Rap Ambush

How the super heroes decided to fight the super villains

So we're gonna stand on perimeter
We did have some shots fired right down the street on us
While this was goin on, so we gotta set up a tight perimeter
We got the streets blocked off
To make sure we don't have any drivebys on us
Other than that, the operation went, fairly well...

Those lines are the beginning voice over of a cop describing a maneuver to contain the villains in MF DOOM’s “Rap Ambush,” from the 2009 album “Born Like This.”

They could stand for the moves made by racing’s super heroes, The Jockey Club, which boldly took steps about 10 years ago to fight the super villains of racing. In fact, in 2012, the keynote speaker at TJC’s 60th Round Table was super hero Travis Tygart, the head of USADA.

During this time, there have been many super villains in racing. Though it’s the nature of the game that public perception of villainy ebbs and flows, TJC nevertheless continues to fight villains on all fronts and was instrumental in the passage of HISA, the federal legislation that President Donald Trump signed into law a year ago that brings federal heft to the policing of the sport. Tygart will be at the helm of its doping/medication arm.

Remember when PETA infiltrated Steve Asmussen’s barn in 2013, alleging cruelty and drug abuse, and the subsequent public outcry from that incident? In 2014, then-TJC chairman Dinny Phipps — who’d won the Derby in 2013 with Orb in partnership with his cousin Stuart Janney lll, the current chairman of TJC — issued a scathing statement about the matter that included this line: “One columnist recently suggested that the trainer implicated in the PETA video should stay away from the Kentucky Derby and the Kentucky Oaks for ‘the good of the game.’ I concur wholeheartedly.”

After all that, Asmussen is no longer a villain these days; in fact, he may be a hero nowadays to some.

Remember when super villain Doug O’Neill was training 2012 Derby and Preakness winner I’ll Have Another for Paul Reddam, who was also considered a villain at the time? O’Neill, especially, was considered a major villain back then for drug issues, but he’s not one now. Things started to change for O’Neill after he again won the Derby, in 2016, with Reddam’s Nyquist. A Derby win tends to go a long way in softening perceptions.

O’Neill trained the popular Grade 1 winner Hot Rod Charlie this year, and on Saturday he won the G2 Los Alamitos Futurity for Reddam with the 2yo Nyquist colt Slow Down Andy, who defeated super villain Bob Baffert’s heavy favorite, Messier. O’Neill gets points for that, because Baffert is the super villain of the moment.

This is Baffert’s second go-around in that role. He was first anointed a super villain about 10 years ago when his stable went through a rash of “sudden deaths.” Like O’Neill, he came back into favor after winning the Triple Crown with American Pharaoh, in 2015. But it’s been downhill from there, even though he won the Triple Crown again, with Justify, in 2018. Justify’s scopolamine positive after the G1 Santa Anita Derby began a string of positives for Baffert over the past year and a half, punctuated by one for betamethasone for Medina Spirit in the Derby this year. His win gave Baffert seven wins in America’s most famous race — a record, which probably infuriates the white hats at TJC. And then just this week, Medina Spirit dropped dead after a workout in what appeared to be another “sudden death” incident, roiling the industry into a rabid froth.

It turns out that the super heroes at TJC have been trying to nail Baffert for a long time, but a bit on TJC first.

TJC is a wealthy organization. It is politically well-connected with Republicans and has paid handsome lobbying fees through the years to get HISA passed. It has hired an elite private detective agency — 5 Stones Intelligence, or 5SI, which played a major role in helping the Feds nail Navarro, Servis, et al — that it pays millions a year to investigate villains. It controls racing’s data and charges handsomely for its use. It has an ownership stake in Blood-Horse that helps it control news narrative, along with friendly journos in trade and general interest press, especially at New York Times and Washington Post. It has a particularly strong ally at another online trade publication, Thoroughbred Racing Commentary, which supports everything TJC does in its editorials. These are usually written by TRC head Charles Hayward, a TJC member (though this is not disclosed on his bio, which says: “Charles Hayward has been a Thoroughbred racing enthusiast for more than 30 years, and a horse owner for most of that time. After more than two decades in book publishing, including stints as publisher of Simon & Schuster’s general book division and president and CEO of Little, Brown and Company, Hayward left the book world to pursue his passion for Thoroughbred racing. He served as president and CEO of the Daily Racing Form, and subsequently was president and CEO of The New York Racing Association, Inc. Hayward lives in Manhattan with his wife, Betsy Senior, co-owner of Senior and Shopmaker Gallery in New York’s Chelsea art district.”).

TJC has also flexed nuts as the breed registrar by instituting a rule change that will limit stallions born in 2020 and later to 140 mares a year, something that evens the playing field for many farms, including ones belonging to TJC members, but it’s a move that has irked three Lexington farms that breed a lot of mares to their stallions. They have filed law suits to contest this action as constraining trade.

TJC has also been instrumental in helping to get racing on TV, and it has a social media arm run by a member’s daughter that highlights and shapes the image of the game as glamorous. TJC supports various charitable entities and market and scientific research and has even established educational scholarships for young people. And every year TJC publishes its valuable fact book that contains annual industry data.

What’s not to like about these super heroes, right?

Essentially, TJC views racing as its game, and it’s determined to control every aspect of it, especially the super villains like Baffert.

Turns out that some TJC members decided to take matters into their own hands and go after Baffert a few years ago. It’s right there in a Washington Post article from June titled, “The dark side of Bob Baffert’s reign.” Here’s a quote:

In 2015, a loose group of prominent thoroughbred owners hatched a plan — according to people with direct knowledge of it — to sic private eyes, from a firm called 5 Stones that helped bring down Russian dopers, on their sport’s most famous trainer. The goal, the people familiar said, was to get Baffert to support languishing reforms in the sport.

The scheme involved digging up drug-related dirt on Baffert and then telling him that the evidence could “disappear tomorrow” if he were to endorse the federal reforms of the sport, one of the people said. They had discussions with David Tinsley, the former DEA supervisor who runs 5 Stones, the people said, but the thoroughbred owners involved scrapped the plan. Tinsley declined to comment.

Apparently the plan was scrapped after Baffert won the Derby with American Pharoah and his popularity soared, but nevertheless that was some kind of gangsta move to think of arm-twisting Baffert to get his support for their legislation.

It appears that there’s a point at which the super heroes and the super villains traverse the same ugly ground of justifying the means to an end, right?

Doesn’t matter, though, right? As long as the good guys win.

Listen to the cops in DOOM’s “Rap Ambush” below.