Elimination of claiming races suggested at Jockey Club Round Table

The North American Thoroughbred racing industry should seriously consider scrapping the widespread use of claiming races and replace the system with one that assigns ratings to horses, a top racing official said Sunday at The Jockey Club’s virtual Round Table Conference on Matters Pertaining to Racing.

Sal Sinatra, president and chief executive officer of the Maryland Jockey Club, argued for the implementation of a rating system by being highly critical of claiming races, calling the system “detrimental to the horse and unsustainable to owners.” He said that a rating system would eliminate a “drop ‘em and lose ‘em mentality” for many owners of horses of lower quality, and give owners more options when seeking competitive races for those horses.

“Owners would be more willing to run their horses and try different options,” Sinatra said. “I believe that protecting the owner’s investment over time would stabilize and actually grow the foal crop.”

Claiming races are an enormous feature of the U.S. racing industry, representing approximately two-thirds of the races held in the country. In claiming races, horses can be purchased out of the race for a set price by any licensed owner. The races were first implemented in the U.S. to make races competitive by forcing horsemen to strike a balance between the purchase price and the horse’s ability to win a race against other horses that were valued at approximately the same price.

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Many other racing countries do not rely predominantly on claiming races and instead use a ratings system in which large teams of handicappers weigh individual horses’ past performances and assign them a numerical rating. Races are then written that restrict entries to horses within a certain range of ratings.

It is far from clear whether the U.S. racing community would embrace such a widespread change in racing eligibility rules, especially considering that claiming races have formed the backbone of U.S. racing programs for decades. Mark Casse, the Hall of Fame trainer, was asked on a separate panel during the Round Table presentation about whether he would support the elimination of claiming races, and he said “that needs to be looked at, and it needs to be changed.”

“But do I have the answer?” Casse said. “No.”

John Gosden, the English trainer who was once based in California, said on the same panel that he prefers the rating system in use in England, France, and Ireland, but he also said that “the claiming system does work to a degree. It has a rationale to it.”

He also said that some European trainers resort to shenanigans in trying to get their horses assigned low ratings so that they can enter races in which their horses can be more competitive.

Claiming races have come under scrutiny in recent years due to vast purse subsidies from casinos that have allowed some tracks to boost purses to as high as three times the claiming price. In 2012, a task force set up to examine a spate of deaths at Aqueduct racetrack in New York recommended that purses in claiming races be no greater than 1.6 times the claiming price, but widespread efforts to put that restriction in place have fallen by the wayside as tracks compete against regional rivals to attract the most horses as possible to their races.

Gosden was succinct in his criticism of high purses for cheap horses.

“There’s a certain sickness when the race is worth more than the horse,” he said.

The recommendation to eliminate claiming races was the most novel recommendation to come out of this year’s Round Table, which is typically held at the Gideon-Putnam Hotel in Saratoga Springs in mid-August in front of an invitation-only crowd. This year, the live event was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and The Jockey Club filmed the presentations and offered them for view on its website at the same time that the conference was originally scheduled.

The Jockey Club spent considerable effort during this year’s event to focus on the role of drugs in racing and its contention that racing is failing to properly police the sport. James Gagliano, the chief operating officer of The Jockey Club, conducted an interview with Greg LeMond, the U.S. cyclist, in which the two discussed the best ways to eliminate cheating.

To LeMond, who was outspoken about his perception that there was widespread cheating in cycling at the end of his career, said that cycling began to get cleaned up only after the sport became serious about taking a short-term blow to its reputation. He said that all sports need to create a climate in which participants are allowed an “out” to provide testimony against fellow cheaters, saying that a fellow rider, Floyd Landis, told him that he couldn’t come clean “because I’ll destroy my family, my friends,” he said.

“You need to have it so that there’s an incentive to out people,” LeMond said, later adding, “If cycling can do it, horse racing can do it.”

Cycling’s modern problems were exposed in part due to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, a private company that compiled an exhaustive account in 2012 about the use of performance-enhancing drugs by Lance Armstrong, who was stripped of all of his wins after the account was published. Armstrong, who had retired by the time the USADA report came out, won seven consecutive Tour de France races from 1999 to 2005.

The Jockey Club supports lobbying efforts to pass federal legislation that would install USADA as the national overseer of horse racing’s drug-testing and drug-enforcement policies. The bill has been introduced in three consecutive congressional sessions but has never advanced to a vote.

Stuart Janney, the chairman of The Jockey Club, said during his closing remarks that the legislation is gaining support in both the House of Representatives and the Senate and that an “announcement” about the bill would be made “very soon.”

Janney also said that “without modernizing our current state of regulation, we will slip back into the present unfortunate state.” The comment referenced the indictment earlier this year of 27 individuals connected to Thoroughbred and Standardbred racing on charges related to the administration of illegal substances to racehorses, including top trainers Jason Servis and Jorge Navarro.

Janney said that “it’s reasonable to assume more arrests are coming” in the case.

In other presentations:

** Katrina Adams, the immediate past chairperson, president, and chief executive officer of the United States Tennis Association, said that all sports, including racing, “need to be more open-minded about who is sitting at the table” and attempt to get greater representation from minority communities and women in its leadership.

“I think, going forward, we all are learning that we need to be a little more inclusive in our marketing materials, in the discussions that we’re having, and the messages that we’re sending so that when I pick up a magazine, I see myself in your sport,” said Adams, who is black.

** Bob Costas, the Hall of Fame broadcaster, said that racing should embrace reform and conduct “a serious self-examination” to discuss concerns about drugs and horse safety. He said that the most effective reforms come from people inside the industry, because those reforms come from those most invested in the sport.

“Why did I talk about steroids [in baseball]?” Costas said. “Not because I wanted to hurt baseball. It’s the sport I love best. It’s because I wanted to see a problem addressed.”