry” to gauge the merits of their client's claims.

“Miller and Rambicure's conduct in the case became particularly egregious when they continued to prosecute the Complaint after Swearingen's written discovery responses confirmed that the Complaint's allegations regarding Swearingen's review of x-rays in the repository were untrue, that Swearingen could not prove requisite elements of his individual or class claims, and that he never qualified as the putative class representative,” wrote Goodman.

The circuit court ruling follows an appeals court ruling from earlier in the year that affirmed an earlier Fayette Circuit Court decision to dismiss Swearingen's original class action complaint, along with the trial court's denial of the trainer's contemporaneous motion to file an amended class action complaint.

According to attorney Mike Casey, who represents three of the Hagyard veterinarians in the case, it is “exceedingly rare” for a court to grant Rule CR 11 sanctions against attorneys.

“And frankly, we don't ask for them unless we believe the conduct was egregious because people have a constitutional right in Kentucky to file a lawsuit,” said Casey.

“However, that can only be filed if there's a good faith basis for that complaint to be filed. That's what the court said—and the court of appeals–that there was never anyone to bring this lawsuit,” said Casey. “It's ironic to file a lawsuit for fraud and it ends up being a fraudulent lawsuit.”

According to last week's court order, Miller and Rambicure are required to pay “jointly or severally” the defendants' reasonable attorney fees and costs “from the day following the tendering of discovery responses until the date of this order.”

These “costs and fees” preclude those associated with the plaintiff's appeals court case. “This Court lacks jurisdiction over filings in matters before the Court of Appeals,” Goodman notes.

Casey declined to comment on the amount Miller and Rambicure will be required to pay, adding that he would first have to discuss the matter with three other law firms representing the defendants.

It is currently unclear if Miller and Rambicure will appeal last week's circuit court decision. They did not respond to an emailed request for comment before deadline.

In his original complaint, Swearingen claimed that he had purchased two dozen horses at Keeneland during the time the time the Hagyard veterinarians had allegedly been falsifying dates on the X-rays placed on file at the sales, and suggested he would not have purchased the horses had he known about the alteration.

It later transpired that Swearingen had never viewed or relied on X-rays during the years in question, nor did he have a veterinarian examine the X-rays.

“While it is certainly questionable whether the Complaint should ever have been filed, it should have become clear to Miller and Rambicure that their Plaintiff's case was completely groundless when Swearingen's discovery responses and deposition testimony indicated that he had never accessed Keeneland's x-ray depository and therefore could never have made purchasing decisions based on the misdated x-rays,” Goodman writes.

“Both Miller and Rambicure could have, and should have, dismissed the case at this point, and their decision to continue prosecuting the case anyway was egregious enough to merit an award of sanctions. The Court, therefore, in its discretion, finds it appropriate to compensate the Defendants for attorney's fees and other costs incurred past this point in the litigation, beginning the day following the tendering of Swearingen's discovery responses.”

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