Any racing afficionado looking to see the current year out in the worst way possible would be well served by glancing over some of the main racing-related stories that have migrated to the front pages from the back.
Casting a bleak shadow over things here in the U.S. has been the sordid and still unfolding saga of the federal indictments brought against Jason Servis, Jorge Navarro and a whole cabal of ghouls for their systematic and, in some cases, possibly fatal use of performance-enhancing drugs.
May’s Kentucky Derby quickly devolved into the theater of the absurd, thanks to Bob Baffert’s carnival barker broadside against woke-ism to explain away on network television Medina Spirit’s betamethasone positive, only to then inexplicably remember that my oh my, the horse had been administered a betamethasone-infused ointment after all.
Somehow, that was a high point of the whole miserable affair.
After nearly eight months without an official verdict on the case — during which time Baffert’s checkered career record has been distilled for public consumption in the Washington Post and lampooned on Saturday Night Live — Medina Spirit tragically dropped dead from an apparent cardiac arrest, resurrecting events from between 2011 and 2013, when seven Baffert-trained horses similarly died suddenly during training or racing.
Worst ‘circle the wagons’ impulses
Across the Pond, events have charted a similarly tawdry course.
Earlier this year, the picture of Gordon Elliot astride a dead horse, a cheery grin on his face, was the perfect viral moment to encapsulate all that racing’s detractors consider wrong with the game.
Same goes with the Bryony Frost and Robbie Dunne affair, which rendered with stark clarity racing’s worst ‘circle the wagons’ impulses to protect an egotistical bully whose behavior should have been nipped in the bud by any one of his peers in the weighing room.
Over in Australia, the findings of a recent survey into public attitudes towards the Melbourne Cup — a hitherto irreproachable national bastion — came with a stark warning about the industry’s spotty welfare record.
Given these developments alone, anyone who loves the sport would have been forgiven for hitting the liquor cabinet hard this holiday season.
But, to all you world-weary souls, a timely reminder of racing’s more laudable values has arrived in an unexpected vessel.
A superb indie flick called ‘Jockey’.
High-stakes lottery
The film follows jockey Jackson Silva — played with haunting authenticity by actor Clifton Collins Jr — whose career is lurching towards oblivion, the lingering effect of injuries threatening to completely upend his life.
Solitary and taciturn, Jackson is forced to further self-reevaluate when a hungry young jockey named Gabriel introduces himself as Jackson’s son. Initially blindsided, the older rider soon takes him under his wing.
Filmed at Arizona’s Turf Paradise in a palate of rich desert pastels, the film is a slow contemplative burn on racing as a high-stakes lottery, when chance and good fortune are strange bedfellows with failure and rejection.
But what it lacks in plot it more than makes up for in its careful examination of the communal nature of backstretch life and the idea that the racetrack is a family chosen more than inherited.
It does this by showing desperate characters who, despite threadbare existences, choose to do the right thing, even when it’s not to their immediate and obvious benefit.
(Warning: Spoilers ahead)
Obligation to horse
Some moments are subtler than others, like at the start of the film when Jackson urges his main trainer, Ruth, to increase the workload of a horse on the easy list.
Jackson’s words carry considerable weight. But Ruth, a trainer with a steely understanding of obligation to her decidedly average stable of horses, doesn’t buckle. The ankle is simply not ready, she insists.
In some form or other, these kinds of conversations are had every day along the backstretch. But how often is restraint jettisoned in favor of impatience or worse? And to what end?
Then comes the more obvious moments, like later in the movie after Ruth has been alerted to the serious long-term nature of Jackson’s injuries.
Jackson is still at this point the respected elder statesman of the colony, a rider with no superior in the jocks’ room.
But Ruth puts professional temptation aside and breaks it to Jackson she will not, for his sake, use him again. That includes her horse in an imminent big race. The ride goes to Gabriel instead.
The moral heart of the movie is no more evident than at the end, when Jackson, determined to compete in that same big race, secures a ride against Gabriel and his former mount.
By now, Jackson has been convinced that Gabriel is not his son. That his relationship to the young rider was one only of emulation.
But, even at his lowest professional and personal ebb, Jackson nonetheless gives Gabriel instructions on how to win the race on his old horse.
You can guess the rest.
Greed, hubris and ego
The idea of racing as a giant sprawling ecosystem, or one large dysfunctional family, is hardly novel.
And yet, a key lesson Jockey imparts — that even the most marginal players in this game can every day choose to do immeasurable good — seems a poignant reminder when many are understandably bludgeoned by one bad story after another into believing the sport beyond redemption.
Here, and at the risk of coming across an all-too-nagging Carrie Nation, it hardly needs repeating that racing has always been fertile soil for greed, hubris and ego.
That’s why moral signposts are wasted on racing’s worst offenders, like Navarro, Servis and co. Same, too, the Ramseys and the Zayats, insulated by their wealth and privilege from the consequences of their actions.
And, if there’s another grim lesson from this past year, it’s that our regulators aren’t up to the task of properly policing the sport.
Over in the UK, the Professional Jockeys’ Association and the British Horseracing Authority share blame alike for completely bungling the Frost case.
Here in the U.S., deep fissures in our regulatory system led to successful passage last year of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act (HISA). But, even before the announcement last week that the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) wouldn’t be assuming the role of HISA’s enforcement agency, it was clear any wholesale revolution many have been hoping for would be years in the making.
And now, without USADA’s slick messaging machine at the helm, the path forward has, in many regards, only gotten harder to navigate.
Moral imperative
But then, sitting idly by in wait of a nanny-state savior should not be an option. Why should the industry need to be cajoled and coerced into pulling up short the jockey whose ego has turned him into a dangerous liability?
Why should the sport be content with a status quo whereby too many are still willing to roll the dice and run the horse in need of convalescence?
The moral imperative is clear. The practical element is, too — of survival in the face of existential threats. Gauging that danger is tough, however.
On the one hand, the industry remains a throbbing economic engine, sustaining tens of thousands of jobs and generating immense revenues.
But at the same time, ours is the democratizing age of the internet, where a single video of a coach punching a horse at the recent Tokyo Olympics precipitated the end of horse riding as a component of the modern pentathlon.
Reason is useless against a landslide of public contempt.
And so, for racing to avoid becoming yet another historical footnote, it needs to be more responsive to the dysfunctional members of its family – the redeemable ones that is. More importantly, it needs to be responsive in a way the authorities cannot, quicker to intercede when they stray, more apt to tell them no.
When Ruth, the trainer in Jockey, says, “You’ve got to tell a horse when it’s time to stop,” she implies that humans, by contrast, have that ability within themselves.
Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes all it takes is a word to the wise. Sometimes that word to the wise is all that’s needed to avoid racing’s next tawdry headline.