Stuart S. Janney III:

Thank you, Gary. It’s great to see you. You chose a pretty attractive studio there, even if it is some distance from us. And I’d like to thank FanDuel for helping us bring you here live from California for your talk. Also from California, but here with us today, is Dr. Dionne Benson. Dionne will update us on the technology being used in California to keep our horses safe. Dionne, glad to have you.

Dr. Dionne Benson:

Thank you, chairman and members of The Jockey Club. January and February of 2019 were terrible months at Santa Anita Park. Horses were dying. By March, the track was closed and there was a real possibility that the state of California would end racing forever. With a two-month fatality rate of over 4.3 per 1,000 horses in racing, it was clear to all stakeholders that something had to change. This was an opportunity to change racing and training forever, with the trainers and owners ready to embrace a new culture of racing, track ownership, and management committed to putting horses first by focusing on safety and welfare. As part of this effort, several track protocols were adopted. Among those were medication regulations for racing and training, protocols that were quickly adopted by the state and emulated by HISA when it developed its equine drug and medication control program. Additionally, Santa Anita committed to having skilled oversight of daily training by track-hired veterinarians who are managed outside of the racing office.

We also required private veterinarians to be involved in evaluating the soundness of horses, in training and racing, by requiring them to examine those horses regularly. This protocol has been adopted across several major racing jurisdictions, including New York and Kentucky, and most recently Florida. We also began saving horses who suffered injury, but could be pasture sound. What we found out was not only could those horses be saved, but they could be ridden and have second careers beyond what were previously thought to be life-ending injuries. Finally, we mandated horsemen sign up for works 48 hours in advance to allow us to review those horses and examine as many possible.

The last protocol turned out to be a huge undertaking. Santa Anita Park is one of the busiest training facilities in the country, if not the world. With 2,000 horses stabled at Santa Anita, most of whom do timed works almost weekly, the task of reviewing past performances, veterinary list history, previous examinations, and track veterinarian information quickly became daunting, taking between three and five hours per day.

So, I sat down with Aidan Butler, the now-president of 1/ST Racing, to discuss how we could better tackle this task. As it happened, Aidan was trying to solve his own issue, namely horse inventory. As he likes to say, “The supermarket knows how many cans of each brand of beans are on the shelf. How is it we don’t know how many horses are on the backside, let alone where those horses are in their conditions?”

Clearly, the data veterinarians in the racing office needed overlapped and could be managed by a single program. The program would need to address a horse’s racing history and trainer preferences while providing analysis of several safety factors to veterinarians working at the racetrack. This information had to be presented in a way that was easily accessible by both the racing office and track veterinarians. Additionally, to encourage adoption by horsemen, there had to be some benefit to trainers.

Out of this discussion and a great deal of work by the talented team at 1/ST Technology, Racehorse 360 was born. Racehorse 360 is a program to help the racing office trainers and the veterinarians be more effective. For the racing office, it can assist in writing condition books. It analyzes not only which horses are on the backside, but also where they are in training. For example, have they worked a race lately? Where are the horse populations in their conditions, such as how many 3-year-old and up-maiden fillies are on the backside who’ve been racing for $25,000? Tailoring condition books to the horse population can provide more stability and predictability for horsemen and better field size for the handicapper and racing office.

Racehorse 360 can also help identify how to order the races in a card based upon what kind of handle a specified race historically generated, placing higher-wagering races more advantageously in the card to increase the handle. It can also identify eligible horses for carded races, specifically identifying those horses who are eligible for a particular race. And in conjunction with the health and welfare portion, it can identify horses who could potentially be scratched from the race due to veterinary reasons, allowing us to write safer races with fewer scratches.

From the trainer perspective, it can also make their job easier. For example, trainers can identify parameters for each horse in the barn, such as distance, claiming price, and preferred surface. The program provides notification to the trainer whenever a corresponding race is written, which means they no longer miss races due to not being aware that one was written for that horse. They can also use the program to contact the racing office to request a specific race, for barn maintenance requests, and to complete stall applications online.

There are several other ways Racehorse 360 can help the racing office, but I’m here to talk about racehorse safety. However, for those of you with questions, Aidan is here. For those of you looking for him, he’s probably in the back, thankful there are no longer assigned seats at this conference, and you can certainly contact him at the break.

So how can Racehorse 360 enhance horse safety and welfare? As I mentioned, we are getting workout requests from trainers two days in advance of a timed work. We review each request knowing we simply cannot physically examine every horse entered to work. Therefore, we prioritize which horses should be examined by track veterinarians the day prior to working.

Most days, we are getting over 200 workout requests. Some days it’s over 400. The requests come to us about 2:00 p.m. and must be analyzed by 5:00 a.m. the next morning. That will allow track veterinarians to examine horses working the following day. When we first started doing this analysis, we would pull Equibase’s past performance data on each horse, vet list histories from InCompass, intra-articular injection information from California Horse Racing Board’s website, and our own examination notes. We then compared this data to each horse provided by the racing office, looking for risk factors identified by Tim Parkin’s research with the Equine Injury Database, as well as risk factors we identified locally.

Sorting through this amount of information by hand was cumbersome and it was easy to miss something, especially after you’d been doing it for a few hours. Using these risk factors, we scratched about 2.7% of horses examined for works during the Santa Anita winter meet. We didn’t realize it at the time, but we were reviewing over 50 different risk factors by hand, plus each horse’s physical examination history. On a Saturday with hundreds of workers signed up, it became a Herculean feat. Now each horse is signed up to work is entered into Racehorse 360. The software automatically searches the past performance and veterinary lists for each of the 50 risk factors we have identified.

On each horse’s home screen, there are PPs, a list of risk factors, the vet’s list history, previous examination, notation of whether the horse has been identified as lame on-track by the veterinarian on the rail, we also call this flagged on track, and the track vet’s risk assessment of the horse from high to medium to low based upon prior physical examinations. This allows a remote veterinarian to quickly determine whether a specified horse should be selected for examination prior to a timed work by one of our track veterinarians.

To streamline the identification of horses to examine, they can be sorted by risk factors or exam-based risk level as a starting point. Horses who do not need exams are passed. The horses who should be considered for exams are sent to the track vets on Racehorse 360. Once in the barn, the track veterinarians can see all their risk factors, vet’s list history, exam history, and flagged on-track history on their tablet, along with notes from the veterinarian creating the exam list about why the horse should be checked.

This is all done stall side, marrying the physical exam with the risk level of the horse without additional papers or the need to shuffle between software programs. This allows veterinarians to make better informed decisions regarding whether the horse should work. Examination results are entered into Racehorse 360, which are visible for future examinations in the program, as well as they link back into The Jockey Club’s InCompass program, making it visible to vets across the country. Furthermore, veterinarians can take videos of in-hand and on-track jogs and link them to the horse’s profile so there’s no question about what the horse looked like on the track or in the shedrow on a particular day. Having this information in one place, as a veterinarian, deciding whether a horse should work is a powerful and enabling tool, allowing us to make better choices.

Looking deeper, Racehorse 360 allows us to monitor horse welfare. For me, as a track vet, one of the most concerning things are horses who stop working or racing, yet are still at the track. Have they shipped out and we don’t know about it, or are they injured? Or have they become even pony horses?

Racehorse 360 allows us to quickly identify horses that have not recently worked or raced and examine them. If they are injured, they can be placed on the official vet’s list and the track vet can help ensure appropriate diagnostics are performed, and the issue is monitored as the horse returns to training. Racehorse 360 allows track veterinarians to be a better advocate for horses who may otherwise fall through the cracks.

Now as I indicated, 1/ST has veterinarians at trackside at all of its facilities, daily, in California, most days in other states. However, one or even two veterinarians cannot always see all horses on the track. This is where another part of Racehorse 360 called Track Optics comes into play during training and racing.

Track Optics provides veterinarians with an additional set of eyes on the track during training. In one configuration, it consists of a modified stationary 4K camera set on the rail of a racetrack or training facility. These are small, inexpensive cameras that can withstand Laurel Park’s winters, Santa Anita’s summers, and Gulfstream Park’s humidity frankly better than I can.

The cameras collect information feeding into a program that monitors 21 separate points on the horse and jockey with data from those points collected 30 times per second. The program essentially builds a rough skeleton of the horse.

Alternatively, it can also be used with four overhead 8K cameras. This creates an artificial pan-tilt camera similar to the one used in racing, allowing for isolation of each horse, and it can capture data for every horse on a track simultaneously, even if there are 100 horses on the track. Regardless of which camera setup is used, the data is run through an AI program that filters the information and adjusts those filters as it learns what data is important. This allows the AI to make predictions based upon the videos. To date, we have captured 3,000 hours of footage and 12 terabytes of data from training at three locations. The more data we have, the more effective the AI will become.

Here you can see the software in action during training. It can identify horses with obvious lameness acting as an additional set of eyes for the vet, but it can also pick up a more subtle deviation in stride. Track Optics was trained to distinguish between multiple horses on the track at the same time, even if they’re both crossing in front of the camera simultaneously. And it can also identify horses versus other objects on the track, such as tractors. So instead of watching five hours of rail and tractors, it’s only being used when the AI needs to identify horses. Within moments of a horse being identified by Track Optics, Racehorse 360 sends a message to the track veterinarian, who could be at the track or anywhere in the world where they have cell service.

The message consists of a video clip of the horse allowing the veterinarian to identify the saddle towel and/or rider on the horse. The veterinarian can then contact the trainer to get the name of the horse, or if the vet is trackside, he or she can stop that horse and follow them to the barn for an examination.

Once the horse is identified, the name of the horse, along with the on-track and in-barn examination information, is entered into Racehorse 360. The Track Optics recording and exam information becomes part of the horse’s profile. The system is currently running at Gulfstream Park, Santa Anita, and Laurel Park. Data is being collected daily and we are reviewing clips to identify horses and potential issues. Approximately 2,500 clips that Track Optics identified have been reviewed since the beginning of data collection. That data is used to retrain the algorithm using machine learning.

To date, we’ve completed two re-trainings of the AI program. The improvement in identifying horses with issues has been impressive from my perspective. As of today, of the clips sent by Track Optics, approximately 75% of those are determined to be worth following up by track veterinarians. As we continue to collect data and train the system, the AI will become smarter. All of this will allow earlier identification of potential issues before they become significant problems.

In addition to the training aspects of Track Optics, the program can help us monitor horses in racing. By using Track Optics with the pan-tilt camera employed at many racetracks, we can collect thousands of data points for each horse in every race, including speed, acceleration, deceleration, stride length, and distance covered throughout the horse’s career. It can also provide information on placing and split timing by horse. This is all done without a single device on the horse.

The way that we do this is through mapping the track using Google Earth and a few on-site measurements, which are verified several times throughout the year to ensure accuracy, and using that information to compare it to the horse’s location on the track.

So how does this help horse welfare? Well, recently I attended an IFHA conference on horse welfare and safety, where some researchers proposed that a horse decelerates and decreases stride lengths in the several races prior to an injury. If this trend is consistent among injured horses, we’ve already digitized several thousand races and could simply run a query on the data for those horses who have been injured, comparing them with others in the same race. If it proves to be a risk factor, with Track Optics, this information could be captured and added to the Racehorse 360 risk factors automatically. The power of Track Optics is even greater as it could be used for timing workouts, which means no more missed horses or estimated times from the clockers.

Furthermore, there is even a stewards’ view module, which counts the crop strikes and generates video clips of each within a couple of seconds at the end of the race. This would allow our stewards to immediately determine if a crop rule violation occurred and provide video to back them up.

At the beginning of this talk, I spoke about the first two months of 2019 at Santa Anita Park. Since that time, with all the shareholders working together and the technology we have developed to improve safety and welfare, for the first two months of 2024 were a much different story. In January and February of 2024, and keep in mind in February, we actually got two more inches of rain than we did in 2019, we had zero racing fatalities. We saw a 40% decrease in training fatalities from 2019 to the first two months of 2024. These results are not an anomaly. As Gary Fenton’s presentation showed, since 2019 Santa Anita has shown significant decreases in fatalities in each of the years following. In fact, from March of 2023 to March of 2024, we did not have a single racing fatality in 363 days.

Our fatality rates are not yet zero, but they are now on par or better with racetracks not in just the rest of the United States, but the rest of the world. I’m incredibly proud of the veterinarians, track management, and ownership, horsemen and women, jockeys, grooms, and everyone who has made this possible. Thank you.

Stuart S. Janney III:

Dionne, that’s a great story. I think back to 2019, and I don’t think there was a moment when I thought we’d be talking about success, how really wonderful it is and how important it is for the whole industry.

Before we break for intermission, I’d like to share a video with you. Shortly after our long-time Chairman Dinny Phipps passed away in 2016, his good friend Earle Mack created an award in Dinny’s honor to recognize long-standing dedication to equine health. Earle commissioned the Odon Wagner Gallery and artist Gary Weisman to create a bronze sculpture for future recipients, and there is a very worthy group who’ve been presented with this award. Today, I’m proud to announce that Nancy Kelly, who passed away in February, will posthumously receive the Dinny Phipps Award this year. No one has ever been more deserving. Start that video.

[VIDEO]

Nancy Kelly wore many hats literally and figuratively during a 32-year career at The Jockey Club and she wore them well. She was a welcome presence wherever she went and whatever she did, she brought her smile, her intelligence, and her sunny outlook to every endeavor. She was equally comfortable stuffing Thanksgiving bags for the backstretch community with other volunteers or coordinating and overseeing a black tie dinner or a major conference. She was not only the face of The Jockey Club, but also the creator of a long list of fundraising events that benefited The Jockey Club Safety Net Foundation and the Grayson-Jockey Club Research Foundation.

As well as her style, she typically worked behind the scenes, quietly organizing these events with unique venue selection, decorations, sponsorships, and wide-ranging promotion. Her powers of persuasion when it came to sponsorships, ticket sales, and donations to the foundations were legendary. When she asked an individual to make a contribution, the only question she usually got back was, “How much?” Her rich legacy lives on in the millions of dollars Grayson provides for equine research throughout the country. Nancy’s respect and admiration for the late Dinny Phipps was matched only by his admiration and respect for her. As the recipients of the Dinny Phipps Award, they are joined again.

[END VIDEO]

Stuart S. Janney III:

She was a great and special lady and we will all miss her. The bronze statue will be presented to Nancy’s sister, Fran, and other family members this weekend when they are in Saratoga for a race named in her honor for the Fashionable Fillies Luncheon that Nancy created so many years ago.

I’m not nearly as good as Nancy at asking for your support, but I will draw from what she meant to all of you and ask you to make a donation to the Grayson-Jockey Club Research Foundation in Nancy’s name. I know how much that would please her. The details are on the slide. We will now take a ten-minute intermission.