Safety And Collaboration Key Topics At 2024 Jockey Club Round Table Conference

As it has in virtually every conversation that involves horse racing over the past year, safety played a central role at the 72nd annual Jockey Club Round Table Conference in Saratoga Springs, New York Thursday.

California: Safety and Collaboration

In two presentations focusing on California, Gary Fenton, Chairman of the Thoroughbred Owners of California and a managing partner of Little Red Feather Racing, spoke from a TVG set in the Del Mar paddock about the importance of California racing to the overall racing ecosystem, while Dionne Benson, the Chief Veterinary officer at 1/ST Racing, discussed the ways in which California has improved the safety of its equine athletes.

“The California product exported throughout America continues to be at the top levels of racing,” said Fenton. “California has produced six of the last 13 Kentucky Derby winners, who all prepped in California for not one, but three separate trainers. And in September we will invest again in the future of our sport by unveiling California Crown Day at Santa Anita Park, which hopefully becomes the next big marquee day.”

Fenton said that he was proud to have been present to witness the complete turnaround that California had made toward safety, from a disastrous 2019 to a near-perfect record today, and that the success of that had required a concerted effort.

“I was fortunate to be in the room when Dr. Benson, Aidan Butler and Belinda Stronach laid out the initial and ambitious plan,” he said. “Trainers do a tremendous job on the backstretch but 20 eyes on a horse are better than two. The detailed plan crafted by California and carried out with the support of stakeholders and horsemen laid the blueprint for helping get HISA over the goal line. And here we are five years later with historic declines in fatalities. It has never been safer to race in California …and we did it with dirt tracks.”

Fenton made a plea for owners in the rest of the country to send horses to California, citing figures to indicate that a major part of the U.S. racing industry is driven by California, despite the lack of subsidies to California tracks from alternate forms of gaming.

Dr. Dionne Benson | The Jockey Club

“We are all connected,” he said. “California buys horses from Kentucky farms, and breaks them at Florida farms and then ships them back to California racetracks. The best ones are sent back to different states again to race and breed. Just the addition of 200 race-ready horses would add tens of millions of dollars to ours and your bottom lines. When you think about it,  that's a Todd Pletcher, Steve Asmussen, Chad Brown and Brad Cox sending a string of 50 horses. It won't take much to improve California's already-premium brand.”

Dr. Benson's presentation detailed how Santa Anita achieved the remarkable turnaround in safety and how it was achieved through a dedication to changing existing procedures, and the use of technology.

“January and February of 2019 were terrible months at Santa Anita Park,” she said. “Horses were dying. By March, the track was closed and there was a real possibility that the State of California would end racing forever. With a two-month fatality rate of over 4.3/1000 horses in racing, it was clear to all stakeholders that something had to change.  This was an opportunity to change racing and training forever.”

Dr. Benson said that as part of this effort, several protocols were adopted. They included stricter medication regulations, and greater veterinary oversight, included track-hired vets and private vets who became involved in evaluating the soundness of the horses they treated.  They also started saving horses who had suffered an injury but were judged to be able to go on to be pasture- sound.

“Finally,” she said, “we mandated that horsemen sign up for works 48 hours in advance to allow us to review those horses and examine as many as possible.”

They found that to be a daunting task, with trainers requesting workouts for up to 400 horses on a Saturday. As a result, they developed Racehorse 360, an integrated program to help not only manage racehorse inventory, but also serve as an invaluable tool for safety with a veterinary repository function to ensure all information vets need is in one place.

Now, rather than sorting through risk factors manually for the up to 400 horses per day requesting a workout, Racehorse 360 does that work for them, and flags horses who should be examined by a track veterinarian. All of those examination notes and even videos are loaded onto the horse's page in the system for future use by other veterinarians.

Santa Anita also installed trackside cameras to monitor horses' action on the track. That data is run through an AI program that filters the information and makes predictions based on the videos. It can pick up horses with both obvious lameness and subtle issues sending a message to the track vets, with the video, to allow the vet to identify the trainer and track down the horse. Benson said that between Gulfstream Park, Santa Anita, and Laurel, 1/ST Racing has analyzed 2,500 videos so far, with 75% of the clips having proven to be worth following up.

Dr. Benson said that 1/ST Racing also uses AI to monitor horses' action during racing, flagging patterns which have proven to indicate problems in the past.

The results of these efforts have been profound. “In January and February of 2024, we had zero racing fatalities,” said Benson. “We saw a 40% decrease in training fatalities from 2019 to the first two months of 2024. And these results are not an anomaly. Since 2019, Santa Anita has shown significant decreases in fatalities in each of the years following. In fact, from March of 2023 to March of 2024 we did not have a single racing fatality in 363 days. Our fatality rates are not zero, yet, but they are now on par or better with racetracks not just in the rest of the United States but the rest of the world. I am incredibly proud of the veterinarians, track management and ownership, horsemen and women, jockeys, grooms and everyone who has made this possible.”

Racetrack Redesign Among the Triple Crown Tracks

The event's keynote speaker, Todd Gralla, principal at Populous, a global design firm that focuses on sports and entertainment from stadiums and arenas to event spaces and urban environments, discussed the redesign of Belmont Park, which aims to integrate technology into racetrack design while respecting the sport's history.

Todd Gralla | The Jockey Club (slide of Belmont in background courtesy of Populous)

Populous, whose design of Camden Yards revolutionized the concept of what a baseball stadium should be, is currently working on not only Belmont Park, but the new Pimlico, the Keeneland renovation, and additions to Churchill Downs. Gralla said that the average age of an NBA arena was 20 years, while the average age of a racing arena was over 60. Today's consumers don't experience sporting events the way our ancestors may have done, he said–sitting in one seat for the entire event and focusing on the game.

Gralla displayed a photo of a model of the new design for Belmont, which reduces the scale of the building while introducing a contemporary design with an overhanging roof reminiscent of ParisLongchamp. The building seats 8,000 guests, with private suites and dining, but with a flexible additional capacity to support events with expected crowds of over 50,000. The entire building will be five levels with floor-to-ceiling windows ensure that every level overlooks the paddock.

The entire Pimlico site will be stripped clean after the 2025 Preakness, said Grall. The project will be similar to Belmont's, he said, fitting the day-to-day needs, while being scalable to handle bigger crowds for the Preakness and a possible Breeders' Cup.

The Intersection of Horse Racing and Sports Betting

Joe Asher, the president of IGT's PlaySports, a leading supplier of gaming technology, gave a presentation on the intersection of horse racing and sports betting.

Joe Asher | The Jockey Club

Asher, a lifelong racing fan who takes his 11-year-old son to horse racing venues around the world, likened the people's introduction to racing through family members to a potential introduction to horse racing through sports betting.

“I encourage everyone to look for ways to get parents to bring their kids to the track, whether it's the Donut Days they used to have at Del Mar, the playground area at Delaware Park, or other ways to welcome families,” he said. “Another way to get people introduced to racing is sports betting.

“One of the reasons sports betting is so popular,” he continued, “is that millions of people are watching the games anyway; they follow sports news on television, radio and the internet. They talk about the latest trades, injuries and so forth with their friends. Making the transition from watching or following a sport to betting on it is quite easy in most states. You just need to set up your account, fund it and away you go. For recreational players, there's no additional work required because you already have the information you need to bet–you can make up your mind on what to bet based on what you've watched or read recently. People are already spending a lot of time consuming information about the game they want to bet on; no extra work is required.”

Contrast that, he said, with the difficulty in betting on racing, where you have to buy products and study them. With so many people already having legal wagering sports betting accounts, he made a case for a simplified way to make an informed wager.

“You have the content,” he said. “It's just a matter of getting it in front of people with a proclivity to gamble and an easy way for them to form an opinion on what to bet.”

NTRA's Rodgers Discusses Safety Runs First Campaign

Meghan Rodgers, senior vice president of Public Affairs, National Thoroughbred Racing Association (NTRA), gave an overview of the NTRA's Safety Runs First campaign, a print, radio, television, web and digital advertising campaign designed to spread the message that racing is becoming safer, and that the sport is committed to that goal.

Meghan Rodgers | The Jockey Club

“During our fall board meeting which was held in Washington, where we met with multiple members of Congress, it became clear that we as an industry needed to do a better job of proactively telling the story about all of the positive things happening in our sport related to safety and welfare,” he said. “In the past two years, we have been inundated with questions from lawmakers asking what the sport is doing to be as safe as possible, especially under the newly implemented law HISA that many members of Congress worked very hard to pass.”

Rodgers said that phase one of the campaign had run from April 22 through the Belmont Stakes, and showed a 60-second spot that was aired prior to the Kentucky Derby, and estimated that it made 190 million total impressions, and generated 100,000 clicks on the website, www.safetyrunsfirst.com.  She said that phase two will run from now through the Breeders' Cup, and asked for the support of the people in the room, from spreading the message to helping to raise funds.

“It's our job to constantly drive the positive narrative,” Rodgers said. “We cannot rely on others to do it.”

Gagliano Delivers Update on Jockey Club Activities

James Gagliano, President and COO of The Jockey Club, introduced several new initiatives the company is undertaking. He said that the company had entered into a licensing agreement with Halo AI to “assist stakeholders with breeding, sales, and racing decisions.” The first models will be rolled out this fall.

Jim Gagliano | The Jockey Club

Gagliano also announced that every breeder of a registered Thoroughbred would now receive free, lifetime past performance information for every horse they register, and be prompted after each time they race so that they may download a fresh set, and that Equibase was now providing a free full-year dataset of entries, results, charts and GPS data to developers, handicappers, academics and researchers to help move their projects forward. He said that they had had 900 such requests for that date. He also said that The Jockey Club is implementing a new service to better track horses through their careers, in an attempt to improve aftercare solutions for horses.

Gagliano also said that The Jockey Club had invested in “a next-generation tracking technology called Real Time Kinematics, or RTK, to help improve the accuracy of data collection by orders of magnitude–in most cases down to centimeter-level accuracy.” The technology was used at the Belmont-at-Saratoga meeting, and has been installed at Del Mar and plans are to expand it over the coming months, he said.

Equibase is working on a pilot ratings and handicap system for U.S. Thoroughbred racing, and Gagliano said that in some cases, this would provide an alternative to claiming races. “We believe the horses will benefit from a ratings system because they are likely to spend more time in the care of the same owner and trainer. As a side note, frequent changing of trainers is one of the risk factors identified by Dr. Tim Parkin, which he discussed at the Welfare and Safety of the Racehorse Summit in June.

The Jockey Club has also okayed funding for new sensor technology to monitor racing surfaces, he said.

Finally, he said, The Jockey Club is making two recommendations for safety; first that all racetracks, beginning with those under the regulation of HISA, fully participate in the Maintenance Quality System. The MQS is managed by the Racing Surfaces Testing Laboratory to record track maintenance and weather information. The second recommendation calls for all racing-related necropsies to be performed using the 2020 AAEP Guidelines for the Necropsy of Racehorses as a minimum standard.