Potts ruled off at Laurel for association with Vitali

Wayne Potts, a trainer who has started horses across the Eastern seaboard this summer, has been ordered off the grounds of Laurel Park after racing officials there concluded that he was training horses on behalf of a trainer who is already banned at the Maryland track, according to Laurel’s top racing official and Potts.

Sal Sinatra, the president of Laurel Park and Pimlico Race Course in Maryland, said that Potts was banned from the track after several horses arrived at Laurel last week with health certificates indicating that they were previously trained by Marcus Vitali, who has been banned by Laurel and Pimlico. The horses arrived from Rising Sun Training Center in New Jersey, Sinatra said, a small facility in which only three trainers are known to stable their horses, including Vitali.

According to Sinatra, the health certificates submitted to the racing office contained a line identifying the trainer of the horses, and it was clear that Vitali’s name had been covered over with liquid paper. Potts’s name was written on top of the liquid paper, both Sinatra and Potts said. Because Laurel has banned Vitali for years, Sinatra called Potts into his office and told him to vacate the premises within a week.

“I’m just so tired of this guy,” Sinatra said, referring to Vitali. “And I’m tired of dealing with all of this. It’s these people who keep breaking the rules, and this industry can’t have a place for these guys. I got to protect the gamblers, and they deserve to know, ‘Am I betting on Potts or Vitali or someone else?’ "

The decision by Sinatra was first reported by The Paulick Report.

Vitali was first ruled off by the Maryland tracks in 2016, after the trainer surrendered his license earlier in the year in Florida as part of a negotiated agreement involving multiple medication violations. Last year, he was suspended for a year by Delaware racing regulators for impeding an investigation, and he was only eligible to begin training again in July. In the past decade, Vitali has been fined or suspended 40 times for various infractions, according to a data base of racing rulings.

This weekend, Potts denied being a paper trainer for Vitali. “I have nothing to do with that,” he said.

Potts has been training since 2004, but he had only a handful of starts each year from 2004-2007. He re-established his training career in 2011, and since 2014 he has started in excess of 300 horses a year. This year, he has been shipping horses to tracks from his stable bases at Laurel and Monmouth Park in New Jersey.

After Laurel forced him out, Potts said he moved all his horses to Monmouth Park. He said some of his owners fired him but that he still has 38 horses. He said he previously had 37 horses at Laurel and 15 at Monmouth.

Potts said that when horses owned by Carolyn Vogel were sent to him from the New Jersey training center, he was handed foal papers and Coggins tests but the health certificates were sent to the Laurel Park stable gate.

He said the health certificates had the name of the previous trainer covered over with liquid paper and that “W Potts” was written over the top of it.

Potts said he trained for Vogel from 2017 to 2019, and that Vitali took those horses to Florida last year.

“She paid me $27,000 over a year and a half,” Potts said of Vogel. “When she called me to take the horses back I had empty stalls. Why would I say no to an owner who pays their bills? I never got the opportunity to defend myself or talk to anybody.”

Regarding Sal Sinatra, who has had a long career in racing offices across the East and who has recently begun taking a hard line against trainers he suspects of playing loose with racing rules, Potts said: “I don’t like him and he don’t like me. It is what it is.”

Sinatra said that Vitali had attempted to enter several horses at Laurel earlier in August, and that Sinatra told him that his horses were not welcome at the track.

It is not against racing rules to transfer horses from one trainer to another, and Sinatra acknowledged that the stewards at Laurel Park said they could not issue a ruling against Potts based on a transfer if the trainers had valid racing licenses. But he said he took the step to ban Potts because of his association with Vitali.

“I can’t deal with it anymore,” Sinatra said.

Sinatra said he alerted the stewards at Saratoga Race Course in New York about his suspicions that Potts was training for Vitali because Potts had shipped some horses to the track. On Saturday, NYRA released a statement saying that Potts has a valid racing license and has not been the subject of a regulatory complaint in another jurisdiction that would trigger a reciprocal suspension. Therefore, he would be allowed to continue to enter horses at the track, barring an official ruling.

“NYRA is aware of the allegations publicly leveled against Wayne Potts earlier this week,” said Martin Panza, NYRA’s senior vice president of racing operations, in the statement. “These allegations must be thoroughly investigated and adjudicated by the relevant regulatory agencies in order to provide due process to this trainer or any trainer in question. NYRA will take additional action only as warranted by the facts developed and presented by regulators.”

Potts won his first career stakes on Aug. 8 at Saratoga when American Sailor was elevated from second to first by the stewards in the Grade 3 Troy Stakes. On Friday, Potts won a New York-bred maiden race with Our Destiny, a horse owned by Rohan Ramdat who was also the 3-year-old colt’s previous trainer.

Potts said that he was considering hiring an attorney to litigate the Laurel ejection, even though racetracks have wide latitude as private companies in a gambling business to bar individuals that they deem threats to the integrity of the racing product.

“I want to clear my name,” he said.

--additional reporting by David Grening