Flatter: Keeneland soldiers on in turbulent week for racing

Lexington, Ky.

The old, white sycamore still stands on the south end of the paddock at Keeneland. Otherwise, the view to the east is unrecognizable.

They tore down the old administration building this winter and, with it, the entrance through which tens of thousands of patrons retraced their steps every April and October. A construction barrier separates the walking ring from the cranes and bulldozers being used to build the new Keeneland.

It will be inconvenient in that pardon-our-dust kind of way, but it is encouraging. When I saw Keeneland president Shannon Arvin during morning workouts Thursday, she told me she pretty much lives at the track these days.

“Where is your jackhammer?” I asked.

“I bring it out every night,” she said without missing a beat. I half think she meant it.

Between the east side at Keeneland and the front side at Churchill Downs and all sides at Belmont Park, these are encouraging signs for racing. Actual building and rebuilding to gussy up the old joints. If only they could figure out how to put one foot in front of another in Maryland, a place where walk and talk require an interpreter.

It makes one wonder about that Baltimore Banner story this week that said Churchill Downs was making a bid for Pimlico. Or maybe it was an inquiry. An entrée. Whatever. Tires were kicked, according to the Banner, a trustworthy website owned by the former president of The Economist and The Atlantic and whose award-winning editor used to lead the investigative team at the Los Angeles Times. If journalism were a poker game, the Banner could see your bona fides and raise you a Pulitzer.

Maybe this was a trial balloon launched by Churchill Downs to see what it might cost to absorb another racetrack. And to control the first two jewels in the Triple Crown. And to widen its influence in the mid-Atlantic, where it already has Colonial Downs. Whether that means true expansion or eventual contraction depends on whether Old Hilltop looks to bean counters like Turfway Park or Arlington.

I am getting ahead of myself now. All we know is that someone from Churchill paid a call. Still to be determined is whether it was serious with a capital $ or whether it was little more than someone looking for free cookies at a Sunday open house. Stay tuned.

Churchill will be in more familiar territory Monday morning, namely a Louisville courthouse. That is where lawyers will be lawyering and a judge will be judging the latest legal salvo in Bob Baffert’s quest to be let back under the twin spires.

I am led to believe this will be little more than procedural excitement and that no stop-the-computer-servers ruling will be made that day. But these are the first steps in a sequel for which there was no clamor.

There is no shortage of onlookers who have grown weary of these legal briefs from the firm of Thrust and Parry. At some point we all make like the students who get bored with the lecturer and start looking at their phones.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This one is different. Baffert is not a plaintiff. Owner Amr Zedan is. It is not about Medina Spirit. It is about the yearlings he bought in 2022 whom he expected to put with Baffert, whose suspension was supposed to be over in 2024. And now Muth cannot cash in his Arkansas Derby chips to run for roses in the Kentucky Derby.

Don’t let my cynicism drip into your screen and short-circuit it, but this feels like a fourth-quarter onside kick, if such a thing exists anymore. It is no secret to readers here that I want to see Baffert back in the Derby, which, without Muth, will be like the NBA those two years without Michael Jordan. Your winner May 4 may as well be your 1994 and 1995 champion Houston Rockets.

As a betting man with absolutely no credentials as an attorney but with more time than I wish I had not wasted sitting through court cases, I would wager against a Zedan-Baffert win here. Even if an injunction were granted, Churchill’s team of barristers would break land-speed records getting to a higher court to get it blocked.

If there is a legal bookmaker within the gaze of my column, I would like to get a two-leg parlay on Churchill getting another court victory and the UAE Derby winner getting another loss on the first Saturday in May. I probably would be looking at 1-5.

I should get such an overlay on the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority ever coming clean on, well, anything. These feds who live by the credo to do it now and apologize later uncorked a fizzer this week. It was a Wednesday news dump smack between Zedan cum Churchill cum Pimlico.

“As previously announced, racetracks operating under HISA’s rules reported 1.23 racing-related equine fatalities per 1,000 starts in 2023,” the news release said.

Where were the specific details? Missing were the numbers at each track and how many horses died in races and how many in training. There was no parsing of information about catastrophic breakdowns on dry or wet courses or even which courses in which states. Let me be blunt. We may know at least how many horses died last spring at Churchill Downs or last summer at Saratoga, but we really don’t know exactly how many. But HISA does.

“HISA intends to publish the rates of fatalities per 1,000 starts on a per-state and per-track basis for each track it regulates beginning with its 2024 annual metrics report,” the 2023 annual metrics report said this week. “HISA is also conducting additional analysis of its fatality data and will consider sharing other specific metrics that may be instructive to those working to make the sport safer in 2024 and beyond.”

“Intends”? “Will consider”? Those predicates looks like a setup to break an unmade promise all over again next spring. That whole paragraph was a fancy way for HISA to apologize without saying “I’m sorry” for its failure to come clean with all the information it is hiding.

“I think transparency is always the safest way to operate, because otherwise it looks like you’re trying to sort of hide your cards for some nefarious reason.”

That was what National Thoroughbred Racing Association boss Tom Rooney, one of HISA’s biggest supporters, told me last month when I asked him about my low expectations and well-founded fears for this week’s report. To be clear, Rooney said that sentence in an overarching sense to frame his answer before he got into specifics about HISA and its CEO Lisa Lazarus.

“I don’t think that that’s what Lisa is trying to do at HISA,” Rooney said. “I don’t know if there’d be reasons to keep confidential numbers until something else is revealed. I’m not going to second-guess what she’s doing with regard to that, because I honestly don’t know what their decision is. But in the end, in politics, in anything, when you are transparent, it’s much harder for people in the end to attack you and what you’re doing.”

Perhaps people like The New York Times. It has been supposed HISA’s withholding of meaningful data was a deliberate attempt to keep specific information away from the Times, whose anti-racing documentary “Broken Horses” is expected to drop at Hulu before Derby day. If that were the case, then why put out this fragment of a report right now? HISA already was late on its promise to post it in March. It might as well have waited until after the propaganda film was released. In fact, since there really was nothing new in its report, it did not need to waste anyone’s time with its regurgitated spin.

And so the same ol’, same ol’ persists. The cloak and dagger that have been in the tool kit of racing’s old guard are government-issue now.

Somehow the good part of this sport persists. True sportsmen and women will make it so, especially at Keeneland starting Friday. The rank and file of our game still put on a good show.

The competitors and workers who grind out a living to give us the thrill of victory and the agony of lost bets are not to blame for endless lawsuits, vulnerable track sales and hidden figures. They are, however, the reason we can build a better racecourse.

Ron Flatter’s column appears Friday mornings at Horse Racing Nation. Comments below are welcomed, encouraged and may be used in the feedback segment of the Ron Flatter Racing Pod, which also is posted every Friday.