Jockey Club hears about taxes, AI, influencers & climate change

Before hearing how climate change and artificial intelligence can affect racing, how a journalist puts horse terms in news coverage and how a social-media influencer can make a positive difference, The Jockey Club heard Thursday about the challenges of making sure racing is not on the wrong end of Washington politics.

“We dodged a bullet this time,” political consultant Shawn Smealie of AGC Advocacy told the 73rd annual round-table conference on matters pertaining to racing. He was talking about language in President Trump’s recently signed spending plan that would have eliminated tax credits for horse-racing expenses.

“This would have significantly impacted the vast majority of horsemen,” Smealie said at the conference in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. “This provision went unnoticed during the House consideration of the bill, and it was only brought to our attention two weeks before the Senate began consideration.”

The U.S. Senate eventually erased the tax change before the “big, beautiful bill” was signed July 4 by President Trump.

“Wealthy horsemen as you can imagine are not high in the sympathy scale,” Smealie said. “But our message was simple. Fewer owners meant fewer horses meant fewer races meant fewer fans and fewer jobs.”

Now, Smealie said, it is a priority for his firm, which was hired by The Jockey Club, to get rid of another contentious provision that made it into the budget act. He said so while taking a not-so-veiled swipe at another group working on behalf of the betting industry.

“One tax increase that did sneak into the bill, unbeknownst to the very powerful American Gaming Association, was a provision allowing only 90% deduction for gambling losses,” Smealie said. “This would actually create a scenario for gamblers where they would have to pay taxes on their losses. Legislation has already been introduced in both the House and Senate to restore 100% deductibility, and I am told that there’s going to be a tax bill later this fall, and this fix will be included.”

Government regulations designed to make public venues more environmentally friendly were the emphasis of a discussion late in the conference. An environmental scientist who works for the New York Yankees and advises leagues and sports organizations around the world said there is an urgency to addressing the rise in greenhouse-gas emissions.

“What we need to do is stop making the problem worse, reducing our contribution, our use of fossil fuels,” Dr. Allen Hershkowitz said. He added later that “this is not going away. Greenhouse-gas emissions are still going up, and the science is telling us they need to be going down. But they’re going up.”

New York Racing Association executive vice president Glen Kozak said environmental sustainability already is being addressed at Belmont Park, which is in the middle of a $455 million project to build a smaller grandstand and rebuild the track’s infrastructure.

“Flooding and drainage, that’s probably the biggest improvement that’s been made at Belmont for the new facility,” Kozak said. “It’s not a very sexy topic, but it’s critical for what we’re doing with the infrastructure that’s there. The old racing surfaces had minimal drainage.”

Kozak said millions of gallons of water will be recycled via storm drains and even the new infield pond.

On a day when Saratoga’s turf races were rained off to the main track, Kozak also said new technology is helping NYRA gauge track conditions before and after storms and even around heatwaves and air-quality alerts.

“Now in the summer months, we’ve all been exposed to not only the heat index with how it impacts racing but also air-quality testing,” he said. “Who would ever think that we’d have to go through something like that at Belmont Park, the day before the (2023) Belmont, canceling a day of racing because of air quality?”

New technology also means artificial intelligence. One AI company representative said it could be used to prevent races at multiple tracks from overlapping one another, as long as all those tracks cooperated.

“This causes contention for eyeballs and thus lowers any potential handle,” said Dr. Ryan Kelley, a scientific engineer with Fastbreak AI. “If we optimize the schedule and reduce this overlap, this experiment shows that it should increase the handle.”

Kelley showed a model that indicated as much as a 3% rise in handle when races are not running simultaneously.

From the media world, NBC’s Steve Kornacki said “horse-race journalism” has become a label used on some political correspondents like him.

“It’s meant to be pejorative,” said Kornacki, who also works as an analytics-based handicapper on NBC’s racing coverage. “I’m probably not in a good position to deny it. But that’s OK, because honestly, I embrace the term.”

He said it has come to mean simplifying the explanation of politics by using horse-racing terms and analogies to define the ebb and flow of a political campaign.

Not one to be politically aligned, Kornacki said using racing as a prism for politics allows him to carve out middle ground to handicap the left and the right.

“They both want to know who’s up, who’s down and why. And so do I,” he said. “So I’m happy to call myself a horse-race journalist.”

Social media had the stage when influencer turned horse owner Griffin Johnson explained his vision for racing. In part it involves the old-school method of reaching out to fans personally, something he said the likes of retired NFL quarterback Tom Brady cannot do.

“It’s awesome that he’s at the Kentucky Derby, but for a viewer, what does that mean?” Johnson said. “They can’t talk to Tom Brady. They’re not going to get to shake his hand or take a picture or even really get close to him. He’s going to have a special line. He’s going to walk through the back. He’s just going to be in his own bubble. For me, I show up to Saratoga. … I’ll be taking pictures with people. I’m introducing myself. I’m asking, did you bet today? How was it? Oh, you lost. Hey, me, too, but that’s cool. That’s what it really breaks down to as the reason that an influencer is so powerful, because it’s accessible.”

The more than two-hour conference closed with Everett Dobson, the new chairman of The Jockey Club, offering his evaluation of various facets of the racing industry.

“Racing has never been safer for our horses and our jockeys,” he said, crediting the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority for contributing to a 44% decline in the rate of racing deaths since 2009. “The Jockey Club will continue to strongly support HISA.”

Dobson did not reference training deaths, which have been absent from the equine-injury database and started being collected by HISA only this year.

Promising what he called a “meaningful increase” in The Jockey Club’s contribution to the Thoroughbred Aftercare Alliance, Dobson announced a plan to expand the Thoroughbred Incentive Program, which promotes second careers for retired racehorses.

“Our vision is to create a pilot program with a series of Thoroughbred-only events across North America,” Dobson said. “We see the tremendous growth, the showing, the eventing and the Western disciplines have experienced recently and believe there’s a similar opportunity for Thoroughbreds in equestrian sports beyond the track.”

Thursday’s conference was held at Saratoga Spa State Park’s Hall of Springs and was attended by about 200 people, mostly well-heeled stakeholders in racing. Horse Racing Nation covered it remotely via a live videostream.