It’s good to be back.

It’s been more than a decade since I last wrote a regular column about horse racing. I am eager to write again now because I think the sport has reached a hinge in its history. Either horse racing changes, adapts, and reforms many of its policies and practices or it becomes extinct before we are able to take our grandchildren to a racetrack or to a breeding farm. Either we acknowledge the precarious state of the “social contract” that sustains North American racing, either we take better care of our horses and our customers, or we see that social contract broken without our consent by lawmakers. No one wants that.

I don’t have the money or the desire to lobby legislators or regulators in the name of racing integrity. I don’t have the power tochange industry licensing standards or possess the medical training or veterinary skills to help harmonize drug testing protocols. But this regular column at The Paulick Report is something I can contribute to the cause. This new weekly column will be a gathering space for smart analysis, timely interviews, original reporting, podcasts, and other ways in which a racing community comes together to talk about its problems. It will be a place where dissenting views won’t be hidden away or ignored.

I am starting this column in particular because I believe that everyone who cares about horse racing deserves to know as much as possible about the new federal racing integrity law, and other integrity issues, which are vital to our future. I believe there should be more open, robust debate about these topics. I cannot count how many conversations I have had with horse people over the past few years who have little or no idea about what’s actually in the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act or what it is supposed to do. No wonder; the amount of public misinformation and disinformation about the law is shocking.

My cards are on the table: I am a supporter of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act. At the same time, I acknowledge that it needs much improvement. I also acknowledge that some of the rules and regulations have already been improved from when they were first announced. A person can believe those three things at once. In fact, I suspect a great many readers of this column do believe those things. The truth is that no law is ever perfect. No regulations capture every scenario perfectly. No scientific or medical or veterinary procedures have yet given anyone the kind of clarity we need to catch as much horse doping as we need to catch.

I think HISA is a valid constitutional exercise of federal authority and that the U.S. Supreme Court will think so, too, if it hears the case. I think it’s telling that one conservative judge after another has endorsed the law and rejected the dubious attacks on it. I think the current state racing commission system is a proven failure and that new federal legislation proposed by anti-HISA forces would be a disaster if it were to pass (which it won’t). I think the folks running HISA are acting in good faith to try to clean up racing. One encouraging sign? The ways in which HISA officials have changed policies after receiving criticism from industry participants.

I think it’s vital for the horse racing industry to work with federal regulators and HISA officials to make sensible changes to the rules wherever possible and to work out the kinks in the law as soon as practical. But we cannot invest smartly in our future this way if we don’t understand how the law works and how its regulations can be made better. This means acknowledging the harsh truth about the current system, or any future system in which state racing commissioners determine integrity issues. If we all are going to have to pay a price for HISA (and I think we all should) then at least we should know what we are paying for and why it’s necessary.

The other sides to the story.

Another big reason I’ll now be writing regularly about the federal racing integrity law is because someone in the world of harness racing has to do it. Right now, no one does. The United States Trotting Association, of which I am a dues-paying member, should be devoting its website to fair coverage of the law. Instead, the USTA has effectively become a propaganda organ for anti-HISA views. The USTA’s website and social media products, which thousands of people check daily, churn out a relentless stream of one-sided coverage against the federal law. My fellow horsemen and horsewomen deserve to see for themselves the other sides to the story.

By turning their otherwise excellent website into an anti-HISA propaganda organ, and by suing to stop the enforcement of the new racing integrity law, USTA leaders have alienated hundreds of industry stakeholders who are opposed to such short-sighted tactics. For example, the USTA’s involvement in the doomed legal effort to stop the law has cost the USTA hundreds of thousands of dollars and precluded anyone in the harness community from working officially with HISA officials to prepare for the likely day that harness racing is covered by the law. USTA members who think the USTA’s strategy is nuts deserve an outlet for their views.

So this will be an online space where the implementation of HISA is praised when it merits praise and criticized when it merits criticism. It will be a space you’ll be able to come to at the start of each week to get caught up on some of the best coverage of racing integrity issues. It will be a column that will help raise up some of the questions horseracing people have about HISA and then try to have officials or experts answer them. We’ve all resisted change for decades. It’s here now, like it or not, and the simplest thing we can do is be honest with one another, and ourselves, about what the new world of horse racing looks like.

Notes. One regular feature here will be the highlighting of other smart reporting and analysis of horse racing. Good work ought to be amplified within our industry and I’m eager to play a role in helping that happen. For example, before the holidays, the Thoroughbred Daily News published a long piece by Dan Ross about the problems that HISA officials are having in harmonizing drug testing protocols and measurements. It’s a problem that has persisted for decades and one that clearly isn’t easy to solve given that different labs employ different standards in measuring samples taken from horses.

Last weekend, Blood Horse published a panel discussion about HISA; a law, said a racing veterinarian, that “has provided a mechanism for the industry to implement best practices and the highest-level medication rules.” In his 2023 review column, the Blood-Horse’s Frank Angst described HISA enforcement: “Compared with state-to-state oversight, these actions were different in that the penalties were significant: Suspensions of 18 months or longer were common, cases were resolved in weeks or months instead of years, and some cases were based on investigative work rather than post-race testing.”

My boss, The Paulick Report publisher Ray Paulick, continues to bird-dog the recent scandal in New York racing over the controversial decision to disqualify the horse Brick Ambush from a second-place finish in a stakes race last month. And good for Ivar Hyngstrom, who wrote into Harness Racing Update last week to offer observations like this about the USTA: “The only way for a change is to make a change and vote out the people you believe are harming the sport and you. Don’t be charmed by the thief in your house.” We’ll have more to say about the USTA’s organizing structure in the weeks to come. Finally, I liked Riley Ceder’s thought-provoking essay about a life in racing.