Jockey Club Round Table on Sunday comes amid transition

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. – The Jockey Club’s annual Round Table Conference on Matters Pertaining to Racing on Sunday here will mark two transitions for the company, one real and one intangible.

This year’s conference will be the first in 32 years to be held without Ogden Mills “Dinny” Phipps, the highly influential head of the Phipps breeding and racing operation, as the chairman of the organization. Phipps, who has had health problems for some time, announced his resignation earlier this year. Phipps first took the helm of The Jockey Club in 1983 and is the longest-serving chairman of the organization in its long history.

The resignation will become effective as of The Jockey Club’s board meeting Saturday, one day before the Round Table, when a new chairman will be selected.

That is the real transition. The second involves the direction The Jockey Club intends to take in the future, and that future is not clear.

Over the past four years, The Jockey Club has pushed the industry to support federal legislation that would transform the way racing is regulated by putting in place a top-down structure requiring states to implement uniform rules governing medication use and drug testing. That effort has accelerated this year with the introduction of federal legislation that would appoint the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, a private, nonprofit company, as the sport’s drug czar.

Already immensely powerful in the industry as a result of a decades-long expansion into various businesses and initiatives in racing, the federal effort has proved divisive in the industry. While the bill has drawn support from powerful owners and breeders, other factions in the racing industry have resisted the bill for a variety of reasons.

The Jockey Club will attempt to strengthen the case for the bill with Sunday’s keynote speaker, Edwin Moses, the Olympic gold medal winner who has devoted himself to anti-doping causes since retiring from athletics. Moses, a physicist with an MBA degree who has been the chairman of USADA since 2012, is a passionate, charismatic defender of anti-doping efforts in sports.

Moses will be the second USADA official to be a keynote speaker at the Round Table since 2012, when the USADA’s chief executive, Travis Tygart, gave the keynote address.

The rest of the lineup for the two-hour conference is mostly filled with Jockey Club officials who will give presentations on the organization’s initiatives and myriad business units. Also, Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, who is serving out his last term, is scheduled to speak, as is Dr. Kathy Andersen, president-elect of the American Association of Equine Practitioners.

In addition, Bill Squadron, the executive vice president of STATS, a sports data company that is partnering with The Jockey Club and its co-owned subsidiary Equibase on the development of handicapping products, is scheduled to give a presentation.

The Jockey Club will provide a live video stream of the conference beginning at 10 a.m. Eastern at jockeyclub.com.