The past, present and possible future of the horse racing industry in the United States – which is still, by many measures, the biggest in the world – were summed up in a few sentences by trainer Jena Antonucci earlier this year, a few weeks after she became the first woman to saddle the winner of the prestigious Belmont Stakes.
Asked for her views on the recently launched Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority (Hisa), a federal-level body to oversee both racecourse safety and anti-doping measures, Antonucci did not hold back. “It isn’t a secret that there’s different availabilities at different levels,” Antonucci said. “Different pharmaceuticals, different really smart chemists, people looking to gain an edge that you guys [Hisa] have worked so hard to try and neutralise.
“That 8% [strike-rate] trainer, historically, where it looks like I can’t train a racehorse. All of a sudden, wow, she’s winning more or he’s winning more. And it’s not that we’ve done anything different in our practice, it’s just that we’ve been able to walk forward now and know that what I do, I do darn well.”
After years – no, make that decades – of gradual decline, with occasional high-profile calamities to accelerate the slide, the arrival of Hisa less than 12 months ago is perhaps the last great hope for US racing. Many years in the making, the new federal-level authority has finally superseded the state-by-state system of regulation, for both anti-doping measures and track safety, that had frustrated attempts to tackle endemic issues with drugs and welfare standards for decades.
An essential problem with US racing, long acknowledged by many professionals and commentators, was that different jurisdictions were in effect forced to compete with each other to get horses to fill their cards, and faced a direct financial penalty – a drop in their all-important betting handle – if they could not. Tightening the rules, on the use of illicit drugs in particular, was often seen as the best way to drive horses elsewhere.
Hisa’s top-down regulation of safety and anti-doping has changed that dynamic, and not before time. The doping scandal that engulfed US racing in the spring of 2020, when the Grade One-winning trainers Jason Servis and Jorge Navarro were exposed as systematic cheats armed with synthetic, and supposedly undetectable, drugs, arrived close behind the traumatic winter/spring season at Santa Anita in 2019, when racing at the track was eventually suspended after 21 horses died at the track in two months while racing or training.
A little over four years later, however, the US racing industry can look forward to next weekend’s Breeders’ Cup meeting at Santa Anita in an altogether more positive frame of mind. Hisa’s anti-doping powers came into force just five months ago, but Lisa Lazarus, its chief executive, believes it has already started to turn things around. “I think there have been seismic changes in the industry since we launched [the anti-doping strategy] in May,” she says.
“There are two ways we’ve had a meaningful impact. One is that we’ve charged about 150 persons with [anti-doping] violations, both when positives have come back from the lab, and also with possession of substances that they’re not allowed to have on the racetrack. But to some extent more so, the seriousness of the programme, the extensive nature of the substances we’re testing for and the harmonisation between laboratories and very serious punishments for cheating, I think have caused a prophylactic effect.
“People who are going to cheat are always going to cheat, but they’re a minority and I think a whole lot of people prior to us launching, they didn’t really want to cheat and might not cheat always, but just felt like if everyone was getting an advantage, they needed to as well.”
Huntingdon
12.40 Foxey
1.15 Big Changes
1.50 Doc McCoy
2.25 Storminhome (nap)
3.00 Iolaos Du Mou
3.35 General Medrano
4.10 Chase Park
Newcastle
4.15 Valley Of Flowers
4.50 Completed
5.25 Rich Harry
6.00 Amayretto
6.30 Havana Rose
7.00 Pop Favorite
7.30 Basholo (nb)
8.00 Lady Celia
In the past, European trainers sending runners to the Breeders’ Cup have faced a comparable dilemma over whether to use the race-day anti-bleeding medication, Lasix. André Fabre, the only European trainer to win the Breeders’ Cup Classic on dirt, was one of the few who did not succumb.
The Breeders’ Cup organisation has been unstinting in its support for Hisa both before and after its launch, and banned raceday Lasix in its 14 races from the 2021 edition at Del Mar. Post-Hisa, it is now banned in all US stakes races and events for two-year-olds, and the long-term aim is to eliminate its use at all levels of the sport.
Whether or not Lasix was used by some trainers as a “masking” agent, Lazarus believes that the “everyone-else-is-doing-it” attitude is on the retreat, and so too some of the near-miraculous strike-rates posted by some trainers in the past. Most tracks had a barn, or barns, which were notorious for the regularity with which apparently exposed horses, often bought out of claimers, would suddenly improve by a stone or more and run up a sequence of wins.
“That [strike-rate] is one thing that people point to as a metric, and we’re definitely seeing that levelling off,” she says. “It’s still early days, it’s only been five months, but I am hearing and to some extent seeing that some of those outrageous strike-rates are coming down and the people who are playing by the book, they’re doing better. So I do think, after a year, you’ll see a very big difference for a bunch of folks from what it looked like pre-Hisa.”
Recruits to Hisa’s investigations team include Shaun Richards, one of the senior FBI officers on the Servis/Navarro case, to head up a team that is expected to prove as important, if not more so, than the testing programme as time goes on.
The old way of doing things was so thoroughly ingrained in the American way of racing, however, that there are inevitably trainers who mourn its passing. Some tracks, meanwhile, are also concerned about the possible costs attached to maintaining their racing and training surfaces at the required standard.
Hisa’s launch was delayed by legal challenges, while even now, with the new agency up and running, some in the industry are keen to return to what they have always seen as the status quo.
Aintree: 12.50 No But I Will, 1.25 Celebre D’Allen, 2.00 Tommy’s Oscar, 2.35 Jagwar, 3.10 Sonigino (nap), 3.45 General Officer, 4.20 Betty’s Tiara.
Wincanton: 1.10 Bertie Wooster (nb), 1.44 Lock Out, 2.19 Liari, 2.54 Clinton Lane, 3.29 Coconut Splash, 4.04 Mikhailovich, 4.34 Flash Gorcombe.
Clay Higgins, a congressman from Louisiana, recently introduced legislation, with the endorsement of the National Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association (NHBPA), that would in effect put Hisa out of business by returning most of its responsibilities to individual states. The NHBPA is also a key player in a separate action, which claims that the new regime is unconstitutional.
“I’m not concerned at all about the [Higgins] legislation being passed,” Lazarus says. “What does concern me is that there is any person or stakeholder group that thinks going to back to that same state system would be a good thing for racing.
“We’re privileged to be able to race horses in this country and if we want to respect that privilege, we’ve got to keep going forward and not go backwards.
“The Breeders’ Cup is a great opportunity to show our international peers how far we’ve come, and that we are very close to delivering the same sort of level playing field and clean sport and integrity promises that other countries deliver.”
