Two different panel discussions on Tuesday’s opening day of the National HBPA Conference — one featuring lawyers and one with research veterinarians — recommended steps trainers can take to diminish the chances of a horse’s post-race drug test coming up positive for an impermissible substance. They also recommended actions to help mitigate potential sanctions if that positive finding occurs.

But first, Dr. Rob Holland, a Kentucky veterinarian and researcher, offered some messaging advice: “Never say the word ‘positive,’” he said. “Say ‘chemical identification.’” Or as National HBPA CEO Eric Hamelback prefers, “adverse analytical findings.”

Whatever the nomenclature, horsemen can find themselves in a precarious position under the rules determined by the federally mandated Horseracing Safety & Protective Authority (HISA) and its testing and enforcement arm, the Horseracing Integrity & Welfare Unit (HIWU). Many of the adverse findings can be traced to environmental contamination and inadvertent transfer from humans to horses, according to the researchers who spoke Tuesday. The National HBPA long has advocated for establishing no-effect testing thresholds that reflect today’s ultra-sensitive testing technology and the abundance of human prescription and street drugs in the environment.

Jay Ingle and Chris Hoskins of the Jackson Kelly law firm were on the law panel that opened the conference at the Safety Harbor Resort near Tampa. Ingle and Hoskins are among the pro bono lawyers who provide qualifying trainers legal counsel if their horses’ tests are determined to have chemical identifications. Ingle said the pro bono lawyers working for free under the HIWU program are top-notch.

“Don’t think of it as you get what you pay for, and it’s free,” he said. “I think the attorneys at HIWU would quickly tell you that none of us taking on these cases are rolling over. We’re fighting just as hard as for the ones where we get paid.”

Ingle said there are very distinct trends “both to help you and your horsemen to protect yourself on the front end, but also how to navigate the system once you get in it, if you unfortunately are.”

Among their conclusions:

• Trainers in such situations should act immediately to get knowledgeable advice because of time limits in place.

• If the case goes before an independent arbitrator, “They want to see that trainers who are accused are respecting the process,” Ingle said. “Not flaunting it, not trying to get around it. Once you are in the HIWU process, that is not the time to attack the system… Arbitrators are not responding well at all to that. They want to see that, even if you disagree with the rules, you’re trying to play by them… Don’t try to hide things. Don’t try to cover things up or lie. The arbitrators are good. They spot it if you’re trying to pull a fast one. Your horsemen are going to do much better before an arbitrator by being honest. Sometimes that means acknowledging something that’s not great: ‘Yeah, I could have had the barn sign up earlier.’ That’s going to be a lot better than trying to talk your way out of it.”

• “The arbitrator will ask the horsemen, ‘What did you do to educate yourself? What did you do to learn about the rules, to try to follow the rules?’” Ingle said.

• Stay on HIWU during the hearing’s discovery phase to get the information trainers need to best defend themselves. “It’s pulling teeth to get documents out of them — something I’d think should be pretty simple,” Ingle said. “I’m not talking out of school, because I’ve said it to their general counsel. There are some things we can fight over; there are some basic things that are fair to everybody. Let us have the documents, and we can have an argument over what they mean. It’s been challenging, so you need an effective advocate to make sure the trainer is getting the information they need to defend themselves.”

• Having horsemen show they are trying to play by the rules. That includes things such as accurate record-keeping and documentation of training for employees instructing them to wash hands and not to urinate in a horse’s stall or have caffeine when they’re around a horse.

• Horsemen’s associations can help their membership “by first educating yourself,” Ingle said. “When new education pieces come out be sure to read them, and then make sure to get them to your members in an effective way to communicate… Because this process is very foreign to them. Heck, when it started, it was pretty foreign to us.”

Jackson Kelly has created a “horseman’s tool kit” with short, easy-to-digest videos on a variety of topics, including what horsemen and horsewomen need to do both before and during interactions with HISA and HIWU. The subjects include best practices; the importance of record-keeping; posting signs telling stable employs what to do and not do to prevent contamination; what to do if a HIWU investigator shows up at your barn to present a notice of violation, intermediate steps to take after receiving such a notice and how horsemen and horsewomen can protect themselves.

Ingle said HISA and HIWU also have some very good educational materials on their websites.

In the last panel on the day, Dr. Kim Brewer recommended trainers not only install security cameras in their barn but take photos to document that state and HISA employees in contact with a horse are following all protocols. (One problem is that HIWU has instituted a rule banning horsemen from videoing or taking photos in the test barn.)

“If you’re selected for drug testing, be very mindful and watchful,” she said. “If you can’t be there, have a witness there to watch what the testers are doing. If they are not wearing gloves, take a picture of that, write that down. Make sure they’re following all the documented procedures. If you can – I know it will be on the paperwork — but get the names of everyone who handled your horse. Document everything. Put it down in writing when it’s happening.

“If there’s any unusual circumstance around the blood or urine collection, such as the horse being a jerk and not being easy to stick (to take blood), that’s super important to us. That can help you if you know that things didn’t go exactly smoothly. If you do get a chemical identification, make sure you retain a lawyer, if you can…. If you are shipping in, I’d be documenting everything like crazy, because we know ship-in stalls are a huge source of contamination.

“Get your data. Request that your B sample (what used to be known as the “split” or “referee” sample to confirm the original finding) be submitted. Get all your lab documentation. HIWU likes to drag their feet on that. Find out if it was in the blood or the urine or both. We need to know the concentrations. And find out if it was the parent drug or the metabolite.”

Brewer’s final advice: Many of the arbitrators don’t have extensive racing or horse knowledge. “So go at it with a very gentle, educational approach.”

Holland, an expert in infectious diseases, said “anywhere the horse’s mouth goes, think about that as a potential problem for you for environmental or irrelevant thresholds to occur. That could be the water buckets, the corners of the stall. We’re seeing a lot of trainers being the ones to give the medication because they’re too worried about a problem.”

He said “the solution to pollution is dilution,” but noted that even multiple intense cleaning of stalls may not get rid of all the contamination, which is why video documentation can be so important. He said he asks his trainer clients who are shipping to another track to race to take pictures of the barn and the stall before their horse goes into it.

Researcher: “We’re not finding really doping”

The Kent Stirling Memorial Medication Panel featured Drs. Clara Fenger, Thomas Tobin, Kim Brewer and Rob Holland — all veterinarians and researchers with multiple degrees and who have spearheaded research into determining at what level in various substances there is no pharmacological effect on the horse. The panelists updated their concerted effort to publish peer-reviewed research in making science-based recommendations for testing thresholds for medications and drugs readily found in the environment. Holland said the Horseracing Integrity & Welfare Unit (HIWU), which oversees most of American thoroughbred racing’s drug testing and enforcement, seems to be paying attention to the published peer-reviewed articles.

Brewer said HIWU does not publish its testing levels, “so it’s really hard to know exactly what level they’re testing at — which makes it very hard to understand what’s going on…. When you read about (adverse findings) it very rarely says what level these substances are being identified at, which is very important.”

Brewer said she went through the HIWU portal and counted 68 different substances that had been picked up as violations. “And 75 percent of those are really are just overages of therapeutic medications,” she said. “Of those, 17 were considered banned by HIWU. So we’ve got about 25 percent of the substances identified by HIWU as considered banned, the majority of those are just inadvertent exposure or what we refer to as environmental contamination.

“We’re not finding really doping. We’re finding just overages of therapeutic medications for the most part… We need scientifically-based thresholds. They need to be made public. HIWU needs to stop focusing on inadvertent exposure and environment contamination because it’s a waste of money and it’s ruining public perception of our sport.”

Fenger thanked the HBPA and their affiliates for their donations toward the research, saying it costs about $2,500-$3,500 per paper to get published.

“It’s important research,” she said. “Whenever you have a board meeting, throw us in there” for funding consideration.

(Photos below of the medication panel by Denis Blake/National HBPA)

What’s going on with HBPA’s legal challenge to HISA?

(Photo: Attorney Daniel Suhr and National HBPA CEO Eric Hamelback. Denis Blake/National HBPA)

The National HBPA Conference’s opening session has become a conference staple: an update on the Horseracing Integrity & Safety Authority (HISA) and its associated Horseracing Integrity & Welfare Unit (HIWU). Also included was information about the Racehorse Health & Safety Act (RHSA), which has been filed in the House of Representatives as a replacement legislation should HISA someday be ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Batting leadoff was Daniel Suhr, founder of the non-profit Center for American Rights and lead attorney on the National HBPA’s court challenges to HISA. Suhr updated the conference on the status of the case, which is pending acceptance to be heard by the Supreme Court will hear it.

“The very short answer is that we have fallen into second place in the pipeline in the court cases,” Suhr said. “This morning, I get to tell you about a new analogous regulatory scheme: the universal service fee. Every time you pay a phone bill, there’s a little fee on it that goes to the government.”

That fee was created by Congress to develop universal phone service by building phone towers all over the place, he said. “I have good news, the government has accomplished that goal. Everybody has phone service. But like perhaps most government taxes, this one has not gone away even though the goal was achieved. Instead, the universal service fee goes to build broadband. But the way they do the fee is a private corporation, that is basically a trade association of the broadband-telecom industry. They all get together and decide about how much money they want to spend on building broadband infrastructure. They submit that to the Federal Communications Commission. The commission rubber-stamps the fee for that year. They’ve only rejected it three times, and it was by like a penny.”

Suhr said that after the National HBPA won at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, “some innovative lawyers said, ‘oh, what HISA’s doing is the same thing that the universal service fee does. It’s a private corporation. It’s getting rubber-stamped by a federal commission but they’re the ones determining your taxes on your phone bill.’ So they filed a case in the Fifth Circuit, based on our win, and the Fifth Circuit agreed.”

However, the HBPA case fell behind the universal service fee challenge because “our friends at HISA decided to take 75 days to file a hopeless appeal within the Fifth Circuit to ask them to reconsider their decision,” he said. “As a result, we went from being ahead by three weeks to being behind by a month and half.

“… I like to think of HISA’s attitude as like a tick. A tick burrows in, and the longer the tick has to burrow and the deeper it goes, even if we eventually win, the harder it is to pull it out — and the more painful it is to pull it out. That was their attitude: We’re just going to let this thing go as long as we can, burrow in as deep as we can so even if they eventually win, it’s going to be a pain to get rid of us.’”

Suhr said that attitude suddenly changed last September when it became evident there could be a new administration in Washington with a different U.S. president, new attorney general and different Federal Trade Commission (which was given oversight of HISA in the enabling legislation). But “the lost ground couldn’t be made up,” he said.

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments March 27 in the universal service fee case, Suhr said. “Hopefully we’ll get some indication of where the justices are at, based on the questions they ask,” he said.

“… I actually think the universal service fee case will help us in coming first, in the sense that until this point, we’ve never had a good fight about the fees that HISA charges. I know you all hate the fees HISA charges, one of the things you complain to me about the most, and I get it. But it’s never been a central focus in the case. We’ve talked a lot about the rules; we’ve talked a lot about enforcement. I think we’ll have a chance after that decision to really put more of a focus on the fees.”

Suhr concluded: “We are going to win. It’s just going to take a little bit longer.”

National HBPA CEO Eric Hamelback discussed the RHSA, in which the National HBPA played a major role drafting in consultation with other industry stake-holders. Proponents say the RHSA is more transparent, more fair, more cost-effective and constitutional.

While some jurisdictions want no federal legislation, Hamelback cautioned, “the vast majority of those (lawmakers) we talked to in D.C., they are not going to give up their footprint. They’re either going to try to make HISA whole and put it back into place, or they’re looking for an alternative. The RHSA is what we believe is an alternative based on the fact that it puts not only the investigation, adjudication and enforcement back into the hands of racing commissions, but it then generates uniformity (through a national compact)…. We’ve got to be there to fight for something and we can’t do it if we don’t have anything to push forward as a solution.”

Hamelback said HISA is reverting to a fees assessment formula for states based on the number of starters at their tracks — as is described in the enabling legislation — rather than its recent formula that combined purse levels and starters.

“That’s going to be significantly damaging to many racetracks in the country,” he said. “There are many racetracks now being threatened with letters (that) ‘you’ve got to start putting in this per-start fee.’ Please talk to us about that. Because there are affiliates that have already started a path to push back on that. They can’t take money from the horsemen’s purse account.”

Workforce: If you thought it was tough to find help before…

(Workforce panel: Oscar Gonzales, Will Velie and Remi Bellocq. Denis Blake/National HBPA)

President Trump’s aggressive policies toward deporting undocumented immigrants figures to have ramifications for horsemen’s increasing difficulty in finding barn help, said the panel titled Navigating Today’s Workforce Issues and Immigration Issues. Speakers were Oscar Gonzales, vice chair of the California Horse Racing Board and who served in the Obama administration as an immigration advisor; labor attorney Will Velie, CEO of Horseman Labor Solutions; and Remi Bellocq of the Bluegrass Community and Technical College’s Equine Studies Program.

“We all know there’s a lot of anxiety right now,” said Gonzales, who grew up as a third-generation groom on the California backstretches, “as there has been. I think these are just a little more serious this time around. Because we are looking at high numbers of deportations. We just never know when those could hit or how they could hit. What we do now is there is a high possibility that they will be acting — and swiftly and rather aggressively.”

Gonzales said there is proposed legislation that would include equine workers in the U.S. Senate’s version of the Farm Workforce Modernization Act.

“We also know that the attention for agriculture in general, with prices going high, with the possibility of tariffs and lack of market access, it could really intensify the need to give farmers some things to work with, including a stable workforce,” he said.

Velie praised the HBPA’s work in creating effective strategies to maximize foreign workers at racetracks receiving H-2B visas, which are for temporary, non-agriculture work or services. Getting those visas can put them on the path to permanent U.S. residency and ultimately citizenship, he said.

“Without the HBPA being involved, we’d be stuck in the lottery for all the other industries,” he said of the limited number of visas. “I work with other industries, and they don’t get the workers.”

Bellocq said the racing workforce cannot exist just on domestic workers or or just on guest workers. “It’s only a combination of the two that’s going to solve our workforce problem or challenges,” he said.

He said his BCTC equine program places 100 percent of their graduates — which are 90 percent female — in equine positions, but the difficulty is retaining them. He said the No. 1 issue chasing workers away from the industry is affordable housing.

“We produce a lot of good, solid workers, but their expectations is after a year or six months of paying their dues, they want to move up,” he said. “The problem there is who is going to fill that spot they just left?”

Citing American Horse Council statistics, Bellocq floated a vision of what a united equine coalition’s sales pitch could look like: “This is the lobbying we could have D.C.: $177 billion added to the economy every year through the equine industry; 2.2 million jobs in total economic impact; $122 billion in salaries, wages and benefits, 6.65 million horses in the United States, 2 million industry volunteers, 12.5 million acres of land owned or leased for horse-related purposes…. We have a good message to say in D.C., to say we have a special industry that deserves some kind of special recognition.”

Bellocq also encouraged horsemen’s association to align with their state horse councils, given those organizations’ connection to horse shows, 4-H, pony clubs, trail riding, eventing and more. He said those can serve as a potential workforce pipeline for racing stables.

He also suggested a national approach to have a presence on major job-search sites such as Indeed and Zip Recruiter for filling backstretch jobs.

The Heart of Horse Racing: Telling our stories with a tech twist

Bond said too often racing just responds to negative stories, which she believes is a losing strategy. Instead, horse racing should share its heart-tugging stories and passion for the horses.

“We have to have a one sport brand,” Bond said. “We don’t have that. The NFL has it. Major League Baseball has it. But we don’t really have that. We have Kentucky, we have New York, Florida. But we don’t have a horse-racing brand, and I think that’s where we’re missing the mark. It’s important to all of us, but we need to take it to another level. We all need to do our own share of marketing. But we’re still missing that one brand, what can we do to entice people to come and be part of our sport instead of going to other sports. This campaign isn’t about fixing a broken narrative. It’s about creating a new one. That new narrative is going to carry us through.”

While the racing industry has done other campaigns designed to tell the sport’s stories through the eyes of participants, the difference with The Heart of Horse Racing is its digital technology, said Bond’s collaborator, Jimmy Chaffin, the managing partner at Integrated Marketing, which specializes in creative strategy and visual storytelling. Chaffin has shaped through his award-winning work such diverse global brands as Jack Daniel’s, Bridgestone, the Jamaica Tourist Board, Goodwill Industries, Dollar General and the Nashville Predators.

“You have so many stories to tell, and we’re just getting started,” Chaffin, a racing enthusiast who lives outside of Nashville.

The presentation included video interviews of trainers, jockeys and fans at Saratoga, multi-purposed into long-form story-telling, short-story telling and 30-second clips. Keeneland and nearby breeding farms are up next.

Of course the key is getting those stories outside of people already interested in racing. That’s where the campaign’s targeted technology comes in.

“We’re talking about a laser-paid focus,” Chaffin said. “We take that ad, there are codes on that ad that make it unique. If we take that, and send it to a landing page that has its own original footprint, these two things are now talking to each other. The page is creating analytics based on where the ad originated, who opened the ad, the demographics connected to the person who opened the ad, including the town or city they’re in. We do what is called look-alike audiences. It creates heat maps and look-alike audiences of people in that same area.”

More from the HBPA Conference’s Tuesday sessions

(Photo: Spikezone owner Charles Lo, left, with National HBPA President Dr. Doug Daniels and trainer/co-owner Jamie Ness. Denis Blake/National HBPA)

Spikezone, an 11-time winner in 2024, was honored as the National HBPA’s National Claiming Horse of the Year, with co-owner and trainer Jamie Ness and partner Charles Lo on hand. Spikezone’s third owner is Troy Johnson.

Lo called it an “awesome award,” saying of Spikezone, “He’s one of a kind. He’s amazing. He has great heart, and he’s such a warrior. I’m so luck to have a horse like him.”

Marty Maline, the Kentucky HBPA’s first executive director who retired at the end of 2023 after 47 years in the post, was recognized with a resolution of appreciation for his service to the industry. Presenting the award to his longtime friend and colleague was National HBPA vice president Rick Hiles, who worked alongside Maline for years as president of the Kentucky HBPA. Among other things, Maline was front and center in the Kentucky HBPA’s successful lawsuit years ago defending horsemen’s right under the Interstate Horse Racing Act of 1978 to hold veto power over where tracks may send their race signal.

Hamelback called Maline “one of the most important people to the HBPA.”

Gunner laCour, president of Chrims-PGSI, emphasized the importance of horsemen’s organizations getting the data to ensure they receive all the purse money to which their members are entitled. Chrims handles such daily audits for its clients. laCour said whether a group uses his company, another company or tries to do it in-house, even having all the data for one day “to try to back into the calculations that your statutes and contracts provide” is important. Today’s purse calculations “with its complexity, it’s rife for people to drop the ball by accident,” he said. “There’s something that’s off in the calculations, and (if undetected) it just compounds it.”

laCour said racing commissions might have incomplete or inaccurate information and tote companies only keep their daily reports for a few months.

Also, he said, “Do not think you’re going to go backward in time (to recreate the data). You just can’t get it. … In your horsemen’s contracts, please just read through it and say, ‘Does this make sense as it was written?’ Does it take into account modern wagering practices? HHR?… This isn’t designed to be an adversarial effort. It should be something you look at your wagering partner and say, ‘Look, we just want to make sure we’re on the same page. We just want to make sure every dollar owed the purse account is going to that.’”

Opening comments: Daniels, Meehan, Hamelback

The National HBPA Conference started with welcoming remarks by National HBPA President Dr. Doug Daniels, who made his first in-person appearance with the organization since a freak mishap at the end of last August that left him paralyzed. Daniels, who was re-elected as president at the 2024 conference in July at Prairie Meadows in Iowa, received a sustained standing ovation when introduced by National HBPA CEO Eric Hamelback.

“This is my first foray, certainly my first flight out in my wheel chair,” Daniels said. “It hasn’t been simple, but I had a lot of help. It would not be right not to recognize all the people in this room who have contributed both monetarily as well as spiritually to my recovery. It’s hard for me to talk about it without becoming a little bit emotional. But your support, I’ve felt. It means a lot to me and has been a huge part of my motivation to stay positive, a huge part of my recovery. I’ve got a long way to go. But I’m a little better every day, and that’s my intention to stay that way.

“… It’s nice to see everybody again, finally. Now that I know I can do it, you’ll keep seeing me.”

Jan Meehan, vice president of the Tampa Bay HBPA, noted in his remarks that Monday’s rain and Tuesday’s overcast skies “is kind of like the situation racing is in right now. We’re under a big storm cloud, in more ways than one, between HISA (Horseracing Integrity & Safety Authority), which is everybody’s favorite organization, and our little problem we’re dealing now with decoupling that they’re trying to accomplish in Florida.

“If they’re successful, it could be the beginning of the end for racing as we know it. Because that will set a precedent for the rest of these casinos (that have horse racing) to say, ‘Well, they did it in Florida. Why can’t we do it?’ So it’s something we have to work really hard. We all have to get together. We’re in a situation we’ve never been in before. We have to work hard to make sure racing continues.”

Before the panel and presentations began, Hamelback thanked all the sponsors for making the conference possible, including its pre-event cocktail gathering and Wednesday afternoon’s outing to Tampa Bay Downs for the races.

“But please don’t forget why the National HBPA does this: We do it for you,” Hamelback said. “We do it for the horsemen on the backside of every racetrack in the country. I don’t care what affiliation you are. I don’t care if it’s in California or New York or the heart of Arkansas, Iowa, Kentucky. I work hard for every horseman, and I’m always going to say that. I have conviction. I have honor and I have a code. And that code is we’re going to do the right things. I’ve been blessed to work for a board that allows that opportunity. And it doesn’t always happen, and we do have disagreements. But at the end of the day, horsemen are what’s important to this industry. Without the horse, we wouldn’t have one, and without the horsemen it all goes away.

“So we’ve got to be here steadfast, work for our convictions, and make sure we’re working to do things right. We’re not going to let regulations to override horsemanship. That’s why we’re here. I’ve always had a theme of trying to educate folks as best I could, and that’s what I try to do when I bring panels to you, to educate everyone, fill everybody in. And then obviously, when you go out in the halls, it’s the conversation that makes this conference special, the interaction you have with each other.”