Cleaning up horse racing's drug culture won't be easy
The new sheriff in town is going to need more ammunition.
Charlie Scheeler, the first chairman of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA), recognizes that cleansing his sport’s drug culture will be a “steep climb.”
Robust rules enforcement will require more resources. Penalty structures now in place must be revised if they are to deter bad actors. Governance by 38 separate jurisdictions has been a recipe for inconsistency and inefficiency.
Bob Baffert may not be the least of Scheeler’s problems, but that list is long. More than a year before HISA formally takes charge of equine drug testing and enforcement (lawsuits permitting), getting everyone on the same page involves many moving parts and some that are stubbornly intractable.
“Until now, horse racing has been governed like the old revolutionary era Articles of Confederation, where the states called the shots, made the rules and you ended up with some results, and you see them here (with Baffert) which are sometimes consistent, sometimes inconsistent,” Scheeler said on a media teleconference Wednesday afternoon.
“It’s going to be the job of our organization to address those concerns to implement standards, rules and enforcement mechanisms across the entire country, apply them uniformly and try to make a sport which is safer, which is clean, and which is fair...”
The agenda is ambitious, but the status quo means stagnation. As other forms of gambling continue to expand — 22 states now have legalized sports betting — thoroughbred racing continues to contract.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of races conducted in the United States had dropped by more than half over three decades. The number of registered foals has fallen 14 times in the last 15 years. Propped up by public subsidies and purses inflated by revenues earmarked from “racinos” and the like, racing’s challenges have recently been compounded by a spate of catastrophic injuries and the drug issues of its most prominent trainer.
“Quite frankly, one of the reasons that horse racing has lost popularity is that many have been turned off by the fact that you have so many horses breaking down during the course of the racing season,” Scheeler said. “It’s our job to make racing safer for the horses and, of course, also for the jockeys. And it’s our premise that if we do so, then horse racing will have a chance to regain some of the popularity that it has enjoyed throughout its long and storied past.”
To that end, HISA and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) have been developing a set of baseline standards intended to streamline and in some cases stiffen penalties for those horsemen inclined to seek competitive advantages through chemistry.”
“We intend to have a vigorous component to follow up on the rumors that you hear in the barn, or the syringe that’s found in the stall, or something along those lines,” Scheeler said. “What you have to come up with is a comprehensive package that will significantly decrease usage, because some folks just look at it not as, ‘Should I play fair or not?’ but as a very cold-blooded, cost-benefit situation and we have to have them see that the costs, or the risks, are greater than the rewards.”
The penalties now in place have not made for much of a deterrent. Baffert was fined $5,000 for Charlatan’s positive test in the Arkansas Derby, but had the horse’s $300,000 winner’s purse restored upon appeal. Though Medina Spirit’s Kentucky Derby positive was the trainer’s fifth drug violation in a 365-day span, he has yet to serve a state-ordered suspension for any of them. (Churchill Downs and the New York Racing Association have suspended Baffert independent of state commissions.)
Similarly, it seems strange that John Sadler was able to saddle Rock Your World in the Kentucky Derby three days after the California Horse Racing Board filed a complaint against him for a drug test failure confirmed while the trainer was already on probation.
Sadler’s issues have remained mostly under the radar, obscured by Baffert’s continuing saga, but the three drug violations for which he was sanctioned in the spring of 2019 brought his career total to 39 according to records kept by the Association of Racing Commissioners International. Medina Spirit is Baffert's 33rd.
While Baffert is banned from Saturday’s Belmont Stakes, Sadler is again scheduled to saddle Rock Your World for the last of racing’s Triple Crown classics. Seems like another case that calls for streamlining.
“There’s actually up to 38 different sets of penalties,” Scheeler said. “So, first and foremost, we need to make them uniform and, second, we need them to have a sufficient deterrent, so that the people who would violate these rules think twice or three times, and ultimately don’t do it.”
Tim Sullivan: 502-582-4650, tsullivan@courier-journal.com; Twitter: @TimSullivan714