Remi Bellocq, chief executive of the National Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association for the past 10 years, is leaving the position to take a job as the executive director of an equine program at Bluegrass Community and Technical College in Lexington, the National HBPA said.
Churchill Downs Inc. has notified the Jockeys’ Guild that it will not renew a four-year agreement that expires at the end of the year providing for payments to the Guild from the company’s four tracks, according to Churchill and the guild.
New instant racing gaming machines will keep operating at Kentucky Downs after a Kentucky Court of Appeals denied gaming opponents’ motion for an emergency injunction.
Judge Glenn Acree denied an emergency request by a lobbying group, the Family Foundation of Kentucky, to stop the machines, saying the group had not shown that allowing the machines presented immediate and irreparable injury. But a scheduled three-judge hearing into the Family Foundation’s request for a routine injunction is still pending. That could take place in October.
An attorney for Morris Bailey, the real estate developer who is operating Monmouth Park in New Jersey under an unsigned lease with the state, contends New Jersey has violated conditions of a memorandum of understanding incorporating the lease, according to state racing officials.
A Kentucky Court of Appeals judge Tuesday afternoon indicated that he will rule soon on whether to issue an injunction that would prevent Kentucky Downs from taking bets on gambling machines, according to an official with the group that filed the request for injunction.
The Kentucky Equine Drug Research Council has issued a recommendation to the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission to ban the use of so-called “adjunct bleeder medications” on race days and restrict the administration of raceday furosemide to commission veterinarians.
Racetracks that received subsidies from slot machines in 2010 generated on average only two-fifths of the betting that non-subsidized tracks generated even though they distributed nearly equivalent levels of average daily purses, according to unofficial statistics assembled by Daily Racing Form.
The statistics were developed for 28 subsidized tracks and 37 non-subsidized tracks in North America for 2010 only.
The Oklahoma Thoroughbred Association, which has represented the state’s breeders since 1958, will turn that duty over to the Thoroughbred Racing Association of Oklahoma, a branch of the National Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association, beginning Monday.
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. – The American Graded Stakes Committee has approved a measure to require that the raceday use of the diuretic furosemide be banned in 2-year-old races in 2012 for the races to remain eligible for the grades it assigns, the committee said on Wednesday, upping the ante in a struggle over raceday drugs that is pitting some of the sport’s most powerful factions against each other.
There is an increasing likelihood that takeout rates on some exotic bets will be lower at California tracks this fall, but executives with the racetracks and the Thoroughbred Owners of California have yet to finalize the details.
In late July, Santa Anita and Hollywood Park officials proposed lowering the takeout on exactas and quinellas from 22.68 percent to 21.68 and lowering the takeout on daily doubles from 22.68 percent to 15.43, the equivalent to current takeout rates for win, place and show bets.