USADA | Horse Racing Free Tips

Letter to the Editor: Hold On, The Ride is About to Begin

There's good news and bad news coming. The good news is that the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act solves the persistent problem of inadequate funding to police the sport. The bad news is that decisions coming soon by the HISA Board may jeopardize millions of dollars of existing public support now allocated for this function.

Collectively the U.S. states invest over $100 million to regulate racing and wagering. That money comes in large part from taxes generated by the industry and fans. Commissions fight every year to ensure that adequate resources are available to do the job. Sometimes they succeed, often they don't.

The law's authors solved this issue by giving HISA authority to self-finance by assessing new fees. The implementation challenge was how to maintain existing state investment and infrastructures to minimize new costs on a sport struggling to compete in a dramatically changing world.

As the details of the proposed new program trickle out from the standing committees, there appears to have been little consideration as to how to maximize things already in place and paid for by the states. Those investigating, prosecuting and adjudicating violations will no longer be paid with public funds. The micromanagement of equine medical directors and regulatory veterinarians may result in shifting responsibilities and costs to racetracks or the HISA itself. And lastly, concerns about undefined but mandated testing program costs are already causing some states to consider privatization to turn it all over to HISA. Note: the states don't fund or do this for other sports.

Since mid-August, the ARCI has quietly held “implementation calls” with HISA and USADA staff for 31 states to identify potential obstacles early that need to be overcome. Additionally, state regulators were not allowed to participate in or even observe the work of the HISA standing committees, a decision that left the development of less costly options to avoid loss of public funding until the last minute as the FTC is eager to receive the formal submission.

Perhaps HISA Chair Charles Scheeler said it best at The Jockey Club's August Roundtable: “This program is going to cost money, and it's going to cost more money than the industry has traditionally allocated for services such as these.” Very true, except that the bulk of the money is not allocated by the industry, but rather by the states who can shift it elsewhere especially if someone else can pay.

Normally, when the federal government partners with a state to operate a program, a financial incentive of matching funds is provided. No such incentive exists here. A growing number of State officials above commissions are asking “What's in it for the State to continue to pay for any of this now that this new entity can pay for it?”

All this is modeled after the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority where that industry has no choice but to comply. That's true here as well, except that HISA authors ignored reality and erroneously defined state commissions as a racing industry constituency. They are not.
HISA has no power to force a state to do something it doesn't have the personnel, money or desire to do, even if the commission is willing. In fact, the more HISA seeks to micromanage and replace rather than improve, the more they push a state to walk and shift existing funding elsewhere to do things like fill potholes.

Only the HISA Board can mitigate the extent to which that happens by what they submit to the FTC. Otherwise, the day the details are released as to how this is paid for and by whom will be remembered as a nuclear blast whose fallout will be felt far and wide by many people who thought all this looked good on paper.

Ed Martin
President, Association of Racing Commissioners International

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Bobby Flay Talks Breeders’ Cup Triumph On Writers’ Room

Still riding high from a scintillating victory in the GI Breeders' Cup Juvenile Fillies Turf with fast-finishing Pizza Bianca (Fastnet Rock {Aus}), celebrity chef, restaurateur and owner/breeder Bobby Flay joined the TDN Writers' Room presented by Keeneland Tuesday afternoon. Calling in via Zoom as the Green Group Guest of the Week, Flay appreciated the significance of winning on racing's biggest stage with a homebred, teased a potential Royal Ascot trip with Pizza Bianca and discussed how he would approach racing's marketing challenges and more.

Flay made a huge splash at the 2014 Tattersalls October Sale when going to 1,250,000 guineas (around $2,122,050 U.S.) to purchase a regally-bred daughter of Galileo (Ire)–the highest-priced filly sold in the Northern Hemisphere that year–he named White Hot (Ire). But the filly never made it to the races. Flay could've cut his losses and sold the mare back at auction, but instead held onto her to breed, putting trust in her pedigree, and she rewarded him with a Breeders' Cup winner as her first foal.

“She has a lights-out pedigree,” he said. “She's by Galileo, she's a half to Pour Moi (Montjeu {Ire}), who won the English Derby, and that's just the beginning of the pedigree. It goes on for pages. It's a Coolmore family. And one thing about buying into a Coolmore family, those guys are so focused on making their families better and better that they're going to spend money all over that pedigree until the end of time. So I made that bet. I took a leap of faith and it didn't work out. The horse never ran, just wasn't good enough. But I knew I was going to keep this horse for the rest of her life. My feeling was, at some point, the blood will show up. If it's that good, something has to happen, directly or indirectly, that's going to help your family. But you have to be patient. You may have to invest more money actually to continue to breed, but at some point it will work. And I obviously did not expect it to work with the first foal, but it did. It's all gravy from here on out.”

Flay has become a breakthrough celebrity and, as a result, a de facto ambassador of racing. He was asked about how receptive people in his world are to the sport and what can be done to introduce more potential owners and bettors into the game.

“There's only one way to do it. You have to expose them to it,” he said. “If you ask me for a recipe and I just hand you a piece of paper or tell you to go download something off a website and you make it, it's going to be one way. But if I actually show you how to do it, it's going to come out differently and probably better, because I'm showing you as opposed to telling you. It's the same thing for racing. If I tell people about my experience, they're like, 'Oh yeah, that's great.' I take people to the big events, because I want them to see racing at its best, see the best horses and the biggest crowds, and then they're hooked. They're like, 'I can't believe I've never done this before.' I hear that all the time. Every year, I take about 25-30 people to the Belmont Stakes. Half of them have never been to a race before. They become racing fans.”

Elsewhere on the show, which is also sponsored by Coolmore, West Point Thoroughbreds, XBTV, Lane's End and Legacy Bloodstock, the writers discussed their takeaways from last week's interview with Travis Tygart and Tessa Muir of USADA, debated whether or not Lasix-free racing is a big deal anymore and addressed potential remedies for the wagering public in situations like the Breeders' Cup Juvenile Turf mess. Click here to watch the podcast; click here for the audio-only version or find it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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Irwin: Robust Investigative Force Critical For HISA To Effectively Combat Cheating

The Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA) is not scheduled to begin operations until July of next year, but with release of the initial guidelines issued for public consumption last week and any number of Op/Ed pieces appearing in industry trade publications, the direction of the Authority that will steer the ship seems to be given plenty of helpful hints for its future navigation.

As the one who got the ball rolling in a 2004 Op/Ed in The Blood-Horse by urging industry members to consider a way of hiring the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency to oversee drugs in horseracing, I must at this early juncture in the start-up of the Authority register my fears regarding the ultimate success of the new entity and its potentially sweeping changes.

Germination for wishing to get USADA involved in the struggle to rid cheaters from the game was to use CEO Travis Tygart and his team to devise a plan to form an investigative unit capable of discovering through traditional and new-wave policing methods which designer and human drugs were being used to tilt the playing field in North American racing.

If the world of international sport had learned one thing from the 2002 Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO) it was that testing was best used not to apprehend suspects but to confirm that they were cheating. The gold standard in catching the crooks was by finding the actual illegal substances first, then developing a test and using that test in the future to nail the bad guys. Testing without knowing what one was testing for was like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

Good old-fashioned cop grunt work and sophisticated FBI-style surveillance is required for the best results. In the eyes of those individuals who formed and drove the Water Hay Oats Alliance, it was foremost in mind that Tygart would use his agency's skills to offer relief to racehorse owners who played the game straight and true.

However, other initiatives, introduced by other stakeholders with alternative agendas, have gotten in the way and now threaten to derail the Authority from their original appointed rounds. And adding further insult to injury, everybody with an agenda is making noises about the Authority widening their sphere of influence by tackling such areas as pari-mutuel wagering.

The last thing HISA needs is to be accused of overreach by encompassing an agenda that goes too far afield from its original mandate. HISA was never envisioned as a so-called “league office” or end-all and be-all to govern the entirety of racing.

HISA is basically divided into two aspects of racing: integrity (preventing cheating) and safety (protecting the horse). While I am extremely interested in protecting the welfare of racehorses, I was personally disappointed in its inclusion in the final legislation, as I thought it could be handled better outside the confines of the law and because it detracted from the focus on cheating with drugs.

I daresay that very well may have been the intention of those proposing and supporting the safety element of the legislation. But I fully understand that with any sort of seminal legislation there must always be compromise and I am positive that without the safety aspect, Churchill Downs would never have been able to use its influence to convince Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell to back the bill.

In reviewing the Authority's releases so far and in reading reports in the media as well as interviews with key members of the Authority, it seems likely to me that testing for illegal substances is being given too much weight, as opposed to investigations. If this turns out to be the case, it would be a misguided, potentially detrimental and disheartening.

I understand why the “safety” advocates pressed so hard to have their initiative appear to be on an equal footing with “integrity.” By shifting the focus away from a single-minded attempt to zero in on drugs, the “safety” crowd hoped that racing would not be placed in a negative light. I get it. I do not agree with this gambit, but I understand it, especially where a major racetrack is concerned.

But unless the industry as a whole is ready to tackle cheating with drugs head on, the specter of altering the results of racing will never cease.

So this is my pitch to members of the Authority, no matter what side of the fence you are on, no matter how you managed to get your seat on the boards and committees and no matter what your agenda: please do all in your power to make sure that Travis Tygart is given adequate funding to carry on investigations that will yield the type of results those of us who have committed our lives to cleaning up the game can feel that all of our work has been worthwhile.

This message is not directed at USADA. It is not directed at Travis Tygart. It is directed at those individuals who may seek to over-fund their own aspects of the legislation.

Without a robust investigative force that is fully funded this entire initiative will fail and HISA will go the way of all other alphabet soup groups in racing. This is our one last chance to get horseracing right, correct the wrongs on the racetrack and clean up the game enough to present it as a viable sport to fans and horseplayers. We owe them that much.

Barry Irwin is the founder and CEO of Team Valor International

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The Week in Review: Tygart, USADA Out to Clean Up the Game

We heard from the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), its CEO Travis Tygart and the Director of Equine Science Dr. Tessa Muir last week when USADA released its anti-doping guidelines, rules and protocols. Once again, we saw that these are no-nonsense, dedicated people with a track record of cleaning up other sports. The release of the guidelines was an important step toward what will be a welcome change for racing–competent, dedicated policing from an outside entity replacing the current system, which just doesn't work.

(Quotes from this story were taken from Tygart and Muir's appearance on the TDN Writers' Room podcast and from Dan Ross's coverage in the TDN and his Q&A with Tygart and Muir.)

With Thursday's release of the details, there was a lot to digest. Here's what resonated with me:

(*) USADA is not going to rely solely on drug testing, which has been proven to be a woefully inadequate way of catching cheaters. There are always a number of potent drugs out there that can't be detected by standard drug tests. USADA may not have all the tools, including wiretaps, that the FBI had when it took down Jason Servis, Jorge Navarro and others, but Tygart made it clear that there are more ways to catch cheaters than just through drug tests.

“Can you bring a case if you don't have a positive test?” Tygart said. “In some states today, I don't think that's even possible under the rules. But if you look at Article Two of the rules, it identifies about 12 different types of violations. Only one or two of those includes a positive test. So possession, trafficking, complicity, attempted administration, retaliation against a whistleblower, those are things that can be anti-doping rule violations.”

He said that scientific evidence will be combined with “buckets of evidence”, much like what you see each week on shows like Law and Order and NCIS.

Tygart said they will also rely on a tip line that is already receiving calls. All of which is a step in the right direction. Neither Navarro nor Servis had any serious violations on their records that were the result of testing, which just goes to show that a lot more beyond testing needs to be done.

(*) USADA appears to understand the importance of going after more than just the trainers. It stands to reason that in most cases where performance-enhancing drugs are used, a veterinarian is involved. And what about the owners? It's hard to imagine they don't know what's going on when their trainer is wining at 30% and 50% off the claim. They should have to pay the price when their trainer is caught.

“When the horse is in training, the owner, the veterinarian, anyone else involved with the horse, they can be held accountable if they're complicit and part of a doping or a medication issue,” Tygart said. “The strict liability of the positive test doesn't apply to them. So there will be a slightly different way that this is prosecuted, but they absolutely can be held accountable under these rules.”

He added: “It's not just the trainer training the horse that has responsibility for this culture of a clean sport. Everybody within the sport should have a responsibility to ensure that it's being done the right way.”

(*) One thing that was not addressed last week was the obvious problem of having a trainer turn the stable over to an assistant once they are suspended. Life goes on largely uninterrupted for that stable with the head trainer getting what amounts to a vacation. There's not nearly enough of a deterrent here. At least with the more serious violations, the stable should be penalized along with a guilty trainer.

(*) USADA is going to rely heavily on out-of-competition testing and trainers must let USADA know at all times where a horse is located. He also said that out-of-competition tests won't be done on a random basis. For obvious reasons, the focus will be on trainers whose results suggest they might be using something to get an edge.

“It's what we call intelligent testing,” Tygart said. “It's not random. Some call it smart testing. Some call it target testing. We will use data.”

(*) You might want to call this one the “Baffert Rule.” While USADA will distinguish between violations that involve performance-enhancing drugs and overages of therapeutic medications, Tygart believes that there is a point where enough is enough when it comes to overages. Four minor infractions or therapeutic overages within five years could result in a sanction of up to two years.

(*) Just because a horse passes post-race urine and blood tests doesn't mean that they can't be caught later on. If someone uses something illegal and a new test for that substance comes around after the fact, they could get nailed. This is another welcome development.

“We will have the ability to do what is called retrospective testing,” Tygart said. “Samples will be put into storage. And then when you develop new tests in the future, we're going to be able to bring those samples out of storage and actually then analyze them with the new methodology for those prohibited old-time substances. That's also a great deterrent to people using things where they say you can't detect it. But in the future, when those technologies and the capabilities are enhanced and changed, then we can go back and you will still be subject to sanction (for a positive test).”

(*) More than six months after the race, the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission has still not acted when it comes to this year's GI Kentucky Derby and the reported betamethasone positive on winner Medina Spirit (Protonico). That, Tygart said, will not happen after USADA takes over.

“I was pretty stunned to hear that (Medina Spirit's) Kentucky Derby case hasn't been resolved yet,” Tygart said. “That's not going to happen on our watch. I mean, it's crazy that it's taken that long to get to a final resolution, particularly when someone is competing the entire time.”

Lawsuits have been filed by horsemen's groups and six states to shoot down the Horseracing Safety and Integrity Act (HISA), which is what created the need for a new method of policing the sport, and USADA has yet to sign a contract with the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority. Both factors could mean that the projected start date for HISA, July 1, 2022 will not be met.

But if and when HISA goes into effect, USADA will be ready. Tygart called the new rules a “gold standard program for the industry.” He's got that right. It's time for a new era.

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