A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION

It is the three-year anniversary of the indictment of a cadre of twenty-seven desperadoes who colluded to manufacture, distribute and inject thoroughbred and standardbred racehorses internationally with the invisible substance SGF-1000 and other synthetic mixtures concocted from as far away as Mexico. Purportedly the plans included a laboratory in the middle east to manufacture and service global horse racing.??Now, thanks to the Meadowlands CEO Jeff Gural, who started a clean-up campaign more than a decade ago and teamed with two concerned members of the Jockey Club to create a Federal investigation resulting in most of the culprits doing sizeable sentences in Federal prisons. A monumental achievement!??An achievement that three men dedicated to a serious problem within our daily racing and a hired gun, “five stones Intelligence) (5Si) were able to bring the case of twenty-seven in-house criminals to their just deserts!

Bob Ewalt, correspondent for the Blood Horse, in a recent article, taps the memory of Jockey Club President Jim Gagliano in a brief accounting of the episode and Federal trials.

For those of us who have lived and worked within the barbed-wire confines of the backstretches of America, we know that there are as many new stories in a day as the sweet smell of horse manure on a cool misty morning.??But the plot of this nascent story had been growing bigger “badder” and bolder for quite some time and well beyond the ears of the alphabet groups tasked with our survival.

It has been decades since many race track managements concerned themselves with the collective security of the sport aspect of the business.??Disbanding the Thoroughbred Racing & Protective Bureau, which was a national network of mainly ex-FBI people based at most of the A, B & C levels of race courses, left a serious vacuum of professional policing that fell upon ill-equipped state racing commissions and industry appointed “million-dollar men.” Two of the latter never lasted a year. The demise of the TRPB severed an important mosaic of communication by which to monitor the “bad guys”… and they knew it!??The TRPB was an effective team that prevented most of what we now have.??They were a direct extension of the stewards stand and a policing interface with management to every local and state investigative agency across the North America. As a steward, racing secretary, VP, I experienced a better connectivity with the daily conduct of the sport; highly essential for an effective operation.?

That brings us back to the current options. As Jim Gagliano stated in the Ewalt piece, “There would be no HISA without the indictments.”??Quite true!??And there would be no mention of lifeboats until the Titanic was sinking and there weren’t enough.??There was no more need for astronauts if the “flyboys” hadn’t taken control of the Apollo 13 module when the autopilot failed on its return to earth.??

But HISA is on “lift off” and overcompensation for an industry problem can be??“scary” for some. Size matters when 90 % of America’s member tracks face a $74 million-dollar annual budget for a politically (FTC) imposed entity that attacked horse racing’s 300-year-old culture in its first act of business. Once enacted these actions cannot be appealed or reversed by its members.??

America’s race tracks are in many states with varying mini-cultures. Bureaucratization of those cultures will be long and difficult for some members of our sport.

Once adopted, recourse is no longer an option... It’s no longer a matter of barbed-wire!?

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