Do blockbuster horse racing purses encourage cheating?
The child, sitting down with the old man close behind … had been thinking how strange it was that horses who were such fine honest creatures should seem to make vagabonds of all the men they drew about them…
Charles Dickens certainly got that one right. In The Olde Curiosity Shop, the orphaned adolescent Nell and her impoverished grandfather travel to the races at Banbury, in the company of conmen and thieves Condlin and Short. The innocent Nell, observing Condlin pickpocketing the spectators at their puppet show and disappointed at not being able to see the horses, muses on the venality of the humans she sees, a venality so at odds with the majesty of the equines.
Little Nell, we’re with you.
Money may not be the root of all the evil surfacing this week, but the indictments over doping in horse racing announced on Monday have raised questions about whether blockbuster prize money offers not only a big payday for owners and trainers, but also the temptation to win by any means necessary.
Earlier this week, the United States Attorney Southern District of New York revealed indictments against 27 people in the racing industry, including trainers, stable staff, and veterinarians. Grade-1 winning trainers Jorge Navarro and Jason Servis are the most prominent of those arrested. They are charged with administering prohibited substances to horses and conspiring with veterinarians to mislabel and conceal the substances.
Servis trains the ironically-named
Maximum Security, the horse that made history last year when he crossed the wire first in the Kentucky Derby and was then disqualified, for impeding other horses. The colt made history again just last month, when he won the inaugural Saudi Cup, the world’s richest race, worth $20 million.
Voted last year’s champion 3-yearold, Maximum Security is owned and bred by Gary and Mary West. Prior to the Saudi Cup, Coolmore Stud purchased a 50% interest in the colt. Maximum Security was initially slated to run in the Pegasus World Cup at Gulfstream Park at the end of January, but Gary West changed course when the purse for that race was cut from $9m to $3m, with an additional 2% of the purse being allocated for donations to Thoroughbred retirement programs.
“If a horse owner had a shot to win a $20m race or a race for less than $3m … I am not sure why they would run for less,” he told Thoroughbred Daily News. “If The Stronach Group cares so much about horse aftercare, why in the world would they show their concern by reducing the value of their already enormously-reduced purse for the Pegasus by 2% at the expense of owners and try to tell the racing community that is a benefit to them? Where I come from, that doesn’t even pass the laugh test.”
A year ago, Mary West was said to be worth half a billion dollars; the couple sold their telecommunications company West Corporation for $1.6bn in 2006. Their horses have earned more than $34m. The Saudi Cup alone was worth $10m to Maximum Security’s owners.
Justin Nicholson owns and breeds horses in both the US and the UK, his operation far more modest than the Wests’. “Owning horses is very expensive,” says Nicholson. “We make use of all the legal options available to us with regard to vet work, and when you do proper maintenance of a horse, keeping a horse in training in New York costs about $50,000 to $60,000 a year per horse. The purses in New York are great, but you’ve got to win races and pick up other checks just to cover the bills.”
He describes being at the barns on New York’s backstretches and getting “pitched regularly” by veterinarians. “Vets and salespeople come by, telling you that they’ve got a product that can improve a horse’s performance by two or three lengths,” he says. “That can be the difference between winning and fi
nishing fourth.”
There’s no straight line between high prize money and cheating, and as Nicholson points out, in a sport with declining participation, purses have to be an incentive for owners to continue investing in horses. Yet in 2012, following a series of equine fatalities at Aqueduct Racetrack in New York, the state regulator implemented a rule restricting the ratio of claiming price to purse money in claiming races. Horses could not be entered for a claiming price that was less than 50% of the value of the race, minimizing the incentive for trainers to offer unsound horses in the hope of collecting a share of the purse.
Following that and other safety measures, fatalities in New York dropped significantly. That rule was amended recently to allow that ratio to be disregarded upon request “to be permitted on a case-by-case basis for all or a portion of a race meeting, while requiring the track to meet increased requirements to ensure the competitiveness, soundness, and safety of the horses that enter any such race.”
James Gagliano is president and chief operating office of The Jockey Club, the organization that maintains the stud book in the US and that engaged the services of private investigators four years ago to look into the possibility of doping at US racetracks, an investigation that led to this week’s indictments.
Gagliano doesn’t necessarily see a connection between purses and illegal behavior, though he did suggest that racetracks might reconsider how they allocate funds, especially given the notoriously lax security standards at most racetracks. Few stables are equipped with security cameras, and there are few physical barriers to anyone who really wants to get to a stable area.
“We need to ensure that that the competition is good, and that horses and riders are safer,” he says. “Our standards and our regulations are not good enough. Penalties have to be a deterrent, and people have to know that if they violate the regulations, they’re really risking something.”