GOING, GOING ...

               The Phoenix horse track Turf Paradise halted its “live” season and shut down all operations on March 16, but to regulars of its Players Club race book, including me, the season effectively ended several weeks before. That was when TV simulcasts and betting on the races at Santa Anita Park in California and Gulfstream Park in Florida, hosts of the nation’s best winter seasons, were cut off to the track and its satellite sites, leaving a menu that was thin, to say the least.

               The cause of the shutdown was a dispute between the company doing the televising and the racing authorities in several states, including Arizona. The beef, which continues, is over money, of course, but a principle of sorts also supposedly is involved, namely the provider’s contention that entities that are OTB only, conducting little or no actual racing, should pay more for their feeds than bricks-and-mortar tracks.

 It’s an issue that’s of zero concern to race goers, but that seems to make no difference to the people immediately involved. The TV provider, Monarch Content Management, is owned by Frank Stronach, the Canadian zillionaire who also owns the Santa Anita, Gulfstream, Golden Gate Fields, Laurel and Pimlico tracks. If anyone should be interested in promoting racing generally it’s he. Ditto, locally, for the people calling the shots at the AZ tracks.

If either group had chanced to look around the Players Club right after the cutoff, it would have seen that business was down by about half from previous levels, which themselves were less than robust. Then the virus orders kicked in and the total shutdown now enters its third month. I think it’s safe to say that some of the people who are locked out won’t come back when business reopens. Once broken, a habit can be tough to resume.

If ever there were a sport that doesn’t need self-inflicted wounds, it’s horse racing. Time was when it was among America’s Big Three sporting enterprises, along with baseball and boxing. Now it’s not on any such list, a nonentity that most people notice but one day a year-- Kentucky Derby day.

Racing has much to recommend it. It’s long in color and tradition, and few things match the excitement of a neck-to-neck homestretch duel, especially when you have a few bucks riding on one of the necks. At the same time the sport is an acquired taste, the serious pursuit of which requires the sort of study that’s out of favor (way, way out) these days. Its clientele is aged and aging, a trend that shows no sign of turning. If it weren’t for the tax revenues the sport provides to the 38 U.S. states that permit it, it’d be much reduced from its current state.

But racing suffers particularly from problems of its own making. One is the recurring concern over equine safety that reached a recent-year peak in the winter of 2018-19, when 30 horses died from race-related injuries within a few weeks at Santa Anita. A lengthy investigation into the cause of the outbreak produced no firm conclusions, and the spotlight dimmed, but a remedy was there all along: synthetic track surfaces. These mixes of sand, synthetic fibers, rubber and wax have been in use for more than a dozen years at Arlington Park near Chicago and Woodbine in Toronto, with fatality rates consistently coming in at about half the usual rate of two for every 1,000 starts. It is, in fact, a solution in search of anyone willing to apply it.

Safety, as well as the integrity of the sport, also is involved in the recurring scandals over the use of illicit drugs that hype equine performance or keep ailing horses on the tracks. In March a Federal indictment was returned against 27 individuals, including seven trainers and 11 veterinarians, for a long-running scheme to illegally “dope” more than 100 horses in a half-dozen states. One of the trainers named is Jason Servis, whose colt, Maximum Security, crossed the finish line first in the 2019 Kentucky Derby only to lose it to a stewards’ ruling. Maximum Security went on to win four of his next five starts and $12 million in prize money.

At least equally disturbing was the  report that Justify, the 2018 Triple Crown winner, had tested positive for the banned drug scopolamine, a bronchial dilator and heart stimulant, after he won the Santa Anita Derby that year, but that California authorities sat on the information, allowing the colt to qualify for the Triple Crown races. Taking up the matter in closed-door meetings later in the year, the California Racing Board gave the horse a pass on grounds that an active ingredient in the drug might have been naturally ingested in jimson weed, which can get into horse feeds and bedding. It never revealed the positive test. The New York Times article that exposed the episode quoted experts as saying that nibbling the weed wouldn’t produce nearly the concentration of the drug that was found in Justify’s system.

 Justify’s trainer, as well as that of American Pharaoh, which won the Triple Crown in 2015, was Bob Baffert, for two decades the sport’s most-prominent personage. While he’s outspoken on many issues, Baffert has been mum on this one. It well might be concluded that the “too big to fail” dictum applies here.

 At the center of racing’s woes is the hodgepodge of rules and rulers that govern it; it shares with boxing the distinction being the sport that needs the most regulation but gets the least. Each state that permits it has its own governing board, and these differ greatly in honesty and competence.  It might have used the suspensions of this virus period to get its house in order, but no such thing is occurring. Meantime, the number of people who care continues to diminish.