Trust, Transparency and Integrity in Racing – The Concluding Part 4 of the Series.

It’s been interesting as I’ve written the blog series around the subject of trust, transparency, integrity and corruption that not a single owner I’ve talked to about it has disagreed with anything I’ve raised. As in everything to do with life and commerce, perception really matters and unfortunately the overriding perception is that the breeding supply chain that brings horses through to owners is inherently stacked against the owner. On occasions it is almost certainly corrupt, and almost daily there are practices being perpetrated that while probably not illegal, lack the necessary standards of integrity.

It is clearly very difficult to gauge the overall impact of this on racing and ownership, but I definitely believe that the BHA is taking the right stance by putting a much greater focus on integrity in all aspects of our sport and is prepared to examine breaches of the necessary standards in the context of the whole sales process.

There must be an irony that I’m writing this blog having just bought a foal today at Goffs in Ireland, and when this blog goes live I’ll be attending the Tattersalls Cheltenham sale with some friends who are prepared to invest deeply. Unfortunately I can’t help but feel that owners are receiving inadequate value for money on too many occasions and cumulatively that must be acting as a potential barrier to new owners coming into the sport while discouraging retention of the owners who are already active supporters.

So I thought it timely to reflect on my “top ten” recommendations for addressing these problems. They are not in any priority order but I do believe that if the BHA puts a searchlight on them, it will definitely be to the greater benefit of the whole ownership community.

1. Develop an end to end integrity framework. What I mean by this is to map out every stage in the equine supply chain from breeding through to the eventual retirement of the racehorse. At every step in the chain there is potential for corruption, and this should be mapped out so that the level of risk is made explicit.
2. Set integrity standards. Having mapped out the supply chain, it is then possible to state unambiguously what the necessary personal, professional and commercial standards should be, and what is acceptable or unacceptable behaviour.
3. Monitor and police those standards. Having developed an integrity framework and set the appropriate standards, the BHA then needs to have inspectors who can then monitor and identify the perpetrators of unacceptable practice. The whole industry through the various stakeholder groups to have been warned in advance of what is unacceptable behaviour and for this to be built into the rules of racing.
4. Identify and copy best practice. Other countries, particularly Germany, are determined that the breed is strengthened on an ongoing basis by not allowing substandard mares to produce foals. The performance record of stallions should be tracked and minimum standards set for mares. The recent requirement for horses with first-time wind ops to be reported is a step in the right direction because over time it should be possible which stallions are passing on higher than average wind problems.
5. Give every horse a log book from day one. In the last blog I commented that you wouldn’t buy a £100,000 car without a log book, and I don’t see why you should do the same with horses. The racing authorities in England and Ireland as a minimum should make it a requirement that any veterinary treatment to any racehorse is logged, and that when the horse goes into any sale, a PDF of that document can be accessed online for one month before the sale date.
6. Improve pre-sale veterinary inspections and change the charging policy. All horses being sold at public auctions should be inspected properly and thoroughly once, with the cost of that being paid by the vendor. A full inspection report should be available. Furthermore the vet making that inspection should be held liable for the quality of it. If the report is inaccurate, the vet should be held to account both commercially and professionally.
7. Full declaration of anything performance-enhancing. I know that many trainers argue that owners and the racing public don’t understand the pros and cons and limitations of many veterinary treatments and procedures, but I do believe that they should be declared. It is why I’m in favour of transparency on wind operations, but I would extend that to all major interventions.
8. No limits to transparency. The simple guiding principle should be that if access to a piece of information can provide a trainer, owner or punter with a commercial advantage, then that information should be in the public domain wherever possible. So for example should there be a requirement to disclose when a horse’s tendons have been fired?
9. Fund more evidence-based research. Owners are losing money every day buying horses which are genetically predisposed to certain maladies and conditions that will significantly constrain their performance during their life as racehorses. The BHA should fund research to collect evidence over time that will identify more of these conditions. As they will be recorded in the horse’s log book, then an informed owner can make an appropriate decision not to invest.
10. Have all the information readily available. In the age of social media, all information should be at owners’ and prospective buyers’ fingertips. There may well be an accusation of information overload, but it would be better for the information to be there if an owner wants to access it, than to be left in the unacceptable position of buying horses where there is significantly asymmetrical information, i.e. where the prospective purchaser knows far less than other interested parties upstream in the supply chain.

I’ve now been involved in buying and owning about 100 horses, either on my own or with co-owners. Unfortunately I believe that if I’d had full information I wouldn’t have bought at least 20% of them. Assuming an average total cost of £50,000, that’s £1m of money in effect wasted. This issue is that serious. I hope that in ten years’ time I won’t have to write another series raising the same ten recommendations. I fear that the first horse of the sale today ought to be called “Pigs May Fly” (Apologies to Lot 1, Ilsnepasserontpas, who I hope turns out to be a magnificent horse giving superb pleasure to whoever buys him.)

I am always interested to hear your views so please do leave a comment. If you can't see the comment box at the bottom of this post then navigate to the post using the right hand navigation or click here > and scroll to the bottom of the page. Look forward to hearing your views. Thanks very much for sharing them.

Do Wind Operations “Work”, and Should They be Declared to Punters?

Last month Bruce Millington, in the Racing Post, argued strongly that because of the dramatic effect that wind operations can sometimes have on horses, the fact of having one should be declared to the betting public ahead of the horse racing. It was a forceful article and it even had an implication that in some way the public was potentially being deceived by a conspiracy of owners and trainers. This prompted a lot of discussion, correspondence and social media traffic, the vast majority of which equally strongly appeared to agree with Mr. Millington. From the owner / trainer perspective, there was more caution and this, in turn, prompted another debate about how many aspects of training and veterinary treatment of the racehorse should be declared, and what, if any, limits there should be on such disclosure.

The Owners for Owners default position in racing is always to advocate transparency. We believe that owners, racegoers, punters and all stakeholders involved in the sport should have full access to information where it is demonstrably relevant. The counter-argument is that it can sometimes be difficult to interpret information, but this argues for releasing not just the facts but also information and education to raise the overall knowledge and awareness of the challenges of training racehorses and keeping them fit, both physically and mentally. So why not apply this principle and disclose the fact that a horse has had a wind operation?

However there are clearly some practical difficulties in this, not least that there is no such thing as just a singular “wind operation”. Horses’ wind has been a subject of concern and conjecture for centuries. Some make no noise but the wind is poor, while others can be roaring like a steam-train but the wind is fine. There are over 20 veterinary procedures that can be used to improve or optimise a horse’s airways, palate and larynx, with the common ones being a hobday, palate cauterisation, tie-back, tie-forward and release of epiglottic entrapment (which is what happened to Cue Card, allowing him to win the King George). Some trainers give wind operations to horses almost as a matter of course from an early age, while others believe that as horses strengthen and mature the wind can naturally improve. And of course there are just as many different options available for bridles, tongue-ties and bits to facilitate breathing, and there are constant innovations with these; as an example, some trainers have recently started importing spoon bits from Australia which seem to have a positive effect in keeping the horse’s tongue and soft palate down. So which, if not all, of these procedures and trainer practices should be declared, when, how and how often?

Not surprisingly, the debate then spilled over into all aspects of training. In some countries it is mandatory to weigh the racehorse and declare that weight to the betting public ahead of racing. As an indication of fitness that sounds very sensible – assuming of course that you can track and relate that weight to what is deemed to be the optimum for that horse. Should ulcer treatment be declared? Or the horse’s blood profile? How about recent gallops? And for that matter the gallops surface that the horse has been on, and whether it has been in a water treadmill, etc., etc. Eventually information disclosure would push the boundaries and become ridiculous. Apparently there is a BHA study under way at the moment looking to provide guidelines, and while there will probably be more disclosure it is equally important to define the limits on it.

While the debate was going on, one of our horses, Thady Quil, who had previously had a cauterisation of the palate, had a tie-forward. Unfortunately the cauterisation hadn’t “worked”, and he was pulled up in his last run. What effect would declaration of that cauterisation have had on the betting public? At the moment there is no requirement to declare the tie-forward. Throughout the treatment we have had very interesting discussions with the veterinary surgeon looking after our horse, who is adamant that surgery as such is rarely a “miracle cure”, and that what he is doing is applying procedures that will hopefully help the horse to control his wind – but most importantly it is a voluntary rather than involuntary action on the part of the horse. There is a strong interplay between the physical modifications brought about by the operation and the confidence and ability of the horse to trust and control his breathing …. and how on earth could you declare how well that has been achieved?

Clearly you couldn’t, but it shows that there are absolutely no certainties whatsoever in this area. Information release to the public therefore needs to come with a health warning – wind operations don’t always “work”. Indeed when I asked the vet for his views on releasing the details he joked that it would put him out of business if everyone knew how difficult it is to predict the outcome. Don’t bet blind on wind ops!!

I am always interested to hear your views so please do leave a comment. If you can't see the comment box at the bottom of this post then navigate to the post using the right hand navigation or click here > and scroll to the bottom of the page. Look forward to hearing your views. Thanks very much for sharing them.