Dionne Benson

Todd Gralla, principal at Populous, will be the keynote speaker at the 72nd annual Round Table Conference on Matters Pertaining to Racing, which will be held Aug. 1 at the Excelsior Springs Event Center in Saratoga Springs. Populous is a global design firm that focuses on sports and entertainment, from stadiums and arenas to event spaces and urban environments. Gralla will discuss cutting-edge racetrack projects around the globe and he will provide a look into the redesign of Belmont Park, which attempts to integrate modern technology into racetrack operations, while...

Since the launch of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act's (HISA) drug testing program over a year ago, metformin has sucked up an awful lot of oxygen. Under HISA, there have been seven resolved cases and four pending cases involving metformin—perhaps not an especially large number on its own, until framed against the number of metformin cases adjudicated before the program went into effect. An Association of Racing Commissioners International's (ARCI) review of their database "going back decades" found five metformin cases for Thoroughbreds. All were from 2017 onwards. The...

Santa Anita Park concluded the six-month 2023-24 Winter-Spring season on June 16 which, when combined with the six-week Autumn Meet from 2023, produced a 99.97% safety record, making the 1/ST Racing facility the safest track in North America among those with a comparable volume of racing and training according to a release from the track Monday. Since the Opening Day of the Autumn meet on Sept. 29, 2023, through the Closing Day of the Hollywood Meet on June 17, 2024, 6,678 horses ran in races over Santa Anita's main track...

Following Decorated My Life (Mehmas {Ire})'s catastrophic injury in Saturday's Sweet Life S. at Santa Anita, a 15-second video clip shared on social media that appears to show the 3-year-old filly slightly off on her right-front as she jogged to the start of the race has spurred talk of modification to the layers of pre-race veterinary scrutiny for horses that run on the track's downhill turf course. A regulatory veterinarian is present to watch horses warm up on the level before they head up the hill—on which the Sweet Life...

1/ST's Pegasus World Cup has partnered with the Irish technology company Equine MediRecord and its group Business Infusions to digitize equine welfare protocols for this weekend's Pegasus World Cup card at Gulfstream Park. EMR representatives will be on-site at the Hallandale track to help log each horse's information on the EMR system. The platform, which allows for the full veterinary history of each horse to be collected digitally and recorded securely, will be mandatory and will provide all entrants, trainers and veterinarians with a user-friendly system to comply with medication...

Given the current snail's pace at which the gender gap is meaningfully shrinking, it'll take more than 250 years for women to reach professional parity with men--just two-and-a-half short centuries, for those who think in blocks. That was the daunting statistic which set the stage at the beginning of the inaugural Horse Racing Women's Summit at Santa Anita Thursday, a two-day event designed to nurture the abilities of women already involved in the sport and engender new talent to follow after the sport's current batch of female leaders. And what...

Santa Anita Park concluded the six-month 2021-22 Winter-Spring season on June 19th as the safest track in North America among those with a comparable volume of racing and training. The record is highlighted by a 62.5% improvement over the previous year from Dec. 26, 2021, through closing day June 19, 2022, with three racing fatalities from over 4,800 starters. The main dirt track did not have a single musculoskeletal racing fatality during the 26-week period. The overall racing and training figures mark a 74% improvement since the spring of 2019...

Newly minted California Horse Racing Board (CHRB) member, Thomas Hudnot--an education consultant and a former racehorse owner--enjoyed a relatively smooth landing on his first public day on the job, with few of the highly combustible topics on the monthly commission meeting agenda that have lit the touch paper during any number of board meetings these past few years. The meeting, however, did signal a potential brewing storm in the shape of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act's scheduled implementation of its racetrack safety rules July 1. CHRB executive director, Scott...

Per the condition of the entry agreement into the GI Preakness S. between the Maryland Jockey Club and trainer Bob Baffert reached earlier this week, Baffert-trained horses Medina Spirit (Protonico), Concert Tour (Street Sense) and Beautiful Gift (Medaglia d'Oro) underwent three rounds of out-of-competition blood sample testing. The Maryland Racing Commission (MRC) took two samples, one May 6 and the other May 10. A third sample was taken by 1/ST RACING and the Maryland Jockey Club (MJC) May 11. Samples drawn May 6 and 10 by the MRC were sent...

The quarantine on two barns at Gulfstream Park imposed after a horse died from unknown circumstances Tuesday night at the track has been lifted after tests for Equine herpesvirus type 1 came back negative, according to Dr. Dionne Benson, the Chief Veterinary Officer for The Stronach Group. The the quarantine prompted a number of scratches on the Wednesday card. Benson said that a filly had gotten loose on the track yesterday morning, and run back to the barn area, entering a barn that was not hers. She was walked back...