OFF TRACK

 

               If you follow this space you know I used to share my Kentucky Derby picks and thoughts the week of the annual Big Race, but I haven’t done it the last two years and won’t be doing it this year. That’s because, again, I won’t have seen most of the prep races leading up to it.

               I’m still a fan of thoroughbred racing, and haven’t gotten lazy (about that, at least). It’s that a dispute between Arizona racing authorities and the Stronach Group have denied Arizona betting outlets the simulcasts from Stronach’s Santa Anita and Gulfstream Park tracks, the sport’s two most important winter venues. The beef is in its third year with no end in sight and the racing public, or what’s left of it, be damned. Those guys make Major League Baseball look good.

               And that’s just one of the black eyes the erstwhile Sport of Kings has inflicted upon itself in recent years, a strange practice for an enterprise that’s in bad shape to begin with. The sport’s biggest problem is an intractable one: an aging fan base that goes against the grain of our quick-thrill culture by poring over the tiny numbers in the past-performance charts in an effort to make intelligent bets.  Rather than allowing us to peter out in peace, it heaps indignities upon us, almost without number.

               Exhibit A on that list is the Derby itself, the one race the general public has when it’s having only one. Amazingly, the horses that crossed the finish line first in two of the race’s last three editions have not turned out to be the winner, shaking confidence in what once was a verity. Maximum Security, the 2019 winner, was taken down for interfering with other horses by briefly veering out of his lane in the home stretch. Last year’s winner, Medina Spirit, was disqualified just last month when tests revealed he'd had a banned substance in his system.

               Question marks remain over both outcomes. Disqualifying actions usually are blatant and obvious, but in the Maximum Security case Churchill Downs stewards examined race tapes for 22 minutes before announcing their verdict, as did millions at home via TV replays. Their decision was heartily booed at the track and elsewhere, mostly because a lot more people held winning tickets on Maximum Security at 9-to-2 odds than on the 65-to-1 winner Country House, but also because it’s rare that the winner of any big race is taken down. That hadn’t happened in the previous 144 runnings of the race. That Medina Spirit’s penalty was almost a year in coming made some question its formulation.  My advice for the next Derby, on May 7: Hold all tickets.

               The Medina Spirit verdict, and the animal’s sudden death in December (the announced cause was a heart attack), took on further import because the animal’s trainer was Bob Baffert. If the race had stood it would have been Baffert’s seventh Kentucky Derby victory, a record. Good-looking, glib and accessible, and with a distinctive shock of white hair, he’s been the sport’s dominant figure of this century, not only in the winner’s circles but also on the sports pages. There he’s been a proponent of stricter health and safety rules for the sport.

               That stance, however, has been in conflict with Baffert’s history of doping-violation penalties (30 by one published account) and the high number of horses that have died in his care. He’s currently under suspension in New York and Kentucky, and the most buzz as another Derby approaches is over what will happen to the half-dozen prospects in his barn. Like many a very-rich man, Baffert has fought actions against him by suing everyone in sight and appealing adverse rulings. He’s doing that now in an effort to get back his Kentucky license in time for the Louisville classic. Given the sport’s record of convoluted legal proceedings, he just might succeed.

It's worth noting here while Baffert can’t race in Kentucky or New York he’s still golden in California, where he’s the leading-money-winning trainer at the Santa Anita winter meeting.  In late 2020 the U.S Congress, in a rare, bipartisan display, passed the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act, which would unify thoroughbred racing’s rules and administration under a single, national agency. When it’s supposed to take effect July 1, things like that won’t happen.

The law was a long time coming, mostly because entrenched interests in many of the 38 states that permit the sport—and create a jurisdictional hodgepodge-- wouldn’t let it. What turned the tide were the training or racing deaths of 24 horses at the 2018-19 Santa Anita winter meeting, something that stirred an uproar beyond parochial circles.

 Congress created the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA) to enforce the new law and make it part of the Federal Trade Commission. Its jurisdiction would extend to track safety and maintenance, injury-data collection, disciplinary processes and sanctions and drug policy and testing. A crucial part would have taken drug testing out of the hands of the states and given it to the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), the nation’s preeminent, independent testing lab.

But racing being racing a smooth transition was unlikely, and in December it was announced that the two entities had failed to come to agreement and suspended negotiations, leaving HISA to find a testing agency that, by statute, is “equal in qualification.”  There is no such agency, which puts the entire project in doubt. That would satisfy industry groups such as the Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association, which has filed suit to block it.

It's not yet clear how it’ll all come out, but it’s never been a mistake to expect the worst from the sport. As Paddy Bauler, the late Chicago saloon keeper and alderman once said about his home city, maybe racing “ain’t ready for reform.”