Flatter: Federal authority misses opportunity to show who’s boss

The Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority had a real chance to make a statement this week. One that would let everyone from board rooms to tack rooms know that it was the new sheriff in town.

Instead, it looked like yet another racing marionette.

This was all about Shoegate. Not so much the conclusion. It was how HISA got there. The means to the end that exonerated Hot Rod Charlie, his trainer Doug O’Neill and his front shoes that looked for all the photographic world like they had illegal toe grabs at Churchill Downs on Oct. 1 when he won the Grade 2 Lukas Classic.

Kentucky Horse Racing Commission stewards did the dirty work. Well, some of it. They came to the conclusion there were no toe grabs, and they sent their paperwork saying so to HISA.

So what did the new sheriff in town do? Rubber stamp it. Or so it would seem.

The KHRC documents that Horse Racing Nation got a hold of this week showed that the stewards sent their version of a sheriff’s posse to Hot Rod Charlie’s barn to inspect his shoes three days after the race. Three days. In fairness to the KHRC, that was when chief steward Barbara Borden first heard from connections for runner-up Rich Strike that there seemed to be a violation.

Yet those same three pages of paperwork showed no conclusions about the images shot by at least five trackside photographers. Sure, the pictures were mentioned. The stewards said they received them. But there was not one word written on those pages about why they were not taken at face value.

So it was business as usual in the Common Stealth of Kentucky, the land where KHRC chairman Jonathan Rabinowitz declared last winter that “this commission is committed to transparency.” That statement was made from behind a load-bearing wall of state regulations that provide cover for the KHRC’s not-so-public operations.

Documents and emails and texts and recordings that HRN and other racing media have requested from the KHRC through the Freedom of Information Act may yet shed some light. By law a response was due this week. But that may be a bigger long shot than Rich Strike was on Derby day.

While there is nothing new about all this, wasn’t HISA supposed to solve this? As an answer to the perceived evils of racing and the bigger evils of animal-rights extremists, it was created as a beacon to shine a light on the shadowy operations of this sport.

Instead, all HISA produced publicly Tuesday in its ratification of the KHRC’s conclusion was a 76-word statement of agreement with the state stewards. It could have fit into two Tweets.

“The investigation was well-conducted and thorough” were among those few words. If only the same could be said of HISA’s endorsement.

Maybe the KHRC investigation really was “well-conducted and thorough.” But unless the media’s FOIA search unearths something we have not already seen, then we are left to accept the word of bureaucrats who have less of a track record than 2-year-old horses in a springtime race.

Speaking of HISA, its P.R. team assembled 761 more words this week to spin a report on its “2023 financial assessments to state racing commissions.” That was a wordy way to say “budget,” which it said would be $72,509,662 next year.

Even in those 761 words, though, the budget was not exactly itemized. There were some bullet points that included the more than $58 million for the enforcement of medication rules, $3.6 million for racetrack safety and $5.4 million for technology and maintenance.

Oh, yes. Another $5.2 million were said to be going to administrative and organization costs. In other words, bureaucrats. But with some classic government spin, that bullet point had a doozy of a parenthetical phrase. It said “$1.8 million is budgeted for defending against litigation challenging HISA and related expenses.”

Yes, how dare anyone challenge the high and mighty HISA – and run up its bills.

This year’s HISA budget, which is not yet burdened by drug enforcement but presumably is weighed down by those pesky lawsuits, was set at $14,397,769. Somehow, though, there was not enough money in that budget or enough words in the Congressional fiat that created it for HISA to send an independent enforcer to see how the KHRC was looking into the Hot Rod Charlie case.

Wasn’t that the great hope for this federal regulation? There finally was going would be someone to keep the good-old boys and girls honest rather than simply let them carry out their look-the-other-way routines.

“Let’s never forget the real adversaries are the bad actors who tarnish our sport.”

Those were words HISA CEO Lisa Lazarus spoke at The Jockey Club Round Table this summer. She was referring to cheating outlaws who compete in the sport. But the old-guard enforcers who give the outlaws free rein are themselves accomplices in these perceived crimes. The Shoegate experience seemed to show that HISA was playing right along.

Again, though, that might not be the case. We know only from the 76 words that HISA spoon-fed the public – and the documents that we had to get under the table.

What was said about the photos? Where can the public see the physical evidence that convinced KHRC stewards that the legal shoes they found on Hot Rod Charlie three days after the fact were the ones he wore in the Lukas Classic? For now we do not have those answers.

Lazarus comes off as the smartest person in the room. Any room. That is not meant to be snark; I mean that sincerely. She is a woman of letters with an impeccable résumé full of experience in equine and sports administration. Yet she must carry the water of a new agency that is steeped in secrecy. We should know her salary, yet it was not in that mid-air view of the budget that was released this week.

Something Lazarus still has pinned to her Twitter feed strikes an enigmatic tone. “Bringing unprecedented safety, transparency and integrity to horse racing is what unites us,” it says. “Let’s get to work.”

Yes. Let’s.