Flatter: Making heads or tails of Fierceness and Louisiana

Heads, it is Fierceness being out of the Belmont Stakes*.

Tails, it is Louisiana being out of its mind when it comes
to drug enforcement in racing.

The coin might as well land on its rim and make like a
whirling dervish, because there really is no winner with whichever topic comes
up as the one to write about. Besides, I stopped carrying cash during COVID and
eschewed coins when do-it-yourself carwashes got harder to find than a
bookstore.

David Grening’s Daily Racing Form report Thursday
night that Fierceness would miss the pop quiz of the champion at Saratoga was
short-term bad news. Last week’s decision by the Louisiana Racing Commission to
turn clenbuterol into a traffic-ticket medication will have longer-term repercussions.

Admittedly, neither of these topics has the mass click appeal
of a former president being convicted in a criminal trial. Who would have
thought that the electoral nation would have less unity than the Horse
Racing Nation?

Short term, first. Fierceness was going to absorb a lot of betting
dollars next Saturday. Whether it was the every-other-race theory that says he
is due to be very, very good or that the pace in the Belmont* will not be as
suicidal as it was in the Kentucky Derby, Fierceness might have been the second
choice behind Sierra Leone. Overseas bookmakers said as much. They had him as
short as 5-2 when trainer Todd Pletcher told Grening the Eclipse Award winner
did not look ready to go at Saratoga.

Beyond the betting sphere, the absence of Fierceness dilutes
the presence of owner and self-proclaimed racing commissioner Mike Repole. Yes,
he will have Mindframe and Protective in the race, but come on. They do not
have Fierceness’s yo-yoing bona fides of two Grade 1 triumphs and two Grade 1
duds.

Repole remains the best thing that could happen to a Belmont
Stakes* that already was watered down by its unnecessarily reduced distance,
thus the asterisk. From what we have been led to believe, horses of the 21st
century cannot possibly figure out how to veer left out of a starting gate in
order to complete a turn. They could do it in the 1960s, when the 1 1/2-mile
Belmont started on a turn at Aqueduct. That trait must have been bred out of
them.

I know. I know. Get to the point of Repole. What is the
opposite of love? Not hate, kids. It is indifference. I defy anyone who gets
within earshot of Repole to walk away without having an opinion. He is analogous
to Reggie Jackson’s straw that stirs the drink. Horse racing needs more of
that.

So, too, does Fox Sports, which has to drum up interest in a
Triple Crown race that has no possibility of a Triple Crown. Beauty shots of
Saratoga can go only so far. Which reminds me, I hope the network spends some
money to hoist the pan camera to a decent height. Nothing says summer like
watching races from upstate New York from through a lens that may as well be on
a GoPro strapped to a trackside woodchuck.

Repole talking about the ups and downs of Fierceness would
have been gold. Or at least the sort of pyrite that could fuel a Fox telecast that
has the benefit of being the only real game going on at that hour next weekend.

It seems doubtful the Fox folks will bring up the Louisiana
mess on their show. Try explaining clenbuterol to an audience that is always one
push of a button from flitting off to a local newscast featuring spoon-fed P.R.,
a traffic jam and 15 minutes of weather.

Actually it was last week when the Louisiana Racing
Commission decided it had some sort of emergency on its hands, what with the
state’s legal fight to declare the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority
unconstitutional. Part of its edict was to let horses who have been given
clenbuterol come back sooner than they could in states where HISA is recognized.
Since Louisiana has a least a temporary OK to exempt itself from the federal
act, this new policy takes effect next Saturday.

Commission executive director Steve Landry told BloodHorse
that when it came to medication enforcement, “the pendulum has swung too far.”

On that I would agree with Landry. HISA has been a bureaucratic train
wreck. The fine tuning of the micro-thresholds that trigger positive test
results has crippled the careers of more than a few good horsemen. Rusty Arnold
and Jonathan Wong and Mac Robertson have been unwitting examples of how federal
enforcers have indiscriminately steamrolled the sport’s rank and file. HISA has
not caught cheaters so much as it has perfected the game of picogram gotcha.

But Landry and the lords of Louisiana racing have not swung
the pendulum back the other way. They have clean snapped it off.

Racing has been remarkably united in opposing what
Louisiana did, which was to go all laissez-faire on a bronchial drug that the
National Institutes for Health said 13 years ago caused “laminitis, acute renal
failure, rhabdomyolysis and cardiomyopathy” that proved fatal in horses it
studied. Three years before that, the National Library of Medicine said
clenbuterol caused “major alterations in cardiac and skeletal muscle function”
and that it “can affect bone and the immune, endocrine and reproductive
systems.”

“This is a big step backwards for all of the positive changes
for the safety of this industry,” trainer Cherie DeVaux said on X.

“This is completely out of our hands,” Hall of Fame trainer
Steve Asmussen told Thoroughbred Daily News. “This is another example of
‘here’s policy, do your best.’ ”

Churchill Downs Inc. is caught in the middle, since it owns
Fair Grounds racecourse in New Orleans. It supports HISA, but it has to do
business in Louisiana.

“We had no opportunity to weigh in on this action and view
it as an inexcusable abuse of process,” a CDI spokesperson said.

Horses shipping from Louisiana to race in the bigger world
of HISA states like the one that hosts the country’s biggest race will be
subject to stricter standards. If we thought trying to get in and out of Canada
during COVID was a problem, we ain’t seen nothing yet.

“From an
integrity standpoint, we’re not going to be able to let horses just come back
and forth from Louisiana,” HISA boss Lisa Lazarus told TDN.

I have made no secret of my disdain for HISA. From its tone-deaf
rules to its opaque accountability, it has exemplified everything that is wrong
with government bureaucracy. But I also have said that while HISA is not the
only answer to regulation, that does not mean I am against regulation itself.
In concept racing should be better than the wild, wild west that it became when
it was policing itself. But that does not make it the only alternative to
regulating.

There are degrees of bad. HISA has been bad. But weighed
against what the Louisiana Racing Commission has done, it is like comparing the
writings of Tocqueville against the lawlessness of ancient Rome.

If Landry says he and his acolytes are using the advice of
their own veterinarians to establish this permissive extreme, their actions
have set up a selfish precedent that will backfire. If this is their version of
self-regulation, failure will be their only option.

Supporters of HISA say the new federal regulation is better
than what we used to have, which they say was nothing. Never mind that the
comically and inconsistently lax enforcement of existing rules was a bigger
problem. It still is, by the way.

But as Charlie Harper said on “Two and a Half Men” in the
face of this sort of better-than-nothing argument, “Lights out at fat camp, a
jellybean is steak tartar.”

If HISA is the jellybean in this example and racing is fat
camp, then the Louisiana Racing Commission is an 18-wheeler full of glazed
donuts. It is a response gone horribly wrong. Here’s hoping that one good,
urgent edict that comes from seeing the light in the next eight days can erase these
emergency rules.

As for that coin toss I wrote about way up yonder, I already
decided that whatever 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan decided to do, I would choose
the opposite.

Ron
Flatter’s column appears Friday mornings at Horse Racing Nation. Comments below
are welcomed, encouraged and may be used in the feedback segment of the Ron
Flatter Racing Pod, which also is posted every Friday.