Category Archives: thoroughbred racing

Bad racing form

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There is something very East German about thoroughbred racing’s state of affairs just as the Triple Crown season commences. Not, specifically, the past year of on-track equine deaths that have been attributed to various circumstances, including drug use. Rather, the fact that the sport’s athletes—the racehorses—have no say in practices meant to boost them toward the winner’s circle.

It’s bad enough when elite human athletes choose to ingest banned substances to get that extra little edge. (And then, busted, express shock that a performance-enhancing drug could possibly have found its way into their system.) But the nagging realization that homo sapiens purposely expose unsuspecting nags to risky, illicit medication goes to a new (lower) level.

That human capacity to manipulate unwitting subjects in dastardly experiments is what sports psychologist Steven Ungerleider detailed in his 2001 book “Faust’s Gold.” From the 1960s through the ‘80s, Ungerleider reported, the former East Germany put more than 10,000 uninformed youngsters on a steroid regimen in a state-mandated quest to dominate worldwide sports events. Which led both to championship performances and long-lasting health problems.

At work then, and now in racetrack cases, was the dishonest circumvention of basic communication. The dirty little secret is that coaches and officials have been known to subject their human charges to various “vitamin” supplements without the athletes’ knowledge. A horse, meanwhile, not only does not know a Triple Crown from an eighth pole, but can’t possibly know if its trainer is spiking the oats.

Responsibility for a failed drug test therefore clearly rests with the trainer, the principal caretaker of his horses and a primary beneficiary of his horses’ success. Thus the ongoing Kentucky Derby suspension of Bob Baffert, whose horses have won that historic race four times and is third in the career earnings list with more than $385 million in purses, but who has a lengthy record of doping violations. Baffert is shouldering the blame for his colt Medina Spirit who, after winning the 2021 Derby, tested positive for a potent corticosteroid used to reduce pain and inflammation.

Obviously Medina Spirit, who died five months later, hadn’t been aware of the betamethasone in his system.

“Does a horse even know he’s in a race?” asked James Ross in a horse-sense post unrelated to doping on theconversations.com. “The answer is likely ‘no.’

“From a horse’s perspective,” Ross wrote, “there are few intrinsic rewards for winning a race. Reaching the end might mean relief from the pressure to keep galloping at high speed and hits from the jockey’s whip, but the same is true for all the horses once they pass the finishing post….there is very little direct, intrinsic benefit to the horse that would motivate it to voluntarily gallop faster to achieve this outcome.”

Logically, then, what incentive would a thoroughbred have to use substances that could endanger its future well-being—even if it somehow understood the possible competitive benefit?

The late Phil Johnson, a Hall of Fame trainer who had been a middle-distance runner in high school, once explained to me that the crucial difference in coaching a human vis-à-vis a horse is the language barrier.

“If I’m training a man to run track,” he said, “I can sit down and talk with him about his career, what he hopes to accomplish and how he can go about it. With a horse, you can’t do that. You can’t sit him down and say, ‘Look, I’m gonna kick you off the team if you don’t shape up.’”

A human runner can be advised of the benefit of extensive training, maybe even offered the suggestion of an illicit chemical enhancement. An equine runner typically is asked to take a brisk but brief morning gallop and have a nice day in the stall. Horses “can get bored a lot quicker [than humans],” Johnson said. “They can’t be told what they’re training for….and what really sours a horse is the boredom of the track.”

So good trainers are careful not to upset their horses, which are at their best when they are happy and eager to run. Thoroughbreds are not driven by the ego-centric possibility of a world record or alluring publicity or defeating a particular rival.

For a stars-in-his-eyes trainer, grasping for more money and more fame, to slip his unassuming horse a mickey—in the fashion of those old East German taskmasters—truly is a definition of “dehumanizing.” The trainer, that is.

What are the odds?

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A math problem: If a thoroughbred racehorse weighs roughly 1,500 pounds, is supported by ankles the size of a homo sapien’s and runs at speeds approaching 45 miles per hour while carrying a human on his back who weighs up to 126 pounds, how long would it take for that horse to break a leg?

Extra credit: If that steed has been administered a drug to mask pain from some previous discomfort, a common practice in the sport, to what extent would that increase the likelihood of serious injury? Could it be calculated that racing on a dirt track, as opposed to grass, further shortens the animal’s life expectancy?

As a lesson on reacting professionally to unexpected distress at an otherwise entertaining event, I show my Hofstra University sportswriting students the 1949 New York Sun newspaper column “Death of a Racehorse.”

“They were going into the turn, and now Air Lift was starting to go,” W.C. Heinz wrote that July day, “when suddenly he slowed, a horse stopping, and below in the stands you could hear a sudden cry, as the rest left him, still trying to run but limping, his jockey—Dave Gorman—half falling, half sliding off.

“‘He broke a leg!’ somebody, holding binoculars to his eyes, shouted at the press box. ‘He broke a leg!’”

Heinz so effectively informed his readers—setting the scene, portraying the various characters’ reactions, describing the predictable result of putting the horse out of his misery—that Ernest Hemingway called the piece “a classic of American literature.”

“Gilman had the halter and Catlett had the gun, shaped like a bell with the handle at the top,” Heinz wrote. “The bell he placed, the crowd silent, on the colt’s forehead, just between the eyes. The colt stood still, and then Catlett, with the hammer in his other hand, struck the handle of the bell. There was a short, sharp sound and the colt toppled onto his left side, his eyes staring, his legs straight out, the free legs quivering.”

They don’t shoot horses at the racetrack any more. But then as now, if a horse breaks a leg, recovery from surgery is virtually impossible. Horses are heavy animals who spend most of their time on their feet, even sleeping, and the lack of movement during potential healing only leads to infection and pain. The only change these days, compared to what H.C. Heinz chronicled 74 years ago, is that thoroughbreds who suffer broken legs in action are put down by a veterinarian’s lethal injection, right there trackside, after an ambulance arrives and a large screen is placed around the proceedings.

And here comes the 2023 Preakness, the second leg of the Triple Crown series, after seven horses died during Kentucky Derby week, two of them on race day, and the Derby’s morning-line favorite, Forte, was scratched hours before post time after veterinarians declared him unfit to run.

Those dark acts recalled 2008—coincidentally, the year that W.C. Heinz died of natural causes at 93—when a filly named Eight Belles, steps after finishing second in the Derby, broke down and was humanely destroyed. Two weeks later, when Big Brown added the Preakness title to his Derby win, the worst fears of casual horse racing fans—and, indeed, the racing industry—were not realized as all 12 thoroughbreds got safely through the event.

Just two years earlier, Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro had shattered his leg in 27 places during the Preakness and, despite surgery and massive efforts to rehabilitate him, was euthanized eight months later.

About that math problem, then: Horseracing experts acknowledge that what makes thoroughbreds so formidable is what makes them so flimsy. Engineered to run fast on spindly little legs by the breeding process, they have been described as a genetic mistake—running too fast with a frame that is too large on legs far too small.

According to The Jockey Club’s Equine Injury Database, between 700 and 800 racehorses are injured and die every year, averaging just under two breakdowns per 1,000 starts. That fact flies under the radar for most people—that is, those of the non-wagering persuasion—who tend to believe that a horse is just a horse. Except during the Triple Crown season, when far more of the public pay attention to the sport.

The Triple Crown format itself has been called into question for three high-stakes races within five weeks even though horse trainers admit that at least 30 days between competitions is preferable. Then again, the sport’s insiders argue that the “tradition” of two weeks between the Derby and Preakness and three between the Preakness and Belmont Stakes is a great part of the charm, separating mere racehorses from super horses—and ought to be maintained as a lifeblood for the sport’s popularity. (Nobody has asked the horses what they think.)

I don’t (as the saying goes) have a horse in this race. But W.C. Heinz summed up some unavoidable feelings, both inside and outside the sport, with his sentence following a description of Air Lift’s euthanization in that 1949 column:

“‘Aw —-‘ someone said.”

A day at the races

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(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

I am not a king, so I cannot claim horse racing is my sport. Nevertheless, on rare occasions I take myself to the track for an afternoon of hoping to channel Nostradamus — without the unreasonable expectation of leaving the place a hundredaire. (At the very best.)

The potential entertainment, alongside timid $2 wagers on a handful of races, includes the occasional surge of adrenaline as the steeds charge down the homestretch but mostly consists of idle chatter with a friend. Because cashing a bet really is nothing more than a magnificent coincidence.

An old horseplayer’s joke goes something like this: I bet on a nag at 10-to-1. He didn’t come in until quarter past two.

On a recent venture to play the ponies—though it always feels like they are playing me—I joined former Newsday racing writer Ed McNamara, who has been to 116 tracks on four continents and fully understands the handicapping truths. Among those: Pursuing winners is a Captain Ahab kind of thing. There is no appeals court when you fail. You need not be in the desert to encounter a mirage.

Anyway, we patronized Aqueduct Racetrack, which is in Ozone Park adjacent to that parking lot known as the Belt Parkway. Not because the relatively shabby, vaguely ghostlike Aqueduct was a first choice, but because of a temporary construction-related closure at Belmont Park, the far more pleasantly rustic layout on the Queens-Nassau line.

Weirdly, the New York Racing Association had labeled its fall meeting “Belmont Park at the Big A,” a geographical misnomer something like marketing the local NFL team as “the New York Giants of East Rutherford, New Jersey.”

The Aqueduct crowd, actually just a sparse assembly, was overwhelmingly male, of the older variety, several chewing on unlit cigars, mostly positioning themselves in the immediate vicinity of the lobby’s betting terminals. Outside, on a lovely, clear autumn day, while jets lazily ascended from nearby Kennedy Airport, the seats were virtually empty.

The day’s adventure began by purchasing a $20 voucher at an impersonal touch-screen terminal, since there was no evidence of the betting windows where human beings used to take one’s cash. Simple enough, but just two races into my attempts at clairvoyance, I failed to retrieve my voucher with its remaining worth of $16.

At that point, I had lost one $2 gamble, then won $6.40 off a second $2 try, which briefly had me feeling like Jesse James. Until I realized, too late, that the aforementioned $16 was gone without the fun of investing it in further efforts to pin the tail on a donkey.

So, I bought another $10 voucher.

I had approached the day’s challenge scientifically, arriving with my wife’s choices culled from morning entry lists and based, she said, on those horses’ names that best telegraphed “attitude”: Arrogant Lady, Arctic Arrogance, Alpine Queen and Shortsinthewinter.

My own criterion was the highly sophisticated technique of playing hunches. Java Buzz in the second race (he was my one winner, a figurative caffeine jolt that quickly dissipated), Prairie Fire in the fourth, Wanna Winna in the fifth, Fouette in the sixth. Should I have considered the horses’ past performances? Interpreted their post positions as lucky numbers? Maybe zeroed in on those being ridden by prominent jockeys?

“It’s a horse race,” Ed counseled. “Not a jockey race.”

The day’s consequences: Arrogant Lady led until the final 200 yards but finished second. Arctic Arrogance led until the final 150 yards but faded to second. Alpine Queen came in fourth. Prairie Fire flamed out, stumbling from the gate and immediately giving up the chase. Wanna Winna was no winna; sixth. Fouette lumbered home fourth. Shortsinthewinter, who went off at 57-to-1 odds, would have paid $114 if he had won. Alas, he was eighth, frozen out in a field of 10.

You see the pattern. The whole exercise was something like climbing Mount Everest without Sherpa guides, hand holds or ropes. Ed and I, our good visit done, quit before the last couple of races, playing the odds of beating the traffic home on the Belt. Lost that one, too.

And they’re (not all of them) off…

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This is about thoroughbred racing. So play your hunches.

Would the sport be better off—for the horses’ health, for wider popularity, for more compelling matchups—if the Triple Crown series altered its schedule to provide more time between races? Or would discarding the demanding format devalue the accomplishment of a three-peat champion?

It’s an old discussion, revived because the handlers of Rich Strike, the darkest of horses before he won the Kentucky Derby, chose to bypass the Preakness on the not-uncommon intuition that their suddenly valuable steed needed at least a month of recovery time.

For decades, the Derby has been followed just two weeks later by the Preakness and, three weeks after that, by the Belmont Stakes. Plenty of the industry’s principals—trainers, owners, bettors—routinely argue that the galloping five-week campaign sets the standard for greatness. Even while acknowledging that it might not be thoroughly sound horse sense.

Handicap this: In the 147 years that all three races have existed, only 13 horses have won the Triple Crown, clear evidence of the difficulty involved. There is a yearning to maintain tradition, but it must be noted that the Triple Crown order has moved around a bit, with the Preakness run before the Derby 11 times—and twice on the same day.

More relevant to this question of whether the Crown’s current schedule is too taxing is the Jockey Club statistic that thoroughbreds, on average, race only about half as often as they did 46 years ago—5.95 times throughout 2021, 10.23 times in 1975.

The Baltimore Sun last week quoted Kathy Guillermo, senior vice president of the animal rights organization PETA, expressing hope that Rich Strike’s absence from the Preakness “will prompt the racing industry to modernize the demanding Triple Crown schedule by extending the time between the three races to less-inhuman intervals of one-month each.”

Rather than the horses’ well-being, though, what keeps resurrecting debate about the taxingly compressed Derby-Preakness-Belmont schedule are the long gaps between Triple Crown champs—25 years from 1948 (Citation) to ’73 (Secretariat), 37 years from ’78 (Affirmed) to 2015 (American Pharoah).

Long-time Newsday colleague Ed McNamara, a true racing connoisseur who has visited 116 tracks on four continents, noted that Hall of Fame trainer D. Wayne Lukas is among several horse people who long ago suggested the Preakness be pushed back from the third Saturday of May to Memorial Day and the Belmont moved from early June to July 4. Still, such a change never has been taken under advisement by any of racing’s officials, and McNamara envisions no benefit would result to any of the three races.

That includes the Preakness. Still run in the fairly decrepit, 152-year-old Pimlico Race Course, and so often left with a small field in the wake of the Derby spectacle, the Preakness has faced hints of being relocated and, in the mid-1980s, of being replaced on the Triple Crown calendar.

In 1985, a swaggering New Jersey builder named Robert Brennan lured Derby champion Spend a Buck away from the Preakness with a $2.6 million bonus to run his Jersey Derby at the rebuilt Garden State Park in Cherry Hill. Brennan strongly suggested his race would become a permanent stand-in for the Preakness—“I do believe there will some adjustments made in the industry in relation to the Triple Crown series,” he said.

On the contrary, no Derby winner ever tried the Jersey Derby again, Garden State Park closed in 2001 and Brennan that year was found guilty of money-laundering and bankruptcy fraud, winding up in prison for a decade.

Meanwhile, the Preakness persists, as well as contentions that the middle race could be better served if it weren’t so closely tailgated by the Derby. A Plan B putting at least three weeks between the races theoretically would guarantee not only the presence of the Derby winner at Pimlico but also that winner’s most obvious challengers, horses that had introduced themselves to the hard-core and casual fan in the Derby. And therefore the potential for Triple Crown rivalries that could endure through the series.

Might all that ramp up bigger crowds, increased TV audiences, massive wagering? More clout for the sport? Or does the Triple Crown’s traditional appreciation for abbreviation—three races in five weeks—prevail, a folkloric commitment to the superhorse crucible?

OK. Here’s $2 on the status quo. Just a feeling.

Horse talk

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What if you could get a tip on this week’s Belmont Stakes straight from the horse’s mouth? Valuable inside dope of how the nags are feeling? How they think workouts have gone? Whether there might be an intimidation factor favoring an opponent?

This assumes, beyond the old saw, that horses can talk. Also, that they would want to share any personal information. A half-century of work as a sports journalist taught me that elite athletes don’t necessarily care to offer their thoughts about the big game. To inquiries regarding insight on one’s performance, a common jock’s retort often goes something like, “You saw it.”

In 2008, when Big Brown was a major sports story—winner of the Kentucky Derby and Preakness leading up to the final leg of the Triple Crown at Belmont—the satiric news source The Onion spoofed Big Brown’s “arrogant refusal to speak to reporters.”

No bon mots from him. The flip side of such silence was offered by Frank Vuono, whose 16w marketing company was handling Big Brown’s lucrative licensing deals at the time. “There is no question we attach human qualities” to fine thoroughbreds, Vuono told me—traits such as courage, intelligence, honesty and heart. And the fact the horses “don’t talk back,” he said, “makes them perfect clients” and, as an added bonus, keeps them from offending anyone.

My late Newsday colleague Bill Nack once described the “borderline mythic” treatment of 1973 Triple Crown winner Secretariat being due, in part, to the fact that he was “this gorgeous mute who came along who was totally honest; all you had to do was feed him and train him and he’d do what you asked.”

Just as humans often are granted the appellation of “hero,” based solely on the ability to hit a home run, dunk a basketball or make an unexpected game-saving play, so do four-legged winners of sporting contests tend to be somehow admired. They don’t go into burning buildings to save babies, yet they often are ascribed the qualities of goodness and determination. As if an inbred ability to run fast indicated a never-give-up valor.

One of my first racetrack assignments in the fun-and-games business resulted from my curiosity regarding the difference in training processes between human and equine racers. A horse, I was reminded then by the best thoroughbred coaches, doesn’t know a Triple Crown from an eighth pole. They can’t be coaxed to workouts based on the lure of world records or fame. They can’t be threatened with, as one trainer put it, “Look. I’m going to kick you off the team if you don’t shape up.”

Still, there’s the Mr. Ed thing, the anthropomorphization of critters, the urge to sort of put ourselves in the animals’ shoes. To suppose what they might be thinking.

A recent takeoff in the New Yorker presented this year’s Kentucky Derby in the purported words of the race’s participants. So Country House, eventually declared the winner of that controversial event, described his confusion in how “everyone was running like mad. On my back was a tiny man dressed like a bumblebee. He had a stick and he was hitting my ass. Which was weird.”

The piece obviously was done for laughs, with Long Range Toddy admitting, “I don’t love running. I think walking at a brisk pace can give you the same kind of cardio with much less stress on your body.” And War of Will making the point that “my name is Greg, not War or Will. I don’t know what that even means or why people call me that.”

Not to disparage horse sense, but the truth is that thoroughbreds—1,500 pounds of muscle and speed—have brains the size of a walnut. They run 35 miles per hour on ankles the size of human ankles, with men on their backs—not a recipe for relaxed sprinting—so it is pretty clear that what you see on the track is what you get. And don’t expect an interview process would produce any more enlightenment about the race’s turning point or strategy or horse expectations.

Maybe a neigh or a whinny. But anyone claiming more from the horse’s mouth is hearing voices. Anyway, when Maximum Security became the first Kentucky Derby winner to be disqualified for interference in the race’s 145-year history, I strongly suspect he would have had only one thing to say.

“No comment.”

Playing the ponies (or vice versa)

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There is an old horseplayer joke that goes something like this: I bet on a horse at 10-to-one. He didn’t come in until quarter past two.

I was reminded of this—and other wagering wisdom imparted over the years—during a recent day at the races. “You take a dart,” one veteran patron of the betting windows once counseled, “and you throw it at the board.”

You blindfold yourself and try to pin the tail on the donkey.

But who doesn’t like a challenge? About once every year or two, my friend Tony and I venture to lovely Belmont Park—the green, almost rustic arboretum covering 430 acres on the edge of New York City—for an afternoon of idle chatter and the dare of channeling Nostradamus, with the full understanding that we are unlikely to become hundredaires. At best.

There is no point in affecting a hard-bitten railbird’s disguise by, say, not shaving and purchasing a big cigar. Or buying a Daily Racing Form to pore over the lineage of the steeds and the successes of various trainers and jockeys. None of that will help.

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Over the course of six races last week, the only four-leaf clover I found was a nag named Warriors Diva, who paid a measly $3.80 on a $2 bet. One other choice, Dot Matrix, finished second. (The official race chart said that Dot Matrix “stalked the winner from the two path and proved no match.”) Another, Mean Season, came in third.

At least those “almosts” were better than One Nice Pal, who finished 10th in a 12-horse field. (Official chart: “Chased the pace along the inside, forwardly placed under encouragement from three furlongs out, swung just off the inside for home. Folded.”) Among my other $2-to-win bets, Kettles On was fourth, Graceful Gal sixth, Singsong ninth. (Singsong also “folded”).

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In fact, even before the racetrack bugler had played his little “Assembly” ditty for the first time, calling the horses to the post, Tony lost $3 on Preferred Parking and I parted with $3 on General Admission.

On one of my occasional thoroughbred racing assignments for Newsday over the years, a Belmont regular recited to me the gambler’s prayer: “Dear God, let me break even. I need the money.” He also recommended that the first question to put to a handicapper is, “What kind of car do you drive?”

Another teaching moment, about how the track is not a consequence-free zone, came years ago during an interview for a story about former Giants running back Joe Morrison who, at the time, was in the midst of his NCAA coach-of-the-year season at the University of South Carolina.

Among the musings of Morrison, who was a horse owner and racing fan on the side, was a recollection of his first trip to the track during his playing career. He had been invited to look into some mutuel windows with a service station owner he had befriended, and “the first time I went to the races with him,” Morrison said, “he threw his pocket change on the floor of the car just before we got ready to walk into the track. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘We have to make sure we have toll fare home.’”

When I was a mere proverbial knee-high sports journalist, dispatched to help with coverage of the Belmont Stakes, I was appalled to learn that there was a betting window right there in the press box. Naivete is not a sin, but I had assumed that fellow ink-stained wretches were too busy with their unbiased reporting on the races to indulge in an activity that required all-out rooting (quietly, be assured) for a particular result.

It turns out that thoroughbred reporters aspire to be thoroughbred reporters because they are as drawn to those windows as to the sport’s characters and story lines. I’ve come to accept that reality as an innocent enough way of hedging their bets: Get paid to write about the ponies, while engaging in what the Brits and Australians refer to as “punting skills.”

Nevertheless. I am only able to rationalize my participation in the gambling aspect of thoroughbred racing by retaining a rank amateur’s dread. Handicapper Harvey Pack used to tell neophytes that a horseplayer must be “confident and resilient. “ I would suggest “fearful.”

My proposal: Instead of having a race-track official on the other side of that window to accept your down payment on the great riches that theoretically will result from your powers of prediction, why not just have a small toilet in there? You put in your money and flush.

All of this is not to say that I can’t justify forfeiting around $20—always just $2 bets on eight to 10 races—as the price of entertainment for a day of occasional adrenaline rushes and the fellowship of disappointment.

But I know how my trip would come out in the unique prose of racing charts: The Dilettante started sluggishly, rushed up momentarily, briefly threatened but quickly came under pressure, wandered and fell back steadily. Folded.

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