STUART JANNEY III: Senate Schumer helped me introduce our keynote speaker. Lisa Lazarus is the chief executive officer of HISA. Lisa has been tasked with implementing the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act. I think we found the right person for the job.
Welcome, Lisa. Thanks for being here.
LISA LAZARUS: Well, thank you so much Stuart, and I’m really delighted to be here. I want to say a huge thank you to The Jockey Club for the invitation, to all of its members for the support. On my way during the intermission, I saw some friends, and I saw Bill Carstanjen from Churchill Downs and he said to me, “Don’t worry, you’re among friends.”
I wanted to start my remarks by mentioning that, because I really feel that in this room, and I want to thank all of you for everything you’ve done to try to help HISA kind of get launched, to support me personally and HISA, as well.
I would be remiss if I didn’t point out Representative Tonko who is in the room for everything he’s done for this act and for HISA. We are very appreciative, and we’re excited for what we’ve got going.
In January of this year, after I had accepted the job for HISA‘s CEO, but before I officially started, I began reading the horse racing trades religiously. During that time, there were two letters to the editor published in the Paulick Report that captured my attention.
The first was, “Why am I leaving the sport I love for 50 years?” The second published two days later was, “Why I choose horse racing over the sports I love for 50 years.”
I printed both articles and placed them on my desk as a daily reminder of HISA’s enormous responsibility to the horse racing industry. An enormous opportunity it presents for the sport and for all those who love it.
As I read these articles, I wanted to make sure HISA did everything in its power to lure back the participants and fans we’ve lost, and grow the enthusiasm for those new to the sport. And beside them, put an exclamation mark on how important and personal the success of HISA was to me.
My grandfather emigrated to Canada from Romania at the turn of the century, and although he had no money, he spent every extra penny he had on his horses.
I was five years old when he had a heart attack and died, but the consolation for the family was that he suffered the heart attack while breaking a horse, doing what he loved.
So many of us, and this is also emphasized by Tom Rooney, have cherished memories from our parents and grandparents around horse racing. It’s not lost on me that HISA has a part to play in ensuring those memories would also exist for our children and grandchildren and their children.
I accepted the job as HISA CEO because I saw a once in a lifetime opportunity to successfully lead horse racing through a much-needed period of positive reform. I had done the same for the International Equestrian Federation with 133 different countries, languages, and cultures. I figured, how hard could 30 or so racing jurisdictions be? Apparently, the answer is pretty hard.
The reason I was convinced HISA would succeed at its mission was, as someone who has spent her entire career in sports regulation, it made zero sense that a national sport like horse racing would have so many different sets of rules, especially since horses moved from state to state.
The nine-member HISA board lead by Charlie Scheeler was passionate about HISA’s mission, and so genuinely and sincerely committed to making decisions that were best for horse racing.
I knew I had an ethical and passionate and committed board. And then there were the seminal organizations, like The Jockey Club, the Breeders’ Cup, and NTRA, who had led the initiative to get the bill passed with many other supporters through tireless efforts and were willing to do whatever it took to be successful.
Finally, I assumed that America’s horse racing industry would want to be competitive in the international arena and attract top trainers who would be confident coming over here to race because of our safety and integrity policies.
Six months into the job, even after taking more than a few punches, I’m more convinced than ever that all those principles are true, and that the vast amount of racing participants support our mission of what we’re trying to accomplish.
And by supporting our mission, I don’t mean agree with every rule or policy we put out there, as that will never happen. We are currently and always evaluating our rules and policies. But I simply mean that HISA is the way forward for horse racing.
I want to emphasize this: When people come up to me and tell me, I don’t like your shoeing rule, I don’t like your crop rule. For me, that means they’re supporting HISA because they’re engaging with us about what’s best for the program, how we can be the best version of ourselves.
The overriding principle, that we need one national uniform body for regulations, safety, and integrity. That is a principle that must be and has to be accepted by our industry.
We all know that horse racing is a sport steeped in tradition, and that tradition is a fundamental component of its magic. Saratoga Racetrack opened in 1863, and in a couple weeks, the 153rd running of the Travers Stakes will take place.
Some of those traditions have come under increasing threat in recent years. I don’t think any observer in or outside our sport can credibly argue that reform isn’t needed.
To quote The Jockey Club vice chairman Bill Lear from his congressional testimony, “We are facing an existential threat. If our response to that threat is business as usual, we are going to lose.” One existential threat is the assault on the integrity of our sport, which were very clearly and obviously underlined and identified by the interview that was just led by Jim and also here with our special guest, John Penza.
No one has fought this more ferociously than The Jockey Club, whose tenacious efforts led to the discovery and prosecution of those bad actors within our sport who were illegally doping horses.
These prosecutions sent a powerful message, and when HISA takes over the anti-doping space in January, the Horse Racing Integrity and Welfare Unit’s job will be to build on these huge successes and create a sustainable and effective deterrent to cheating across the country.
And of course, the second existential threat is horse welfare. Our racetrack safety program is aggressively addressing that and will continue to do so.
To protect the sport of kings, to grow and expand the business of racing, and to ensure that tradition continues for the next generation, we must rebuild trust in the industry, both with the public and among each other. We need to preserve our traditions but tolerate change.
I know change is hard and scary, and I hear that all the time when I am meeting with stakeholder groups. But to quote Somerset Maugham, “Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.” We need to safeguard horse racing’s tradition but evolve. It is no longer good enough to say that we need to keep doing things this way because it’s how we’ve always done it.
The reforms we are implementing, the work that we’re all engaged in, are a necessity part of the sport’s evolution. Policymakers and, more importantly, the public demand it of us.
So what would it mean to successfully lead horse racing through reform? Our efforts at HISA will be guided by four principles: Collaboration, transparency, accountability, and unity.
Collaboration, the first one, with experts from the industry and developing and evaluating the rules that govern racetrack safety and anti-doping and medication control. Our sport is unique, and we will approach the future development with the sense of humility and appreciation for the wealth and experience and expertise that resides among industry members.
Specifically, I will soon be creating several advisory groups, including a horsemen’s group, to enhance engaging with stakeholders to ensure we’re delivering the best programs for the industry.
Additionally, when the ADMC rules are published, stakeholder groups will see that we’ve incorporated a lot of the feedback we’ve received from various industry groups, and we very much appreciate receiving that feedback.
The second is transparency, both as a fundamental building block of the reforms and how we need to operate as an organization. As we now have a core HISA team in place — we will create new policies and procedures to guarantee transparency. Specifically, as we transition to a new permanent website, we will be hosting considerably more content around committee work, budgets, staff responsibilities, and contact information, organizational charts, as well as HISA’s strategic goals and objectives with the racing community and the public.
Accountability is the third. Accountability for those who violate the rules, threaten the health and safety of our athletes, both human and equine, and undermine the integrity of the sport.
We at HISA are also accountable to you. We have and will listen to everyone and adapt as appropriate.
And the fourth, which I’m particularly passionate about, is unity. We will work tirelessly to unify this industry. I know it will be hard, but we will not give up on unity.
I am passionate about it because we have to do it to be successful. I don’t mean, again, that we’re going to agree on every single rule. I mean we unify around the governing principle, the core principle, and we need to speak with one voice outside, particularly, the industry.
The horse racing industry is one family made up of many different branches. If we can come together around just a few common goals and speak to those who challenge us outside the family in one voice, we can flourish together.
HISA is, as I sit here today and address you, is not perfect. As you know, it is still a work in progress. But I’m incredibly proud of the work done by our small team under the very tight timeframe set by Congress and the legislation.
Under the direction of our board chaired by Charlie Scheeler and led by working committees of experts from within and outside the industry, we’ve made real progress.
I want to especially thank Dr. Susan Stover, chair of the Racetrack Safety Committee, who has spent countless hours developing with her committee and then implementing the Racetrack Safety Rules. And Adolpho Birch, who has brilliantly led the dedicated Anti-Doping Medication Control Committee, the ADMC committee, through a methodical and comprehensive rule-making process to create HISA’s Anti-Doping Medication Control program.
Our core HISA team is small but growing, with our new CFO Jim Gates, our director of racetrack safety Ann McGovern, general counsel John Roach, and director of State Racing Commission Relations Marc Guilfoil. These folks are all exceptionally dedicated to HISA’s goal and to the industry, and they know racing. All four of them come from racing.
We will continue to add experienced people from both inside and outside the industry in a strategic manner who can help HISA achieve our mission.
We are now six weeks into the implementation of the racetrack safety rules. To date, we have registered 34,000 horses and 28,000 people. More importantly in my view, 90% of horses, jockeys, and trainers that are competing are registered.
If you take the state of Louisiana out of the picture, we’re at 95%, because the majority of our nonregistered participants are located in Louisiana.
We’re in the process of enforcing registration rules, and there are consequences for failing to register. We have reached voluntary agreements to implement HISA rules with 17 state racing commissions out of a total of 21 that HISA currently governs. We have held more than 100 zooms, town halls, and information sessions with stakeholder groups.
We have facilitated and paid for concussion testing for jockeys at 10 different racetracks prior to July 1. We have held multiple national stewards calls to harmonize rule implementation.
We have begun to enforce new uniform rules governing the use of the riding crop, riding crop specifications, horseshoe specifications, and more.
We voided 36 of the 1,748 claims since HISA’s inception through our registration system. We’ve also made significant progress on the ADMC program. In recent weeks we have developed and refined with input from hundreds of racing stakeholders a comprehensive set of rules. These rules will be submitted to the FTC this coming week for implementation in January 2023.
We have appointed an incredibly well-respected and experienced ADMC Enforcement Agency, Drug Free Sport International, which created the Horseracing Integrity and Welfare Unit, HIWU, to be a comprehensive, uniform anti-doping agency.
We just finished earlier this week a two-day off-site dedicated to the program’s buildout, and we have some of the most experienced anti-doping experts in the world working on this program. We are collecting an unprecedented amount of data on equine treatments, injury, and safety, that we will mine and share back to stakeholders to continue to drive ongoing progress. Together I strongly believe those programs will save horses lives and rebuild trust that racing is clean, humane, and fair.
Unfortunately, we have also spent a tremendous amount of time and industry resources defending HISA against lawsuits. Significantly, not a single challenge to HISA’s constitutionality, thanks to the brilliant legislators, has been successful. We have spent approximately $1.8 million total defending the four lawsuits.
As you all know, HISA is industry-funded. These lawsuits are ultimately being paid for by the industry, and ironically, in part by the entities suing us. This is really a shame, as these are industry dollars that could be spent on positive reforms to make racing safer.
It’s deeply disappointing, because there is so much you can do as an industry through unity, which as I said, is one of the core guiding principles that I’m passionate about.
So, what can you expect next from HISA? We will continue to refine the racetrack safety rules. Rulemaking is an integrative process, and future rules will fill in gaps, clarify ambiguities, and reflect new information and sharing of basically feedback we received on how the safety rules are working.
As you may know, we recently evolved new shoeing rules after constructive engagement with a number of racing participants. That’s just one example of the collaborative dialog we want to and will continue to have around these rules.
A primary focus this fall will be the ADMC program. We will soon be announcing additional leadership within HIWU, including highly qualified and well-known individuals from within racing, and broader anti-doping efforts. We are building a seasoned world-class team that will implement the first national anti-doping program in horse racing, with uniform testing and uniform sanctions.
They will be tough, but they will be fair, and in time horsemen will be able to compete with the comfort of knowing they will not be beaten by someone who’s cheating.
There will be transformational opportunities in the future to leverage the data we are collecting, to do things like marrying racetrack service information with injury and treatment data. We have only been collecting records for six weeks. We already have a tremendous amount of data thanks to the tremendous participation by all of our stakeholders. We can see an exciting future working with stakeholders to deliver useful findings to the industry.
We also see a future we can marry anti-doping investigations and intelligence with a robust capability that will be deployed nationally both in and out of accomplishing testing, and that’s interesting given the recommendation that just came out of the safety committee. That will also be something we can address within the HISA database.
HISA is also hiring a national medical director to support the racetracks with uniform health and safety protocols and safeguards for jockeys to make sure they receive the treatment they deserve and the care they deserve. The national medical director will work with local representatives to deploy the concussion protocol and make sure that when jockeys have head injuries, the concussion history is shared with the hospital and any caregivers to optimize the jockey’s treatment. Jockey welfare alongside equine welfare is a major priority for HISA.
Finally, as we work to build greater trust in the industry, I am committed to continuing to build trust with all of you. HISA wants open and collaborative dialog with everyone in the industry who comes to us in good faith.
As mentioned earlier, we are developing additional policies to ensure greater transparency in our decision making, and the application of the new rules. As Tom Rooney said, HISA is now the law of the land. There is no longer any disputing that fact. The task in front of us now is to work together to make HISA and the sport the best it can be.
We have one industry and one chance. Let’s have vigorous debates about what the rules should be. Let’s never forget our real adversaries are the bad actors who tarnish our sport, anyone who is cavalier about horse welfare, and those who would shut down horse racing for good.
If you looked at some of the recent objective metrics available to us, the new records for yearling sales set here in Saratoga, increased wagering at both Del Mar and Saratoga. These statistics tell us the future is bright, that the public has hope and faith, like I do, in what the industry can deliver and do together. When you buy a yearling you’re basically buying a dream for the future. HISA wants to play a role in protecting that dream. I had faith in the potential of this industry to grow and flourish when I took the job, and every interaction I’ve had since that, believe it or not, has made me more confident that a strong future for the sport is within our grasp. It’s been only six weeks since we launched HISA. Give us some time. Give us some grace.
This effort to enhance the safety and integrity of racing is so important. If it fails, we all fail. If it succeeds, we all succeed. It’s really that simple.
So, I’m not really a gambler, but I’m putting my money on HISA. Whether or not you think the odds are in our favor, this horse is coming in, and the payout will be tremendous for all of us.
Thank you so much.
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