Flatter: Ky. Derby is over, but what about racing’s dark side?

Vezpa was a young 7-year-old. Young because she was bred in Brazil, so her Aug. 6 foal date was in the southern winter, months after the North America crop of 2016 was standing and nursing.

Her trainer Paulo Lobo, himself a native of Brazil, was racing her in her second career stakes seven weeks ago. The Latonia was on the Jeff Ruby Steaks undercard that windy day at Turfway Park.

Jockey Joseph Ramos was spinning Vezpa out of the far turn when, as the Equibase chart put it, she “went wrong into stretch.”

I was there watching it. It looked like one of her legs shattered. Within minutes, the green screen went up, and Vezpa was euthanized.

Or so I assumed.

Turfway Park is in Kentucky, a state that hides its racing deaths as much or more than any other. Two senior racing officials told me that Saturday afternoon that Vezpa died, but they did so off the record.

When I asked a track spokesperson, an employee of Churchill Downs Inc., if the death could be confirmed, I was told the track veterinarian had not returned a text message.

Back on March 25, the death of Vezpa was not big news. It was not news at all. The breezy conclusion was that it was a one-off. If it had been a big-name horse in a bigger-name race, say, the Jeff Ruby, it would have been news.

If it had come during Kentucky Derby week at Churchill Downs, the death of Vezpa would have been news. It actually would have been reported by the racing establishment. And by what is left of the media establishment.

“Transparency,” we were told nine days ago, “is an important component of ...”

Oh, never mind the rest. That statement from CDI lost me at “transparency.” Sort of like hearing, “I don’t mean to get political” before someone gets political. Or “with all due respect” when none is coming. You can’t spell transparency without the 11th, second, third and sixth letters.

Transparency might have been an important component May 3, when racing was under the klieg lights of an event that got the biggest TV audience this side of the Super Bowl. When no one was paying attention to an undercard race at a suburban track near the Cincinnati airport, transparency ran headlong into an unreturned text message.

From Wild On Ice on April 27 to Freezing Point on May 6, seven horses died at Churchill Downs when a mainstream audience was paying attention. If they had suffered their catastrophic injuries in the middle of summer at Ellis Park, we might not have known. And we probably would not have cared.

This is not to thrust the entire burden of openness on Churchill Downs, which should be commended for stepping forward with the information it provided last week. The Kentucky Horse Racing Commission should have put out a news release, too. It could have started with the word “transparency,” too. Maybe something like “transparency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

The KHRC will be dragged kicking and screaming, in a closed session, of course, into a new era of ersatz openness. One of the foundational tenets of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority was to require all states to report horse deaths, including the Commonstealth of Kentucky. But since HISA itself has had trouble getting its own arms wrapped around the concept of transparency, it is hard to be confident about this idea becoming a reality.

In the midst of its 2022 hearings to deal with Medina Spirit’s drug positive after the 2021 Kentucky Derby, KHRC chairperson Jonathan Rabinowitz declared “this commission is committed to transparency, as well as ...”

He lost me after that.

To some degree, state law ties the KHRC’s hands. Not that the commission and its acolytes have shown any eagerness to change that. In the 15 months since we heard “the commission is committed to transparency,” the Medina Spirit story faded from public consciousness, and the custodians of Kentucky racing went back to the solitude of their collective privacy.

Every so often we get cries to pierce the calm of all this business as usual. The Kentucky Derby provides the annual stage to air racing’s grievances. They reached a crescendo Saturday, when Forte’s co-owner Mike Repole expressed his frustration with the status quo minutes after his favored colt was scratched from the Derby because of a bruised foot.

“I just would like to be more consistent with the process of how we do things, Kentucky vs. everyone, and the different rules and regulations and different medications and different vets,” he said. “This horse might have not run in five states today, and he might have run in six states today.”

Repole is dreaming if he thinks there will be some genie coming out of a HISA bottle to cast a spell of consistency over the inconsistencies of subjective diagnoses.

He is right in thinking another state’s veterinarian might have ruled differently on Forte’s injury. The same could be said if Forte had been racing, say, in the middle of the summer at Ellis Park.

This is racing’s version of concussion protocol, and the last time I checked, the NFL was a long way from making that a black and white issue. The extreme caution shown with Tua Tagovailoa last fall was a far cry from Super Bowl XLIX, where I was in the media section to see Julian Edelman stagger through the fourth quarter after being rung up by Kam Chancellor. One man’s suspension-inducing concussion in Florida was another man’s oh-never-mind bell ringing in Arizona. Different states, indeed.

The credibility of Repole’s declaration took a hit this week when The New York Times uncovered Forte’s failed drug test last summer at Saratoga. Perhaps shamed into taking action, New York racing authorities finally got around to DQ’ing Forte and suspending Todd Pletcher on Thursday. Different states, indeed.

Trainer Shug McGaughey called Kentucky’s scratch of Forte and one of his undercard entries “overkill.” Maybe it was within the racing community. The same might be said of the indefinite banning of Saffie Joseph Jr. from Churchill Downs after two of his horses died mysterious deaths.

For drive-by onlookers who watch racing for two minutes a year, however, these actions might have looked robust. Any idea that they would guarantee a trouble-free Derby day dissolved shortly after 11 a.m. EDT on Saturday when Chloe’s Dream was “vanned off.”

We still do not know all the reasons for the seven deaths at Churchill Downs any more than we know for sure why Santa Anita lost 37 horses four years ago or Aqueduct 21 in 2012. California and even New York rather openly addressed their issues by making it harder for unsound horses to get onto racetracks. One can only hope Kentucky follows suit.

Because there was a glare on Santa Anita and Aqueduct, lessons were learned and dialog was productive. The idea that unfit horses there were thrust into races with bloated purses should be food for thought in Kentucky, where historic horse-racing machines have generated stacks of new-found money.

A media colleague suggested Kentucky is where California was four years ago, when every death became news, because there were so many. That being the case, it looked like Churchill Downs had a clean Thursday night of racing.

If Vezpa were to happen now, her death would not go unnoticed. Nor would those of Aerator, Caramelito, Petit Verdot, Joy Enamorada and Fort Defiance, who also died this year at Turfway Park. Nor Goin to the Show, Master of the Ring and Wolfe County this spring at Keeneland.

And those are just the ones we know of. Yeah. Transparency.