The Jockey Club has announced it will push for federal regulation of horse racing if the vast majority of racing states do not adopt a set of uniform medication rules that has already been endorsed by a handful of major racing organizations,according to the chairman of The Jockey Club.
Horse racing at Churchill Downs
The chairman of the Jockey Club called for the veterinary records of every horse competing in this year’s Triple Crown races to be made public immediately with a goal of ensuring that horses are sound and not under the influence of unnecessary drugs.
© 2014 by Jarrett Campbell
Ogden Mills “Dinny” Phipps, the owner of the racing and breeding operation Phipps Stable, made the remark after a separate speaker at the Round Table had presented the results of a recent poll of horseplayers and casual fans suggesting widespread support for uniform rules.
Phipps displayed a chart showing that eight racing states, mostly on the Eastern seaboard, already have vowed to adopt the rules by Jan. 1. Another four states, including Kentucky and Illinois, are in the process of securing an endorsement, Phipps said, leaving 17 states, including Florida and Texas, without a position on the uniform rules.
“Ladies and gentlemen, that is not uniformity,” Phipps said. “The racing poll you heard about today told us in no uncertain terms how both casual fans and avid horseplayers feel about medication and the integrity of competition. Clearly, our wagering handle and our business is being compromised. The international community is watching us closely and still wondering why this country allows such liberal medication policies.”
Over the past several years, as The Jockey Club has pushed for medication reform, the organization’s officials have refrained from explicitly supporting federal oversight of the sport, which is a sensitive topic in the racing industry. Racing is regulated on the state level, and many critics of federal regulation fear that a federal framework could be too easily exploited by opponents of racing or gambling, or by animal-welfare organizations that support a ban on racing altogether.
Resistance to federal regulation also has been mounted by many entrenched state organizations that owe their existence and funding to the current regulatory framework. Those organizations are expected to continue to oppose federal oversight of the sport, but Phipps’s statement seemed to introduce the threat that those organizations must toe The Jockey Club’s line on reform or face dissolution.
Robert Green, who presented the results as a principal in the polling group Penn Schoen Berland, said the results of the survey prove that medications “aren’t just a threat to the finish line, but also the bottom line,” because the survey respondents indicated that they were not betting as much on races in which illegal medications were believed to play a factor.
Green said the poll respondents were directed to the survey by the Horseplayers Association of North America and the sheet-maker Thoro-Graph, whose founders administer Internet sites that often encourage spirited commentary about drugs in racing.
While support for such a concept as “uniform rules” seems logical to an extreme, state racing regulations evolved in an era when the shipment of horses across state lines was not nearly as prevalent or easy as it is now. During that time, state horsemen’s organizations largely protected their own turf or supported regulations that might not be in place in other states, and the result was a hodgepodge of rules among the 38 jurisdictions that allow some form of pari-mutuel racing.
The trend also resulted in a gradual liberalizing of medication use in horse racing, in line with a larger movement in both human and veterinary medicine over the past two decades, in which medications increasingly play a role in medical diagnoses.
In the past year, however, support has coalesced around a set of uniform rules devised by a committee of representatives of a wide cross section of racing organizations, including horsemen’s groups and Jockey Club-supported organizations.
The rules allow for the controlled therapeutic use of 24 medications and prohibit the race-day administration of all drugs but furosemide, the anti-bleeding medication that is legal to use in all North American racing jurisdictions. The race-day use of furosemide is prohibited in most other racing jurisdictions around the world.
Supporters of a ban on the race-day use of furosemide, including The Jockey Club, have run up against steadfast resistance from horsemen’s groups, which point to a study sponsored by The Jockey Club that indicated that the drug was effective in mitigating severe bleeding in horses. The study simultaneously suggested that the drug is overused, leading to split opinions over the study’s most pertinent conclusion.
While The Jockey Club still supports a ban on the race-day use of furosemide, commonly known as Lasix, the organization last year decided to remove language calling for a ban from the model-rules document in order to allow the rules to gain support among horsemen.
The chairman of the Jockey Club, one of horse racing’s most influential groups, called Monday for the veterinary records of every horse competing in this year’s Triple Crown races to be made public immediately. He said the goal was to ensure that the horses were sound and not under the influence of unnecessary drugs and that the races were run safely and fairly.
The club’s chairman, Ogden Mills Phipps, the owner of last year’s Kentucky Derby victor, Orb, said the Jockey Club had already endorsed federal legislation that would put the United States Anti-Doping Agency in charge of the sport, which has been unable to eradicate a pervasive drug culture.
He said it was vital, however, to take meaningful steps now that demonstrate to the public that the sport takes restoring integrity seriously.
“It can bring greater credibility to the races that define our sport at a time when millions are watching,” Phipps said in a statement, referring to the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes.
Two years ago, New York authorities required trainers with Belmont Stakes entries to submit veterinary records for their horses beginning on the Wednesday before the race. Last year, it made those records available on its website, and has continued to do so in its marquee races like the Travers Stakes and the Wood Memorial.
Last year, the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission enacted 24-hour surveillance on the 20 Derby horses and required their trainers, their veterinarians and others to log in and log out. Syringes were collected, and expanded drug testing was in place.