COMMENTARY

By Jude T. Feld

Is it our fault that, “We’re on the precipice of a clusterfuck,” as the Bill Jacks character in John From Cincinnati so perfectly stated?

What’s the first thing an owner does when he or she is looking for a trainer?

They check the standings and usually pick the person on top, or one in the first three, and certainly nobody lower than fifth.

Winners draw owners like moths to a flame. So some trainers take every edge available to make a name for themselves, attract more horses to their shedrows and add plenty of dough to their stable accounts. They’ll worry about the suspensions when and if they get caught.

In the mean time, they saddle winners at unnatural percentage rates, leaving just crumbs for the honest trainers, most of whom never darken the door of the standings and many of whom eventually go broke.

Then, at the end of the year, the same press corps who decries the use of illegal drugs in virtually every column, hands the coveted Eclipse Award to a guy on suspension, making it even more attractive to “do whatever it takes” to get horses to the winners’ circle.

Obviously, the rewards are great for those taking the edge, while the bulk of trainers, who play by the rules, struggle to make payroll and pay the feedman because they don’t have the balls to use cobra venom, morphine, Epogen or elephant juice.

They show up every day and do their work, some of them at a very high level of expertise, yet their names are hardly ever listed in the top ten, their pictures seldom grace the Daily Racing Form and their mugs never appear in a Peb cartoon, because they can only manage to win 10 or 15 percent of their starts using hay, oats and water.

Anybody who saw the great Flawlessly train every morning under the watchful eye of the late, great Charlie Whittingham has got to wonder how many races she would have won on cobra venom.

How many track records could Native Diver have broken if Buster Millerick had raced him on clenbuteral when it was a banned substance in the United States?

The magnificent mare Convenience made over $600,000 in the early 1970’s. If trainer Willard L. Proctor had slipped her a little Epo, how much money would she have made?

Three of racing’s biggest trainers were suspended last year and I would bet money that all three of them will be in the Hall of Fame before Millerick and Proctor and that is another travesty of racing that will not be cured soon.

In my perfect world, I would be Melnyk Stable’s private trainer. Jay Robbins would have the Coolmore string and we’d be fightin’ it out with Sheik Mohammed’s man Saeed bin Suroor and the Phipps family’s Hall of Fame trainer Shug McGaughey. But all of us would be trying to get past Ambassador Farish’s Neil Howard, who would already be in the Hall of Fame and have won the Eclipse Award for training three years in a row.

“When pigs fly,” as they say.

Internet wagering, the lack of cooperation between racetracks, simulcast signal pricing, nation-wide uniform medication rules, health and safety insurance for jockeys and backstretch personnel, improved stabling facilities and a strong marketing program are just some of the issues our sport needs to address.

Many of these challenges are beyond the control of the bulk of racing participants, but the cheating crisis is something that can be halted immediately if owners quit sending horses to trainers that cheat, if jockeys refuse to ride for trainers who put their lives at risk by using illegal substances and practices, trainers withhold entries in races that cheating trainers enter and horseplayers refuse to bet until racing cleans up its act.

If everybody did that for just one week, it would change the face of our sport.

The paltry fines and suspensions are ludicrous penalties for the atrocities perpetrated by trainers who cheat. The cheaters have taken the livelihood from many of their fellow trainers, literally stolen millions of dollars of purse money from rival owners, tons of cash from horseplayers’ pockets and they are killing our sport to boot.

It’s robbery and murder with a deadly weapon and for that you should get the maximum.

Let the punishment fit the crime – death by lethal injection.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 13th, 2007 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Featured Articles. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.