Racing’s Periodismo Amarillo

Real Writing on Racing 💯

*The Going in Circles Digest is pleased to share the work of excellent writers who provide educational, informative and passionate prose about a wide variety of horseracing topics. Our first guest writer is the indomitable Sid Fernando.

Do You See the Perpetrator? Yeah, I’m Right Here

By Sid Fernando

Sometime back in the mid-1990s when I was at DRF, I wrote a series of columns opposing an industry initiative called the “check-off plan,” which had been concocted to publicize racingthrough a funding scheme amounting to the “taxing” of bettors. My columns infuriated the backers of this plan, and soon I found that some well-placed calls had been made to Jack Farnsworth, the publisher of DRF, to have me silenced or even fired. I know this because Jack came to my office in Manhattan to discuss the matter, and he suggested I go to Lexington and meet with some of these folks (which I did), but what I liked about Jack was that he had my back. No one was going to tell him what to do about me or his paper.

Guys like Jack helped to foster the concept of an independent racing press, which is a good thing, right? I mean, who wants power brokers to use the press for their benefit?

I bring this up now because it seems to me like there aren’t many Jack Farnsworths around to protect racing writers anymore, which means that writers have to increasingly toe the line to save their jobs.

I’m not a rat snitch, so I’m not going to name names, but you’ll probably agree if I say that it seems at times like the power brokers are controlling segments of the press to sculpt narratives that are beneficial to them.

For instance, for years an industry group that’s been against the use of race-day Lasix has deployed segments of the press to spread the narrative that there’s rampant drug use in the business by blurring the distinction between the legal usage of Lasix and illegal use of other drugs. It was a scorched-earth policy meant to underscore the need for federal intervention, and many in the press went along with it.

Now, no one wants cheaters using illegal drugs, but vilifyinghorsemen using a legal drug under the umbrella of “illegal drugs” only served to give the entire industry a black eye – which was the intent. It served to galvanize the idea that Fed intervention was needed to clean out the industry.

It got to the point where my brother-in-law, a casual racing fan,would read articles about drugs in the business and call me to lecture about the “rampant problems of Lasix,” quoting articles about how Lasix also was contributing to a rash of breakdowns. “These illegal drugs like Lasix have to stop,” he’d say. My brother-in-law is a sophisticated reader, but he’s a civilian, too, and there was no way for me to counteract what he’d read in the press.

And, in my opinion, some in the press were complicit in the conceit, not simply bag men.

All of this reminded me of a celebrated chorus in an MF DOOM song, “Rap Snitch Knishes,” that goes like this:

Rap snitches, telling all their business

Sit in the court and be their own star witness

Do you see the perpetrator? Yeah, I’m right here

Fuck around, get the whole label sent up for years

With apologies to DOOM, let’s replace “rap” with “press” and “label” with “industry” and you get this:

Press snitches, telling all their business

Sit in the court and be their own star witness

Do you see the perpetrator? Yeah, I’m right here

Fuck around, get the whole industry sent up for years

Here’s a more recent example of the press not wanting to upset the power brokers, who are heavily invested in Fed oversight with the passage of HISA a year ago.

A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court vacated federal drug misbranding charges against trainer Murray Rojas, which I wrote about in TDN. You can read that article, “Misbranding Case Doomed by Fed Error,” here.

Rojas had been swept up in a vast FBI investigation in 2015 and was convicted on 14 felony charges in 2017. She was sentenced in 2019. Her appeal failed in January of this year, and in May she filed a petition for a hearing in the Supreme Court – a longshot, which happened to come through because of a subsequent discovery of Fed error.

During the period of 2015 to her failed appeal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in January, the details of Rojas’s case were covered in depth in the racing press.

However, when the Supreme Court vacated the decision, the coverage stopped. That’s right. Only Ray Paulick and I actually told the final story.

If that doesn’t paint the picture I’ve been describing, I don’t know what will.

Sid Fernando is president and CEO of Werk Thoroughbred Consultants, Inc., originator of the Werk Nick Rating and eNicks.