2 Hall of Fame horseplayers have ideas on how to repair racing

Las Vegas 

There was an irony surrounding the induction of new Hall of Famers Michael Beychok and David Gutfreund last month at the National Horseplayers Championship.

Weren’t these the same two guys who, in the past six months, said they were through with horse racing?

“The fact of the matter is there’s no chance that Michael and I are completely, completely quitting,” Gutfreund said. “Cutting back quite a bit, yes. Completely, completely stopping? It’s way too deep in our blood.”

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This is the same David Gutfreund who wrote on Twitter last Aug. 15, “Between corporate nastiness of all the alphabet groups, the blatant cheating on the backstretch, which is obviously bad for horses, and the overall apathy of those involved in the game, … it is time to just walk away. And I’ll readily confess, not gonna be easy. Have tried it before.”

On Jan. 22 in the Louisiana newspapers The Advocate and The Times-Picayune, Beychok wrote, “Trainers who use drugs on their horses illegally run horses in the sport’s biggest races. When they are caught, it is too late for the tracks to ‘un-pay’ the bettors who won and pay the bettors who lost. … I’m quitting horse racing, but the truth is horse racing has quit on me.”

The following week, Beychok realized he was not the first to say he was mad as hell, and he was not going to take it anymore.

“Probably what I’m following is Dave’s lead, which is a courageous and honest and truthful assessment of the industry and where he’s at,” Beychok said.

The two men sat together a few hours before their Hall of Fame induction on the last day of the 2022 NHC. Beychok, 58, a political consultant based in Baton Rouge, La., and Gutfreund, 60, a professional gambler who splits time between Chicago and Las Vegas, answered questions in an extended interview for Horse Racing Nation’s Ron Flatter Racing Pod.

Gutfreund, known around gambling circles as “The Maven,” wore a T-shirt that said, “Take a stand.” Beychok said it was a microcosm of what drove him to take such a strong position in his hometown newspapers.

“Where I’m at is I have to take a stand,” said Beychok, the come-from-behind winner of the $1 million first prize in the 2013 NHC. “It may not work out for everybody, but I need to worry about how it works for me.”

Both men identified the most frequently stated problems with the sport. Drug cheats. High takeout. Disjointed administration. Lax regulation. When asked what is at the top of their to-do list to repair the sport, they agreed on something more basic than all that.

“Product,” said Gutfreund, who used an unmatched, autumn hot streak to win the NHC Tour’s year-long title in 2018. “The product needs to be better. Having a good product makes up for a lot of other mistakes and makes the game a lot more interesting to the players.”

Gutfreund singled out the shrunken field sizes in California as a case in his larger point.

“The product in a lot of jurisdictions isn’t what it used to be on a day-to-day basis,” he said. “That, first and foremost, needs to be fixed.”

“If you don’t have product,” Beychok said, “you don’t have a game.”

He added there have been some strong steps in the right direction, but they have come up short of realizing meaningful goals. The 2020 federal indictment of trainers Jason Servis and Jorge Navarro and 25 other defendants accused of illegal horse doping came right to mind.

“Where are the rest of the indictments?” Beychok asked. “These are not the only two offenders. They were used as an example, as almost sacrificial lambs by the powers-that-be. They wanted to say, ‘Hopefully, we’ve cleaned it up. Let’s move on.’ Well, we haven’t cleaned it up, and that’s why I’m not moving on.”

Beychok has been especially visible in his criticism of Bob Baffert, who is fighting to preserve not only his reputation but the late Medina Spirit’s victory in last year’s Kentucky Derby. Since the colt failed a post-race drug test, Churchill Downs suspended Baffert and his horses for two years. Beychok then became the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit on behalf of bettors whose losing tickets might have been winners had Medina Spirit been disqualified on race day.

Now Beychok is watching with keen interest how Kentucky stewards may yet change the outcome of the race, perhaps any day now.

“If Medina Spirit is disqualified, that will obviously help our cause,” Beychok said.

He and Gutfreund said the greater good of the sport would be served by the implementation of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act (HISA), but only if the new federal law’s drug-enforcement edict is robust.

“There’s a lot of trainers that are running and hiding from the law,” Beychok said. “We don’t have the testing. HISA was supposed to solve it. They promised us (the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency), but we’re not getting USADA. That’s what they promised Congress to pass it. That’s what got Churchill Downs on board. That’s what got (Senate Republican leader) Mitch McConnell on board. Now they’ve pulled that rug out from under.”

“It needs to have good testing,” Gutfreund said. “It needs to have teeth, and it needs to have the industry stand behind it.”

USADA announced in December that it could not negotiate a deal with HISA directors to take on the burden of enforcing drug rules in horse racing. If that did not stop the forward momentum of HISA’s scheduled enactment July 1, it certainly slowed everything down.

“Let’s have HISA make a deal with a real-world, drug-testing agency that is without ties to horse racing,” Beychok said. “They can go out and test for the drugs that are prevalent, and have HISA have the teeth to enforce the findings.”

Gutfreund said some star horsemen may have to take the fall to send a message that the old way of doing business around the edges of the rules will not work anymore.

“You have to be willing to throw people under the bus,” Gutfreund said. “You have to be willing to take accountability. Horse racing has never really wanted to take accountability. There’s no question in my mind that some of the bigger names in the sport, not just now but over the course of decades in the sport, have been protected.”

Both men pointed to Rick Dutrow, the trainer of 2008 Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner Big Brown who is in the last 11 months of a 10-year suspension by the New York Racing Association for repeated drug infractions. Dutrow has his supporters who believe he was set up to be used as an example.

“Richard Dutrow was a convenient scapegoat,” Gutfreund said. “It’s lame to say he wasn’t the only one, but he wasn’t.”

“He was a scapegoat,” Beychok said. “Now we have two other scapegoats. I fear that it’s another two or three years down the line before we have some more. We all know it’s out there and prevalent, and it’s hurting the game, which is the greatest gambling game that we have.”

On that note, the conversation turned on a dime. Or more accurately 20 cents. That is what Gutfreund once famously turned into $90,000 on a successful, multi-race wager.

“You can turn 50 cents on a Pick 5 into six figures,” Gutfreund said. “It can happen to anyone. If you get full fields on a card, you can have that dream. It’s hard to have that dream betting sports or other sorts of gambling products.”

Still, the two men who spent a lot of their time at NHC catching up with old friends are ultimately at a loss to cure what ails the sport they love.

“I can’t solve it,” Beychok said. “But I want to talk about it.”