Lyrically unorthodox, I flow continuous

A convo about racing with a guy who knows what he's talking about

I was chopping it up with a friend the other day who gets what’s happening in racing. He’s not the type you’re gonna find on social media emoting into the void, patting you and himself on the back because you’ve both just trashed the super villain of the moment, or come up with some tin-foil conspiracy theory, or some witty comment that you’re hoping will get a lot of likes.

He knows what he’s talking about, he knows numbers, and he’s unemotionally clear-headed about the path racing is on. I’m not going to identify him. Let’s just say he’s wearing a metal mask like MF DOOM for our purposes, because he happens to be that rare guy in racing who actually knows of MF DOOM. In fact, he commented on my IG the other day about DOOM’s track “Anti-Matter,” which was featured on my last post on this joint. “Anti-Matter is a *great* track. Haven’t heard it in a while,” he said.

I’m going to reproduce these lines from “Anti-Matter” in his honor, because they kinda apply to him; he’ll slice and dice you if you don’t know of what you speak. And most of you and your friends on Twitter, let’s face it, don’t, but you’re mostly nice folks, so don’t take it personally.

The nigga that you with played like Atari now
Lyrically unorthodox I flow continuous
Never on a straight path I'm known to bend a twist
Put it down from the Suburb to the Tennament
You bet against me but wanna wonder where your money went
I get the cash take niggaz out like trash
Known to stack a mean stash they used to call me pure math
Back in the days all I did was stay paid

Okay, so here’s the convo, which took place via text. I’ve edited out some prominent names and organizations that were mentioned (though I’ve kept the original “text language”), and we join it here after having already discussed Baffert. This starts with a convo about Fed involvement in the game (subject of my last entry), and from there the convo twists and turns.

Me: Yeah, they are, for misbranding. No one charged with “doping” because there are no Fed charges for that. Feds just release press stuff plastering doping schemes but when you look at charges, it’s misbranding. Servis is actually fighting his charge. What’s funny 2 years later is Feds, with all their labs, haven’t been able to say SGF 1000 had illegal drugs in it.

Him: Nobody would be surprised if it’s snake oil.

Me: They collected all this stuff thinking they were gonna be able to say it had this and that and instead crickets. But they play journos like trained monkeys on a grinder. No one has yet questioned what the hell was actually in the drug.

Him: You’ve got conmen (wannabe drug makers) conning conmen (unscrupulous trainers). I mean, the racing commissions couldn’t deal with that if you drew it up for them on a whiteboard.

Me: I know quite a few guys that were using SGF. Obviously all the money MediVet made from SGF didn’t come just from Navarro and Servis. All the big guys at NYRA were using it too.

Him: “We don’t use a drop of bute on our horses.”

Me: Lmfaoooo

Him: But this other shit that Vito sells out of the back of his Crown Vic? We pump them full of it and have no idea what’s in it!

Me: Lml [that stands for “laugh mad loud,” by the way]. A trainer was telling me that [name deleted] — one of the most vocal against Clenbuterol — had “a huge bottle just sitting there in his tack room.” [name deleted] told me that he, like a bunch of other trainers who used Dr Rhein, regularly gave SGF to his horses because Rhein prescribed it as a great recovery med. [name of famous horse deleted] used it. Keep all that confidential. [name deleted] and these other guys stopped using it in the fall of 2019 when NYRA specifically banned it after they got [t]ipped off from Feds.

Him: Now map that to the real stuff. The growth hormones and other experimental stuff. It’s a free for all. And whatever, I know what I’m betting on when I bet. But the entire industry is full of crap.

Me: Industry has been this way since I’ve been actively following it for 45 years. I mean, Northern Dancer raced on Lasix in the 1964 Derby lol. Oscar Barrera in the 80s was turning claimers into G1 winners.

Him: The funny thing is nobody really cares. Does anyone really believe MLB is any cleaner now than the Sosa/McGwire days? I don’t. But the main point is — if you’re not going to enforce the ticky tack stuff, don’t tell me that the industry has a drug problem. And Baffert, they didn’t enforce the nonsense…so it’s the Wild West. Nobody has a leg to stand on.

Me: Yeah. And Yeah.

Him: At least MLB can say they suspended Joe Blow in the minors because they caught him with something they test for. Racing can’t even do that.

Me: Racing is a local game that’s trying to go national and international and it just won’t work. Not on a big scale. That’s why it’s headed to a small game for the rich.

Him: They want to be Hong Kong so bad. Give it another 20 years and it will be small enough that they might be able to try it. CDI is giving up. Stronach is gonna give up as well. The minors are dying a slow death. NYRA is gonna be the last one standing of the big boys.

Me: Yup. Racing works when it’s in a highly authoritarian state. “Works” used loosely.

[I then sent him a copy of my piece about the shrinking game, “More Cheese Than Doritos, Cheetos, or Fritos.”]

Him: Socialist horse racing. Everybody owns a piece of everything. Join our club and you can too. It’s been this way for awhile. [name of organization deleted] had me looking at super trainers. 8 trainers made like 80% of the stakes money at NYRA. It’s too late to change any of it.

Me: Exactly.

Him: They’ve got 400+ trainers making significant amount of starts on their circuit. It’s Pareto on crack cocaine. You can’t fix that.

Me: Yup. It’s all there for anyone to see. It’s like when you predicted short fields with decreasing foal crop and projected horse shortage.

Him: The funniest thing — NYRA made a change to the purse distribution. Instead of 60% to the winner, they chop it up differently. 55% etc. When we ran the numbers on who gets what purse money after the change, it made absolutely no difference to top guys because they run second and third and fourth too.

Me: Lol.

Him: Whole industry is so dumb. They do so much for window dressing until one day their house gets blown up and they wonder where their nice curtains went.

Me: That hits it right on the mark. Guys at top only care about the glitz game; they are also the guys that got richer during stock market prop of covid, and they have $$ to play top game even stronger now. Plus they’ve joined forces and squeezing everyone out. Soon it will 20 ownership syndicates and 10 trainers — just like HK! And with an authoritarian entity in HISA.

Him: Yes. While this is happening CDI is selling TwinSpires. Stronach is selling Xpressbet. And a whole bunch of small tracks that ran in 2019 are close to extinct this year. Races run down 10% vs pre-covid and field size then way down even. It’s an industry that’s contracting at an accelerated rate.

Me: Ok, I’m gonna jump in the pool — it’s 80 and sunny, sorry lol.

Him: Nice. I’ve got 2 screaming kids and cold ass weather. Enjoy.