Archive for the ‘Industry Organizations’ Category

Our good friend Joy Rose Murphy who rolled out the red carpet for the Paulick Report when we swung through Oklahoma City for the Breeders’ Cup or Bust tour will be participating in the Mrs. Oklahoma pageant this April. True to herself, Joy has chosen the Permanently Disabled Jockeys Fund as her platform.

Below is the press release on her entry. Please feel free to write well wishes to Joy as she tries to bring national attention to an incredibly important issue to our industry.

Choctaw native to compete for title of Mrs. Oklahoma America
Joy Rose Murphy will represent the City of Choctaw at the official state preliminary for the Mrs. America Pageant
 

CHOCTAW, Okla. – Joy Rose Murphy, a committed volunteer and local horse racing personality, has been chosen to compete for the title of Mrs. Oklahoma America from a field of applicants received from throughout the area. Murphy is the promotions coordinator at Remington Park in Oklahoma City, where she hosts a televised race-day program.
 
The 2010 Mrs. Oklahoma Competition will take place April 16 and 17 at the historic Guthrie Scottish Rite Temple. Murphy will compete in three categories for the Mrs. Oklahoma title: personal interview, swimsuit and evening gown.
 
If selected as Mrs. Oklahoma America she will use her title to bring state and national attention to her platform, the Permanently Disabled Jockeys Fund (PDJF), for which she recently raised $25,000. The organization works to provide financial assistance to former jockeys who have suffered catastrophic on-track injuries.
 
“Oklahoma has a thriving horse industry, and my husband and I are so proud live and work here,” says Murphy. “By supporting PDJF and bringing awareness to this cause, I hope to promote the welfare of all jockeys, who are pound-for-pound the best athletes in the world.”
 
In her free time, Murphy is devoted to community service. She is a Sunday School teacher at St. Philip Neri Parish organizing and directing the curriculum for second grade students. She has held the position for five years.
 
Her husband, Glen, is a top thoroughbred jockey in the Midwest region. The couple makes their home in Choctaw.
 
About the Mrs. Oklahoma Competition
Mrs. Oklahoma is the official state preliminary for Mrs. America, the only nationally televised pageant for married women in the country. Mrs. America celebrates the achievements, poise and personality of today’s married women. Mrs. Oklahoma delegates are judged on their communication skills, achievements, poise and appearance.

By Ray Paulick
A Paulick Report reader commenting under the pseudonym of “another young owner” made the following observation in connection with yesterday’s article that surveyed top executive salaries at 18 industry non-profit associations: “Over $3.75 million a year and our industry has never been worse off… we have some great leaders!”

Actually, the aggregate of the 18 salaries was $3,911,096 and didn’t include bonuses, retirement plan contributions or other benefits.

But the point made by “another young owner” was not lost on me. When you consider that executive salary should only be a small fraction of an organization’s expenditures and that there are many more associations and businesses not included in our survey, it makes you wonder: What exactly are we getting for all that money?

Do we really benefit from and need a TRA and an NTRA, a TOBA, an HBPA and a THA, a TOC and a CTT, a Jockey Club and a Jockeys’ Guild? For the ultimate absurdity consider that we used to have two national organizations for racing regulatory bodies—neither of which really had the authority to do anything.

Perhaps when racing was healthy—a regional or local sport that didn’t participate in interstate commerce–there was little need to consolidate some of these redundant organizations. But today, as revenues are in serious decline among racetracks, horse owners, breeders and in virtually every other industry sector, the status quo will not work.

But don’t take it from me. Owner and breeder Satish Sanan, a no-nonsense businessman who has closely examined racing’s organizationally littered landscape, believes the industry will continue in a downward spiral unless it commits to changing its structure.

Sanan, a weekly guest on Steve Byk’s satellite radio show, “At the Races,” has been speaking out in his regular “Our Industry” segment about the need for a new structure. (Click here to listen.) Yesterday, in reaction to the Paulick Report’s salary survey, Sanan said: “If you look at the so-called alphabet soup organizations from TOBA to NTRA to horsemen’s associations, the THA, and the (Thoroughbred) Owners of California, you can add all that crap up, and collectively we are spending millions of dollars. Each one is doing one or two good functions, but not seriously impacting the growth of the industry. It goes back to, do we need this kind of structure and what the hell is it doing for our industry? We need a single structure and in that structure we have got to find a way to generate more revenue, put more money back into the business, hire the best talent.

“When the NFL and NBA created leagues, they brought people in, paid them millions of dollars, and put governance and structure in place and marketed the hell out of their sport and nobody complains about that because they bring in hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. Unfortunately, there is not an organization with the exception of maybe individual racetracks that are customer focused, customer centric, customer-service centric.”

Sanan said Breeders’ Cup–where he is on the board of directors and has led a strategic planning committee that is set to announce its final recommendations at a board meeting on Thursday—is the only association on the horsemen’s side of the industry that has focused on revenue growth. “I do not know of another organization that is tasked with growing the business,” he told Byk.

“The leadership of our industry should be thinking like a think tank and working together, talking about how do we transform this business, how do we go back to how this business used to be, how do we attract new owners, keep the existing owners, keep the existing horseplayers, have them bet more and make it more attractive to them and market the sport so we can attract new ones. I’m at a loss as to whose job it is and who thinks about these things on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. Can you name somebody? I (expletive deleted) can’t.”

Byk couldn’t either.

“We have got to streamline our industry,” Sanan continued. “There should be one horsemen’s organization, not 15. Period. There should be one panel that focuses on nothing but all the issues that are integrity-related: safety, medication, tote and wagering, and build confidence so we can attract new people. We need the best of minds with the most creative and innovative marketing programs to attract new horseplayers, new fans and market the hell out of the sport. Shoot, if this was my company I would be doing it.”

And that begs another question: Whose company is it? Who will take the lead here? Which organization will dissolve or be willing to merge with someone else. Which alphabet soup executive will focus more time on doing what’s right for the greater good of the industry instead of fighting to maintain whatever small chunk of turf he controls? Many of these executives are bright people, but the absence of a common-sense structure and industry-wide collaboration is a lethal combination.

There are too many chefs cooking our alphabet soup, and no one is buying it.

Copyright © 2010, The Paulick Report

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By Ray Paulick
I took no glee in writing about bloodstock agent Jim Cullen’s legal and financial problems earlier this week. The trail of lawsuits, unpaid financial obligations and charges of alleged wrongdoing from some of his former clients and associates do not paint a pretty picture to outsiders interested in investing in the Thoroughbred industry.

For his part, Cullen has responded to my article at the website he maintains for his company, Cullen Bloodstock. Click here to read his response. Feel free to comment below on whether you feel he was wronged by the Paulick Report expose, or in subsequent, similar articles at bloodhorse.com and drf.com.

Copyright © 2009, The Paulick Report

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By Ray Paulick

UPDATED 9 P.M. 
(NOTE: Several hours after the following story was published, the Paulick Report received a press release from the group known as California Horsemen for Change in reaction to the email distributed by the California Thoroughbred Trainers to some of its members.  Click here to read the press release from California Horsemen for Change.)

The civil war that broke out recently among California trainers has escalated as a result of the following email that warns horseman what could happen if California Thoroughbred Trainers is decertified. A group calling itself California Horsemen for Change is staging a palace revolt to either replace all nine members of the CTT’s current board of directors through a special election or get enough signatures from trainers to have the CTT decertified.

Click here for a previous Paulick Report story providing background on the war between the California trainers and here for a press release from the California Horsemen for Change. 
Following is the warning email distributed by the California Thoroughbred Trainers to its members:

•     YOUR SUPPORT OF A NEWLY FORMED TRAINER GROUP COULD HAVE SERIOUS NEGATIVE FINANCIAL AND POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS 
•     WE URGE YOU NOT TO SUPPORT THE ELIMINATION OF THE CTT 
•      WE URGE YOU NOT TO SIGN ANY PETITION TO DECERTIFY THE CTT

By Ray Paulick
The California racing and breeding industry appears to have the stability of a bowl of Jello. Two tracks, Santa Anita Park and Golden Gate Fields, are owned by bankrupt Magna Entertainment and their future is cloudy. Hollywood Park is in the hands of a land developer that already bulldozed Bay Meadows and has similar plans for the Inglewood facility, though when he gets the money to develop the property is anyone’s guess. Del Mar is run by a non-profit association whose contract will soon expire. Training centers are being shut down, farms are closing and the foal crop is sinking. The former head of the California Horse Racing Board pleaded guilty to a crime most often committed by juvenile delinquents. The Thoroughbred Owners of California has been without an executive director for the last several months. And now the state’s Thoroughbred trainers are forming a circle, pulling out their weapons and getting ready to fire.

In a word, it’s a mess.

It’s been more than 15 years since the late Ed Friendly—the Emmy-winning television producer of such shows as “Laugh In” and “Little House on the Prairie”–led a revolt that ejected the Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association from its traditional role representing the state’s owners and trainers and created the Thoroughbred Owners of California. TOC would be responsible for negotiating purse and simulcast contracts with racetracks and represent owners in front of the CHRB and state lawmakers. At the same time, a new group called California Thoroughbred Trainers was formed and certified, and their role was to deal with track management and the CHRB on issues related to backstretch conditions, track safety and benevolence.

Owners in other states have tried similar maneuvers but failed, in part because they lacked a leader with the tenacity and commitment of Ed Friendly and also because they didn’t have a focal point to rally around. For Friendly and his fellow owners, that focal point was a trainer-led boycott of Friday night racing at Hollywood Park in 1992. The trainers didn’t want to race at night, and Friendly said it wasn’t up to them to decide when to race his and his fellow owners’ horses. Friendly persevered and won the fight, getting legislation passed that created TOC and neutered the HBPA.

The two groups have pretty much stuck to the script since then, with TOC representing owners not only in California but on national organizations like the National Thoroughbred Racing Association. CTT has focused mainly on backstretch issues. How well has the arrangement worked? It depends on who you ask.

A group of prominent trainers have become increasingly unhappy with the situation and with the representation they were getting from the CTT. When an general election was held in June for three of the CTT’s board seats, trainer Jim Cassidy, who had served as president for the previous year, was voted off  the board. The following month, when the newly seated board met (John Shirreffs, Clifford Sise and Ed Moger were elected in June, joining incumbents Dan Hendricks, Jack Carava, Bill Anton, Gloria Haley and Tim Bellasis), their first order of business was to appoint a replacement for Eoin Harty, who had resigned from the board with one year left on his term. Harty said he was spending an increasing amount of time out of state.

The board voted to replace Harty with Cassidy, who had the fourth-highest number of votes for the three board positions in the June election. After being put back on the board, Cassidy was then re-elected president on the second ballot (three individuals nominated on the first ballot each received three votes, and one of the candidates withdrew his name from consideration prior to the second ballot).

That sequence of events didn’t sit well with the trainers who voted to keep Cassidy off the board in June. Much like the Friday night boycotts motivated owners to form the TOC, the appointment of Cassidy and his subsequent reelection as president galvanized CTT’s critics. They formed an ad hoc group called California Horsemen for Change, and began laying the groundwork in an effort to replace CTT as the organization representing trainers. Members of the California Horsemen for Change and others met with the CTT last Friday (click here for a press release from the California Horsemen for Change), and urged the CTT’s board to vote for a new election to fill all nine board seats. The CTT board agreed, by a 5-4 vote according to a source, but additional changes in the bylaws will be required before they can wipe the slate clean and elect a new board of directors. According to a published report, one CTT member has challenged the legality of the board’s decision to hold a new election.

Interestingly, the trainer said to be behind this new organization is Darrell Vienna, one of the leaders of the Friday night boycott at Hollywood Park in 1992 that led to the HBPA being ousted and the trainers losing much of their clout. According to a source, Vienna, who is one of a number of trainers unhappy with the CHRB’s synthetic surface mandate at California racetracks, spoke up against the synthetic tracks at a CTT meeting earlier this year where the CHRB’s equine medical director, Dr. Rick Arthur, presented statistics comparing equine fatalities on dirt versus synthetics. Vienna “got into it” with Arthur, the source said, demanding to see the data of the study. At that point, Gloria Haley, a CTT board member from Northern California, was said to have reprimanded Vienna, reminding him that he was “guest” at the meeting. The comment apparently infuriated Vienna.

“When we had the vote three months ago I asked Vienna personally to run for the board,” Cassidy told the Paulick Report. “He refused. He said ‘I’m not getting involved.’” It looks as though he’s changed his mind.

Vienna didn’t answer questions when contacted by the Paulick Report, instead deferring them to Chris Knight, a recent law school graduate and son of trainers Chay and Mary Knight who has been brought on as interim executive director of the California Horsemen for Change. Knight downplayed any discord between any individuals within the two organizations or anger with the recent election, instead saying the “CTT and California trainers in general are dissatisfied with California racing. We’ve capitalized on the momentum and will be holding a new general election, having everyone involved.”

Knight said there are a number of critical issues, including:
- the pending closing of Fairplex Park to stabling and training due to revenue shortfalls;
- the poor economic state of the racetracks and the uncertainty over the future of Hollywood Park, Santa Anita Park, Golden Gate Fields and Del Mar;
- questions about the safety of the synthetic tracks;
- a desire to be more closely engaged with TOC (according to sources, there have been recent talks between CTT and TOC to bring the groups closer together).

Cassidy said the individuals within the two groups share common ground in many areas, including a desire for higher purses and greater stability in track ownership. “A lot of them have their own agendas including a change in surfaces, and I understand all that,” he said. ”I tell them we work on what we can. I’m at so many of these meetings that my head spins. I hate to see what’s happening, because people are desperate and angry, but those are the times we are in right now. I feel like the Lone Ranger.

Copyright © 2009, The Paulick Report

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What’s this? Happy horseplayers? Why the racetracks must be giving money away. EIther that, or someone has paid attention to the needs of these long-suffering, often forgotten supporters of the game. In this case, it’s the latter, and the group paying attention to horseplayers was Equibase, the racing industry’s data base owned in tandem by the Thoroughbred Racing Associations of North America and the Jockey Club. 

The Paulick Report has chided Equibase to be more responsive to the needs of the industry and suggested the company focus more on using its data to help build the fan base and worry less about turning a profit for its owners. Shortly after our critique of Equibase, the company announced that it was loosening restrictions on access to historic charts. Most recently, we were pleased to see that Equibase announced a new and improved method of communicating late scratches and changes to horseplayers and fans. We hope these two recent imnprovements in service are signs  that Equibase takes its mission seriously.

Jeff Platt, president of the Horseplayers Association of North America, tells the story of how this new program came to be. — Ray Paulick

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
By Jeff Platt
president Horseplayers Association of North America

Equibase recently announced completion of a new project called Scratches Today. A press release was distributed on Oct. 1 (click here to view). HANA was involved right from the very beginning. Here is the story…

Early Beginnings
In April, 2009 while we were in Lexington, Ky., for the first HANA Day at the Races at Keeneland, we met with Equibase CEO Hank Zeitlin and his management team. We talked about several issues that are critical to racing and we were given a tour of the Equibase facility.

When the subject of scratches and changes came up, everyone in the room admitted the current system in place was lacking. Reporting of scratches and changes had always been a point of player frustration. More so for players following and wagering multiple tracks online than for players following a single track while wagering at the track live.

For the online player, reporting of scratches and changes had always been hit or miss. Each and every week we could point to at least a handful of scratches that were never reported at all. Every once in a while we could point out instances of the wrong horse being reported as scratched. The same could be said when it came to reporting of rider changes. Ditto for races off the turf.

A little bit of background information about me might be in order here. Back in 2004 I created a module for JCapper called Scratch Bot. Scratch Bot’s sole function is to allow the user-player to scour the web for scratches and races off the turf and import new changes as they become available. I’m telling you this as a way of letting you know just how acutely aware I am when it comes to scratches and changes information and just how unreliable that information can sometimes be.

To give you an example, when the Breeders’ Cup was held at Lone Star Park in 2004, Seek Gold officially finished second in race one, and was part of a $2 exacta paying $970.20, while listed in the Autotote/Brisbet system as a scratch!

While chatting with Hank that morning we let him know just how strongly we felt that there needed to be a reliable web-based source for scratches and changes information. While sitting at the table in one of Equibase’s conference rooms, I "white boarded" a design for a web-based system capable of getting the job done on a legal pad and showed it to Hank. I even volunteered to stay on in Lexington for the next several weeks (or the entire summer if necessary) to do software development work on the project for free.

I guess Hank must have seen how passionate we were about the need for the industry to do a better job in this one area. He agreed to a follow-up meeting which was held a few days later. From that beginning the idea of Scratches and Changes in Real Time became a reality.

The Scratches Today Project
The Scratches Today Project enables Equibase to propagate scratches and changes information onto the Equibase site in something pretty close to real time. Click here for a direct URL to the page at Equibase.com:
When you click on the link for an individual track, you will see a page that looks like the following screenshot:

The page html shows the track name, date and time of the last update, and continuously updated changes for each race.

RSS
Players can also subscribe to a free RSS Feed.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication  which allows anyone to subscribe to a feed of data using a software client of some kind.

What is cool about RSS is that any new information is pushed to you direct. There is no need for you to visit Equibase and constantly refresh the page. Once you subscribe you will just receive an update with new information each time there is a new scratch or change. There are also RSS clients available for mobile phones, so a player wagering on multiple tracks online, at an OTB, or at a track live, can easily receive updates on any or all tracks as well.

You can find the most popular standalone RSS clients here.

A list of popular mobile RSS clients can be found here.

XML
In addition to the web pages for each track and the RSS Feed, a downloadable XML File has been provided for those players who wish to parse the latest scratches and changes. The XML itself looks like this:

The XML contains nodes populated with information for race date, track name, race number, horse name, program number, change description, and a timestamp. In early meetings with Equibase, everyone was in agreement that a central XML feed was the perfect source data format for delivering this information.

How does it work?
In the past, an employee at each track was responsible for letting Equibase know about scratches and changes. At most tracks the employee responsible for scratches and changes wears many hats and is responsible for many different things on race day. Generally that employee could be counted upon to let Equibase know about early scratches and changes. But if that employee happened to be busy later in the day when subsequent scratches and changes were announced, reporting such information to Equibase had always been given low priority.

Enter the Equibase chart caller. Before a chart can be cut, all scratches and changes need to be entered into the system. Hank Zeitlin, the CEO of Equibase came up with a novel idea. Instead of waiting until after the race to enter late breaking scratches and changes – why not be proactive and have chart callers enter scratches and changes data into the system as they are announced by the track announcer over the public address system? If that could reasonably be done – then changes could be propagated from the database into the XML and out onto the Equibase site within a second or two after the chart caller clicks the submit button.

The following info model was adopted:

A designated track employee would still be responsible for entering early scratches and changes. As part of the project Equibase went out into the field and sold the tracks on the idea of giving higher priority to scratches and changes.

Responsibility for entering scratches and changes shifts to the chart caller 45 minutes to an hour before post time for race one.

In late April, 2009 Hank committed a team of Equibase IT people to making Scratches in Real Time a reality. Hank has kept HANA in the loop and asked for our involvement and input right from the beginning. The system that Equibase has created is more extensive than the one I initially “white boarded” on a legal pad in that first meeting. It contains protocols for error checking/error correction that the initial system I was proposing didn’t have.

HANA is honestly thrilled with what Equibase has produced. The new Equibase system meets all of the requirements we wanted to see in every way. It is web based. It records scratches and changes in a central database. And it propagates those changes out onto the web within a second or two of when the submit button is clicked.

For the online player wagering on multiple tracks the Equibase Scratches Today project is a vast improvement over what was available in the past. As well, for those at tracks or simulcast centers, they now can get accurate real time jockey changes, surface changes and scratches "pushed" right on to their mobile phone, eliminating the need to watch TV screens or visit the posted scratches sheets for their updates.

Where do we go from here?
It is our sincere hope that players everywhere will enjoy the benefits of this new system for many years to come. We are also envisioning that tracks, in an effort to cut costs and improve standardization, will move to use the Equibase XML feed as a data source for displaying Scratches and Changes in Real Time right on their own track websites as soon as reasonably possible.

But how is the company doing in fulfilling the mission its founders established for Equibase?

Alan Marzelli, president of the Jockey Club and chairman of Equibase, said in 1990 the “promotion and betterment of racing is behind the decision” to start Equibase. The company’s first president, David Haydon, said Equibase would “address racing’s need for fan base expansion.”

Marzelli can point to the fact that the “industry” through Equibase since 1991 has owned its data, which previously had been collected and controlled by the “Daily Racing Form.” Limited portions of that data have been provided at no charge for promotional purposes to television, media and racetracks. Daily entries, jockey and trainers standings, and horse tracking software are available at no cost, as are race results for a limited time after a race is run. Equibase.com is a popular web site, by horse racing standards, though it pales in comparison with every other major league sport’s Internet presence.

Equibase.com also strikes out, big time, when compared to what the other major league sports web sites offer in the way of free statistics to their fans. It wasn’t until I started really digging around www.mlb.com (baseball), www.nba.com (basketball), www.nfl.com (football), www.pgatour.com and www.nhl.com (hockey) that I realized how woefully inadequate and misguided Equibase.com is as a sports information web site. It’s a commercial site, pure and simple.

Other sports use their web sites in large part to provide information for fans who have an appetite for statistics, whether it’s for the very popular fantasy leagues or for their own curiosity. It’s truly amazing the scope and depth of information you can find on these other sites. The theory is that informed and educated fans are more likely to become engaged with a sport, and providing as much information as possible on the Internet, the undisputed No. 1 source for information gathering, is the way to inform, educate and engage them. It might take a while for those sports to capitalize on fans who visit the web sites; perhaps they’ll go to a game, buy some team merchandise or at the very least provide a pair of eyeballs during televised events.

Racing can capitalize much quicker, since turning fans into horseplayers can be monetized through pari-mutuel wagering. You’d think racing would provide as much information as possible to fans in hopes of transforming them into paying customers, either at the racetracks or through legal online betting accounts. (There are rumors that some people bet on major league sports, too, but in the United States that’s only legal in the state of Nevada, and the sports leagues don’t get any of the revenue from those bets.)

Instead, however, Equibase, the official database of Thoroughbred racing, uses its web site in large part to promote its commercial ventures. Let’s do a comparison:

I’m a baseball fan who grew up in the 1960s watching greats like Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle and Ernie Banks (showing my Chicago Cubs bias). If I wanted to compare the lifetime statistics of any of those players to modern-day greats like Alex Rodriguez or Milton Bradley (just kidding), that information is just a click away at mlb.com.

Even better, if I wanted to see how Rodriguez or Bradley have done against pitchers like Randy Johnson or Roger Clemens, I could plug in the names and, voila, mlb.com gives me those statistics! (Click here for an explanation on how mlb.com’s stats work.)

Now let’s look at some racing greats. Say you wanted to compare the lifetime records of Cigar and Curlin, both of them two-time Horses of the Year in North America. Go to Equibase.com and click on the “search for products” dropdown menu on the left column. There you’ll have an option for “lifetime PP’s.” Type in the names of Cigar and Curlin, add them to your shopping cart, get out your credit card and buy the lifetime records of these two horses for $16. It’s a slightly different fan experience.

Want to know how Cigar’s trainer Bill Mott compares with Curlin’s trainer Steve Asmussen? Sorry, but Equibase doesn’t offer that kind of product. (It is available at the Jockey Club’s other data company, equineline.com, for $7 per report.)

Equibase does offer some products for free, including what it calls “E Leaders”—horses in various divisions that have produced the fastest Equibase speed figures (a poor man’s Beyer Speed Figure) for the year. I’m not sure how reliable these numbers are, though, since the highest speed figure for any horse racing in 2009 belongs to Researcher, who earned a 132 Equibase speed figure winning the Charles Town Classic Stakes in April. I guess in a sense you get what you pay for.

I’d tell you more about the Charles Town Classic winner, but I’m not willing to spend the $8 for his past performances or buy the chart of his race from Equibase for $1.50.

Charging for lifetime past performances and race charts is just one of many commercial products available at Equibase.com. There are tip sheets selling for as much as $12.50 per racing program, charges for video replays, charts, pedigrees, etc.

Do yourself a favor and go to some of the other major sports web sites, and explore the vast, comprehensive information that these leagues are willing to provide to their fans at no cost. The data is so rich you might get lost for hours, but the result might be a closer bond between you and that sport. There is an investment involved, but these other sports are willing to make that investment to help build and maintain a fan base, especially among the youngest demographic that is most familiar with using the Internet for gathering information.

After you’ve seen some of these other rich and creative web sites, take a look at Equibase.com. I’d be interested in your comments comparing Equibase.com with other sport web sites.

Racing, through the Jockey Club and TRA, made an initial investment in Equibase nearly 20 years ago so that the industry could own its data. The hope I had then, and the hope I still have today, is that the people who run Equibase will look beyond the bottom line of their profit and loss statement, and begin to use the statistics that the industry owns to make horse racing more popular and more accessible. All they’re doing now is making Equibase as profitable as it can be. It’s a bean counter’s mentality, and it’s the kind of business philosophy that will stifle any prospect of industry growth.

Copyright © 2009, The Paulick Report

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Created in 1990 to end the century-old monopoly “Daily Racing Form” held on the acquisition and ownership of North American racing data, Equibase is a joint venture of the Jockey Club and the member tracks of the Thoroughbred Racing Associations of North America. For most of its existence, the “Racing Form” was owned by Walter Annenberg’s Triangle Publications (other products in Triangle included the Philadelphia “Inquirer “ newspaper, “Seventeen” magazine, and “TV Guide,” which at one time had 20 million weekly readers, the biggest circulation of any American publication; suffice to say Triangle was an extremely lucrative business).

Annenberg and his key lieutenants at the “Racing Form”—publisher Mike Sandler and editor Fred Grossman—had a cozy relationship with the racing industry. Racetracks were doing well in the 1970s and 1980s and so was the “Form.” Prices for racing’s only daily newspaper went up regularly (always preceded by a page two news brief about the rising cost of newsprint), but if horseplayers and fans complained, there was really no option for them; attempts by other publishers to collect data and compete with the “Form” were quickly squashed, with help in many cases from the racetracks, who didn’t want to upset the applecart.

But in a surprise move in 1988, Annenberg sold Triangle Publications to Australian publisher Rupert Murdoch for $3.2 billion. The transaction made more than a few people in the racing industry nervous. For the first time, they felt threatened that the new owner of the “Racing Form” might not be quite as benevolent as Walter Annenberg and his father had been. In order for Murdoch and Co. to squeeze profits out of this significant investment, there was the fear that these new owners might hold the industry hostage using the historical and contemporary racing data it acquired as part of the purchase.

Not long thereafter, a plan was hatched for the “industry” to begin collecting its own racing data, and Equibase was formed. There were great pronouncements about how Equibase would be used to serve the racing public, making a day of racing more enjoyable, and help address the sport’s need to expand its fan base.

A new publication, the “Racing Times,” launched in 1991 (and folded one year later), became Equibase’s first customer, and before long most racetracks began using Equibase racing data in past performances published in track programs. They were, in fact, competing with the “Racing Form” with their products.

Then and now, Equibase received a fee for every program sold. That has been one of Equibase’s biggest successes: collecting fees at its information toll gate.

Eventually, even the “Daily Racing Form” (which changed hands several more times after Murdoch’s 1988 purchase) became a customer of Equibase, shutting down its own track and field operations that had set the standard for charting American races.

The means by which the data was collected always seemed a bit crude to me. Whether it was the “Daily Racing Form” crew or Equibase’s employees, the method was the same: someone with a pair of binoculars perched in the press box watches a race and calls out (to another person or sometimes into a tape recorder) the running positions of each horse, including estimated margins, at specific points in a race. As you can imagine, it can often take some time to work through a field of a dozen horses, and by the time the chart caller gets through the field, some horses may have changed positions. The only truly accurate call of a race is a horse’s finishing position, which is taken from the photo finish camera.

In short, charting races is a very inexact science, and it can lead to some very misleading charts and past performances that horseplayers, fans and horse owners believe to be gospel. As a former “Racing Form” employee, I would often see charts of races where a horse was said to be 15 lengths behind the leader with a quarter of a mile to run, and then went on to win. Using the formula of one length equaling approximately one-fifth of a second, that horse, on paper at least, theoretically might run his final quarter mile in less than 22 seconds, a virtual impossibility.

I trust that Equibase’s standards have improved over the years, but the bottom line is the charts and each horse’s position in a race at different “points of call” is little more than an estimate made by the chart caller.

Equibase has been promising for almost 20 years now that it is working toward an automated chart collection process. Early in 1991, I felt like an acquaintance of the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk when I went out to the Kentucky Horse Park to watch a demonstration of an early chart-collecting system. An Equibase executive cobbled together a microchip processor, some wires, a slow-moving horse and an old Telex machine to show that data could indeed be collected automatically. Of course, getting racetracks to mimic the project with antennas and wires stretched around the racetrack was another thing.

Since then, we’ve seen sports like NASCAR lead the way in global satellite positioning. Trakus, a private company that is not part of the Jockey Club “family of companies,” is the leader in this technology for horse racing. Trakus technology has been in place at Woodbine racecourse in Canada since 2006. Del Mar and Keeneland also use Trakus to give fans a video game-like view of a race. The technology can also be used to automatically chart races and give horseplayers very specific information, such as how far a horse may have traveled during a race (based on how wide a trip he had), and when he demonstrated his fastest and slowest speeds. For some reason, the Jockey Club has not yet embraced this technology.

In between the humorous demo in 1991 and the Trakus installations in 2006, Jockey Club president Alan Marzelli (who is also chairman of Equibase) has promised automated charting of races in the “not too distant future.” In 2002, speaking at the Jockey Club’s annual Round Table, Marzelli said Equibase might be on the verge of revolutionizing how racing information is collected. “We are in the early stages of testing this technology,” Marzelli said, “so we don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves. But we think that we may be close to finding an answer. If so, this new technology will not only provide entirely new ways for handicappers to analyze races, but it will also provide broadcast enhancements and new media applications that will help make televised racing more compelling and open up additional distribution channels for the sport. This is not a fantasy. Other major sports—football, baseball, and NASCAR being three prominent examples—are already enhancing their broadcasts using this technology, and the information generated by it today. At its board meeting earlier this week, the Equibase Management Committee heard about the success of our initial tests conducted at Keeneland in July, and authorized management to conduct further testing later this fall. So stay tuned for further news regarding this exciting initiative later this year.”

Seven years later, the industry is still waiting for that update.

In the meantime, Equibase has been a very successful toll booth, charging horseplayers, fans and horsemen for things that other sports routinely give away at no cost. (I suspect it is a very profitable company, though Equibase’s financials are not made public.)

Granted, horse racing is a very statistically-oriented activity, and the collection of the data costs money. But golf, baseball and football (anyone ever heard of fantasy leagues?), among other sports, are also statistically heavy, and those activities manage to collect and disseminate their data without gouging its fan and customer base.

A baseball fan can go to MLB.com and check out box scores of all Major League Baseball games, not just this week, or this month, but last month or last year, or the year before that. There is no charge to go back and relive those games or to see what happened.

If a racing fan wants to go back more than a few days and see the charts of Rachel Alexandra’s (or any other horse’s) races, they have to pay for that privilege. Equibase’s toll booth is pervasive.

And that’s just the beginning of what Equibase charges for. Over the last 20 years, it has become the new monopoly, replacing the “Daily Racing Form” in that role. But is it as benevolent as the “Form” once was?

Tomorrow, we’ll take a further look at how other sports provide information to their fans at no cost, and compare that to horse racing’s official data company, Equibase.

Copyright © 2009, The Paulick Report

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