The 54th International Conference of Horseracing Authorities, organized by the International Federation of Horseracing Authorities (IFHA), continued today with its virtual keynote address from Pete Giorgio and Alan Switzer from Deloitte, the largest global professional services network.
Via a video presentation, the duo discussed Deloitte's perspective and insights around the impact of COVID-19 on the sports sector, including the practical steps that sports organizations can take to adapt to the “new normal”, opportunities arising from the challenging circumstances, and how that advice can be tailored to horse racing organizations.
Switzer is a director in the Sports Business Group, Deloitte's global center of excellence in sport business. He has worked extensively in horse racing for over 15 years, including producing multiple Economic Impact studies on racing—notably in respect of British and Irish racing.
The IFHA Conference is typically held in-person in Paris, France, the day after the Qatar Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe (G1), but in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, this year it is being conducted as a series of videos released during the first two weeks of October.
All videos from the International Conference of Horseracing Authorities will be released on the IFHA's YouTube channel, its website (www.ifhaonline.org), and its social media platforms. They will also be available as podcasts.
The first video, a panel discussion examining how to sustain the business of horse racing, as well as sports in general, in the midst of a pandemic and economic uncertainty, was released yesterday. The Paulick Report's summary and a link to the video is available here.
The next video/podcast will be sent out tomorrow, Oct. 7, and will feature a panel discussion focusing on adapting the broadcast, production, and media experience to a COVID-19 racing and sporting landscape.
It's no secret the COVID-19 pandemic has proven disruptive and dangerous to the business and sport of horse racing, but some international authorities say some good things have emerged from this unprecedented time.
In the first digital presentation released Monday as part of the International Federation of Horseracing Authorities (IFHA) annual conference, a panel of racetrack officials and racing authorities gathered to talk about the challenges and lessons from the pandemic so far. This year's 54th international conference is being conducted virtually for the first time, with conference materials being released gradually over the next two weeks. This year's focus will be on COVID-19 and its impacts on racing. In most years, the IFHA conference is held on the day after the Group 1 Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe at the France Galop offices in Paris.
Readers are familiar with the challenges faced by American racetracks starting in March and April, as some had to shut down, close to fans, or delay major races. In other countries, cross-border travel restrictions caused significant headaches even when racing resumed.
Andrew Harding, executive director of racing at the Hong Kong Jockey Club, said that organization was particularly taxed, as racing in Hong Kong relies much more heavily on horse movement than in other countries. It's also a lot more concentrated population of participants, with a much smaller pool of jockeys, stewards and trainers licensed to keep horses running, so Harding and his colleagues knew they had to be as strict as possible with biosecurity measures.
“If one of [the stewards] were to become infected, in normal circumstances they'd all be sitting in the same room together. In one fell swoop, we'd lose all our stewards,” he said, pointing out that would be the end of racing while officials were quarantined.
Hong Kong jockeys were divided into four clusters and had their jockeys' quarters separated to keep riders in bubbles. Stewards were also given separate rooms to minimize the risk of disease spread. Additionally, licensees were required to provide Hong Kong racing officials with a daily log of their temperatures. Jockeys were required to provide officials with an activity schedule so they could be advised what their potential risk for exposure might be, and to provide a guide for contract tracing should a COVID-19 positive occur.
In the United States, many racing fans have become frustrated by what seems like an uneven application of government regulations to different businesses. For a period of time this spring, Santa Anita Park was closed to fans and required jockeys to live on-site to reduce exposure, while crowds of people poured into the Los Angeles County Arboretum across the street. William Derby, chief executive and clerk of course at York Racecourse, told panelists the same is true in England, where he's aware of nearby bars and pubs beginning to bustle while fans are still not permitted at the track. In fact, York had to erect 3.5 kilometers of fencing to keep people away from the racecourse despite it being on public land. Still, Derby pointed out, local and national governments are overwhelmed, dealing with basic safety questions for hospitals and schools, and patience is key.
“Sport takes its place in the queue, despite the fact [racing] is a very important employer; 18,000 jobs in the UK rely on it,” he said.
Still, some good things have come out of the pandemic. Stephen Cook, director of content for IMG Productions, said that as soon as racing fans were barred from coming to the track, his team had to think of ways to recreate the experience for them remotely — including filming horses whenever possible in their stable yards and in workouts to create a sense of familiarity before they headed to the track.
“It's helped us jump probably a couple of years ahead on something we'd be behind on if this hadn't happened,” said Cook.
Of course, racing was one of very few live sports that was able to carry on or return quickly after initial shutdowns in the spring. Olivier Delloye, CEO of France Galop, said that after racing resumed in France, it took just five weeks for handle to regain its 2019 averages. From early June until now, wagering has consistently been up 10 to 20 percent over last year.
“We didn't expect that,” Delloye said. “We were all worried that even if the betting shops would reopen, even if people were opening new digital accounts, people would think of many other things than going to bet on horse racing.”
The panelists are certainly not seeing a cloudless sky ahead, however. Delloye and Derby both worry tremendously about ownership retention, as owners have been hit particularly hard in the wallets by the spring shutdowns. For Cook, questions remain about whether racing will be able to capitalize on its time in the spotlight and turn temporary interest into long-term loyalty once the virus is controlled and other sports return. In the more near term, Harding worries about how many racing authorities can outlast the ongoing disruptions COVID-19 is causing.
'”As hard as it's been in the UK and France, there are some countries where they haven't been able to operate in a manner that's profitable,” he said. “How long that's sustainable is troubling to me. That will have an impact globally.”
Hong Kong has no breeding program of its own, so potential future impacts of the current economic downturn on the international foal crop is another long-term concern.
All in all, Keeneland president-elect Shannon Arvin said she looks to the future with a mixture of realism and optimism, uncertain of what comes next, but hopeful racing's new lessons will carry it through.
“We don't know how long this will last,” she said. “Somebody asked me this morning, 'Will we have fans back in April?' I don't know the answer to that.
“I think there are definitely silver linings to the pandemic, and I think we need to keep looking for them. I think the perseverance that so many in our industry have shown and that resiliency is shining through ad showing us the silver linings. Winston Churchill said, 'Never let a good crisis go to waste.' I think about how the Keeneland sales actually started, which is during World War II, because we weren't able to ship horses up to New York so we started our own sale. Now of course, that's such a critical part of our business as well as a key piece of the industry and the marketplace. I'm excited to see what innovations come of this.”
Collected did an admirable job preserving the memory of his late sire City Zip on the racetrack, and he'll aim to continue that pattern as he sets course on his stallion career at Airdrie Stud.
In the 2020 season premiere of the In The Stud video series, Airdrie Stud's Cormac Breathnach discusses what makes the 7-year-old Collected an attractive prospect for breeders, prior to the stallion's first weanlings going through the ring at this year's fall mixed sales.
Collected started his career on the turf, and he ran second in the Grade 3 Cecil B. DeMille Stakes as a juvenile. The colt was then moved to the dirt at three, where he found his true footing with victories in the G3 Lexington Stakes and Sham Stakes.
At four, Collected became one of the top older males in his division, racking up wins in the G1 Pacific Classic, G2 Californian Stakes, and G3 Precisionist Stakes. He also finished second in the Breeders' Cup Classic at Del Mar. In total, Collected retired with eight wins in 15 starts for earnings of $2,975,500.
The In The Stud series, put together by our friends at EquiSport Photos, features up-and-coming names in the stallion ranks, with a focus on those whose first foals are weanlings of 2020. Paulick Report bloodstock editor Joe Nevills interviews farm staff about the stallion's appealing qualities and what mares might work best with him, while giving viewers and potential breeders a chance to see the stallion on the walk and on the racetrack.
This is the first in a four-part series examining the arrival of female jockeys in American horse racing – why and how they broke in to the sport when they did, and how racing has reacted. In this first installment, we'll learn about the historical context for the start of Kathy Kusner's legal fight to be allowed to ride races.
In 1967 she was arguably one of the finest members, male or female, of the show jumping profession. Her impressive resume already included a gold medal at the 1963 Pan American Games in Brazil, the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo and a silver medal at the 1967 Pan American Games in Canada. Her future plans included representing the United States in Mexico City at the 1968 Olympic Games. She had been racing in unrecognized flat and timber races since she was 16 years old. Prior to joining the United States Equestrian Team, she had been named Horsewoman of the Year by the American Horse Shows Association — at age 21. Three of her most famous horses, Untouchable, Aberali, and Unusual, were Thoroughbreds.
And yet, in 1967 the Maryland Racing Commission repeatedly denied her application for a jockey's license, ultimately forcing her to take her case to court. The commission's primary objection: that Kathy Kusner was incapable of safely and effectively riding a Thoroughbred racehorse.
Today, we can comfortably look back through time and feel some level of shock at such a turn of events. How, we ask ourselves, could such a thing have happened? What was the Maryland Racing Commission thinking, and why did they believe that, in a nation where federal anti-discrimination laws had existed since 1964, they were right in their decision? How did their decision impact the opportunities of female jockeys and, more globally, the world of horse racing today?
As noted by Steven Reiss in The Cyclical History of Horse Racing, by the 1950s and 1960s horse racing had become the leading spectator sport in America. Racing was still controlled by the super-wealthy owners of the top stables, Calumet Farm being the most dominant among them. By 1969 racing was still the leading spectator sport, with auto racing second and college and pro football third. Equine stars of the era were hard-knocking and developed their own intense fan followings – Carry Back, Kelso, Dr. Fager, Damascus, and Round Table among them.
The men on their backs also garnered attention. Racing routinely commanded the front page of sports sections, and top jockeys were as recognized as top athletes in other sports. Johnny Longden appeared on the television show “I Love Lucy” in 1957; Eddie Arcaro became the spokesman for Buick after his retirement; Bill Hartack graced the cover of Time magazine in 1958 and Sports Illustrated twice (in 1956 and 1964). Jockeys were as well-recognized and adored by the public for their athleticism as any other professional sports figures.
It was into this highly visible sporting world controlled by wealthy farms that Kathy Kusner planned her entry.
Kusner's pursuit of a license began in the 1960s, a time when our beliefs in the role of women in the family had a profound impact on the opportunities for women in horse racing. Because events — great and small — rarely exist in a vacuum, there is an interplay back and forth between culture, society, and history. The laws of the United States arose out of our beliefs and goals, and society and popular culture responds to those laws in varying degrees.
During the 1950s America and Russia were at the height of the Cold War. Both nations engaged daily in a deadly game of rhetoric and brinkmanship. The too-familiar presence of a nuclear threat added fear and uncertainty to our lives. As a result, Americans responded by creating a home life intended to create a sense of security against our perceived dangers from the Russians.
The American family evolved into a microcosm of our expectations of society — stable, safe, and above all, predictable. Everyone had their role; the men assumed responsibility for the stability of women's roles in the home. In fact, in the famous Nixon-Khrushchev kitchen debate in Russia in July 1959, Richard Nixon pointed to a dishwasher and said, “In America, we like to make life easier for women.” America was supposedly safe and superior in part because we kept our women happy at home.
By the early 1960s, our nation was basking in the security created by the Eisenhower administration. Hollywood and the mainstream media contributed to that perceived ideal of the post-war modern family. We created homes that were safe little cocoons. Families moved to the suburbs. Men were the breadwinners while safe and happy homes were piloted by women overseeing their 3.5 children. They most certainly could not be found atop a Thoroughbred racing at close to 40 miles an hour.
However, there was trouble brewing in paradise. Even with modern kitchens and household conveniences, women found themselves spending more time than ever before on household labor. More to the point, their role as happy and content members of a stylized family unit began to show cracks around the edges. As noted by Stephanie Coontz in her book The Way We Never Were, in 1956 the Ladies Home Journal devoted an entire issue to “The Plight of the Young Mother.” When McCall's Magazine ran an article titled “The Mother Who Ran Away,” it sold more copies than ever before. It seemed that women may not have been as happy as we thought. Perhaps they wanted to expand the possibilities, both personally as well as professionally, that existed outside the home.
How do we get from a supposedly safe and secure family environment to women launching legal battles in order to risk their lives on racehorses? Although it is both naive as well as short-sighted to search for one or two events that prompted women to consider professional race riding as a career, we can safely mention two specific incidents that must be included in anyone's list of contributing factors.
Kathy Kusner, shown in 1966 aboard Teana after winning the Rose Tree Ladies Plate
The first was the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. The Civil Rights Act encompassed multiple aspects of potential discrimination, such as housing and public segregation, but it also contained a section called Title VII, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of “race, color, religion, sex or national origin.” Except for certain narrow exceptions, women could not be discriminated against in the workplace.
One of those exceptions would rear its head when women applied to be jockeys. Discrimination on the basis of sex is permitted on the basis of a “bona fide occupational qualification (BFOQ) reasonably necessary to the normal operation of that particular business or enterprise.” One example of a BFOQ would be the use of male models to model men's clothing. While Title VII gave Kusner a legal basis to insist she had a right to a jockey's license, the BFOQ gave Maryland Racing Commission a legal avenue to assert that only men possessed the ability to handle racing Thoroughbreds. (Spoiler alert – it didn't work.)
Another event we can look to as influencing women's increasing desire to find gainful employment (and, dare we say, happiness) outside the home, was the publishing of Betty Friedan's “The Feminine Mystique” in 1964. Friedan initially began writing her book as an article reporting her interviews with fellow Smith College alumni. As she interviewed friends from college, she learned of a surprising level of dissatisfaction, even unhappiness, by women who supposedly led lives of security and comfort.
Friedan's influence was noted by Kate Chenery Tweedy in her book, “Secretariat's Meadow.” Her mother, Penny Tweedy, had read Friedan's “The Feminine Mystique” and “identified with its revolutionary ideas.” Kate noted that, years before the birth of Secretariat, “the more (Penny) struggled to fit the wife/mother mold, the more she felt like a failure.” We can easily misconstrue the evidence of this changing attitude from women in the household. The statements of Betty Friedan and Penny Tweedy were most certainly not a universal condemnation of the role of women in the family — they were evidence of women's growing interest in having a choice for their future.
One of the issues facing women in sport is that athletics often serve as a substitute for combat or battle — historically an arena limited to men. We have also used sports to provide a national cultural identity. The rise of gender-separated sports did not threaten that concept. Women's tennis and golf have existed for decades, enjoying a popularity that has ebbed and flowed along with other sports. Horse racing is unique in that men and women compete directly against each other. In the Olympics, only two sports threaten the male-dominated status quo: sailing (the Nacra 17 boat – a high performance catamaran), and equestrian sports.
In 2012, researcher Helena Tolvhed, wrote in International Journal of the History of Sport, a paper rich in both historical and cultural observations, that “Physical activity, strength and assertiveness have generally not been regarded as either commendable or suitable for women, since the possession of such qualities has gone against traditional definitions of womanhood.”
Those arguments will mirror those used against women wanting to be professional jockeys. Tolvhed further notes that competitive sports rose in popularity in the late 1800s, and at that time the “feminine ideal dictated a slender, passive and physically weak body, and this ideal has continued to make women's sport problematic.” Later, during the Cold War, popular culture in Sweden emphasized the differences between the feminine Swedish girls and the muscular communist women.
“Social change was coming to America in the 1960s because of strong men and women of conviction fighting for what they knew was right,” said Jessica Whitehead, curator of exhibits like Right to Ride at the Kentucky Derby Museum. “Women had begun to enter public life in some professions — and even some sports — but horse racing remained a challenge. The force of will the first generation of female riders would bring to the sport eventually ensured their rights, but actually exercising that right…that was a whole other battle.”
David Beecher has a master's degree from Shippensburg University and a PhD from Penn State, where he is currently a lecturer. Dr. Beecher's research and teaching interests are American history with an emphasis on Early American and Civil War History. His dissertation explained the role of Thoroughbred racing in the Antebellum South.
