Oaklawn to Offer Lasix Free Bonus

By T.D. Thornton 

One oft-repeated mantra about medication reform in Thoroughbred racing is that horsemen will follow the money. 
Oaklawn Park will attempt to test that theory in 2015 by paying a 10% bonus on top of the first-place purse value to horses who win without Lasix in their systems. 

The Arkansas track will open Jan. 9 with myriad unanswered questions about its Lasix-free bonus program: Will a three-month meet generate a meaningful enough sample size to gauge whether the program works or not? Will there be horsemen who support the experiment in theory but are reluctant to try it for fear of compromising performance or losing owners? Does Oaklawn’s lack of 2-year-old racing skew the study? Would writing entirely Lasix-free races be a better way to level the playing field? 

The only agreement among Oaklawn officials, industry leaders and horsemen seems to be that the program is worth a shot, and that the sport has to start making incremental changes if it intends to get serious about weaning the nationwide horse population off a well-entrenched regimen of raceday medication. 

“The perception of Lasix is not what it was five, six or seven years ago,” said David Longinotti, Oaklawn’s director of racing. “It’s a work in progress. It’s a step in the right direction. You have to start somewhere, and we’re going to evaluate things and see how things go during the 2015 racing season.” 

Lasix (also branded Salix) is furosemide, a once-unsanctioned but now nearly universally prescribed legal diuretic in American racing. It gained widespread use in the 1970s for its ability to reduce exercise-induced pulmonary hemorrhage in equine athletes. In the decades since its legalization, there has been endless debate over the role of Lasix as a performance-enhancer and in fostering a culture of over-medication. Grave questions have arisen about its short-term effects on individual horses and long-term implications for the breed as a whole. 

Suffice to say it would take an entire issue of TDN to properly outline both sides of the debate. But a substantial gray area exists in which advocates for the therapeutic benefits of Lasix overlap beliefs with those of reformers calling for an outright ban on raceday medication. This murky middle ground is the starting point from which Oaklawn will attempt to incentivize owners and trainers to race–and win–without Lasix. 

Oaklawn will pay the bonus money separate from its purse account. Oaklawn Jockey Club president Charles Cella has underscored to his executive staff that he wants to accentuate the track’s reputation as a “hay, oats and water” example. 
“If you remember back in the 1970s and 1980s, we were one of the last tracks that actually allowed Lasix,” Longinotti said. “We’re not advocating that horses who need Lasix should run without it. But we think that maybe there are horses that don’t require Lasix, and if you can run without Lasix, they should certainly do so.” 

The Oaklawn incentives will range from $1,080 on top of a minimum winning purse of $18,000 up to $60,000 for a Lasix-free victory in the GI Arkansas Derby. The total amount budgeted for the program is $1.4 million. 

“One of our concerns was we did not want to create an incentive for people to run horses without Lasix if the horses needed it,” Longinotti said. “So that was a big reason we made sure these funds are not coming out of the purse account at all. The funds to create these bonuses come out of our own pocket.” 

A perusal of the charts of the 2014 racing season at Oaklawn shows that the track is unlikely to have to dig too deeply into its till to fulfill the bonus pledge. 

In 473 races at Oaklawn last season, only five races were won by Lasix-free Thoroughbreds (four horses total, with one repeat winner). So barely 1% of all winners ran Lasix-free. Had the bonus program been in effect last year, Oaklawn would have paid $14,850. 

In fairness, Oaklawn does not conduct 2-year-old racing, and a sizable shift within the industry has been for owners of juveniles to pledge not to race their young horses on Lasix. 

“That’s because of the time of the year that we race,” Longinotti said. “We race January through mid-April. That’s too early for 2-year-olds to race, obviously. But we do get a lot of 3-year-old first-time starters. What we kind of expect to happen is some owners will run first-timers without Lasix. Obviously, we hope that they will scope them before they attempt that to make sure they have some confidence that the horse is not going to need Lasix.” 

Trainer Chris Richard was third in wins last year at Oaklawn. Two of his 23 victories came with Lasix-free horses in maiden special weight races. 

“Those two horses that wo–All Call and Discipline–were both owned by James McIngvale,” Richard said. “He is a big proponent for not running horses on Lasix. Those were young 3-year-olds, and if they don’t show that they have bled in the mornings or anything, Mr. McIngvale would prefer that they do not run on Lasix.” 

Although Oaklawn’s initial September press release about the bonus program claimed that the track would be the “first in America” to offer such incentives, Longinotti said Oaklawn officials have since learned that Arapahoe Park was the first to implement medication-free bonuses. Oaklawn has since conceded that honor to the Colorado track, which operates on a far smaller scale on a geographically isolated circuit. 

Arapahoe spokesman Jonathan Horowitz said track management decided “at the last minute and in the middle of the season” last summer to offer flat $1,000 bonuses to any winning horse that ran totally medication-free (Lasix, Phenylbutazone, Banamine and Ketoprofen are permissible on raceday in Colorado). 

“We were thrilled that after we were the first to do it, Oaklawn Park has a similar bonus system,” Horowitz said. “When you’re the first one to do something, it seems kind of lonely. But when other people come on board, you sort of take a little satisfaction that, hey, we might be doing the right thing.” 

A total of 21 Arapahoe horses ran medication-free, and three of them won a total of four races. 

“Now that we have it out there, we might change things up a bit [for 2015],” Horowitz said. “We have some time to target trainers and give them a heads up so they can figure out if they have horses they want to run under this program.” 

Longinotti said Oaklawn considered several options as to how to best promote Lasix-free racing. 

“We talked about giving a weight break to horses who do not run on Lasix, or special race conditions for non-Lasix users,” Longinotti said. “But at the end of the day, this kind of boiled down as the most fair way of doing it.” 
As for expectations at Oaklawn, Longinotti said he did not want to commit in terms of numbers. He said the initial response has been supportive, but not overwhelming. 

“We’ve gotten a few emails, a couple of nice letters and some phone calls, but nothing huge,” Longinotti said. “A lot of pats on the back, things like that. The first person who came in my door and patted us on the back was Jack Van Berg.” 
Reached by phone near Remington Park in Oklahoma last Saturday, Van Berg, a Hall of Fame trainer, said he was in favor of Oaklawn’s initiatives, but doesn’t know if they are enough to spur serious reform. 

“I’ve tried over and over to stop all medication,” Van Berg said. “What Mr. Charles Cella is doing in Hot Springs is going to help, but the only bad side of it is if you’ve got an owner, and you run his horse without Lasix, if he doesn’t like it he’s going to take that horse to another trainer [who will run the horse on Lasix]. There are quite a few trainers that abuse the drug route. But the owner doesn’t have to suffer if a trainer has a bad test. 

Van Berg added, “The only way you’re going to change the darn thing is to invest enough money to have the most sophisticated testing there is to detect all drug use, and then trainers will have to follow the rules when they take out a stall application and sign their license. 

The conditioner continued, “Back in my time, years ago, when you got a bad test, you [were sent packing] down the road. Nowadays they just get an injunction and keep racing. They don’t do anything to them; they give them a little slap on the wrist.” 

Van Berg said that at Remington, he starts his 2-year-olds without Lasix. Those juveniles will be three by the time he brings a stable of 18 to Oaklawn. Past performances show some older Van Berg entrants at Remington do race on Lasix. 
“I testified before Congress in New York [in 2008] and there hasn’t been anything done since then,” Van Berg said. “The bad part about it, when I was up there testifying, some of the same people who were abusing the system then are still doing [illegal] things now. Either you make a rule or you don’t. I feel sorry for the horses, and what they have to go through.” 

Richard said it’s a case-by-case basis as to whether he uses Lasix on his horses. He will have 35 head at Oaklawn, but because of the way his stable has rotated, he only expects to train one for Lasix-free advocate McIngvale. 

“I go a different direction than some of the people who are against Lasix,” Richard said. “If they outlawed Lasix tomorrow, would I have a huge problem with it? Not really, because I think I can do without it. Certain horses who are bleeders can greatly benefit from it, and I’m all for trying to take the best possible care of my horses as I can.” 

Richard sees pitfalls in experimenting with taking a known bleeder off of Lasix just to chase bonus money. 

“What people don’t realize is that it’s very easy to put a horse on Lasix [initially],” Richard said. “But if you take a horse off of Lasix, he doesn’t run well, and you scope him and find out he bled, it’s not just as simple as ‘Well let me go to the test barn and get him back on Lasix.’ Each jurisdiction is different, and there’s a time period [before a bleeder is allowed back on the drug]. A lot of times you could be sitting in the barn for 30 days.” 

Richard said he tries to keep an open mind and be respectful of both sides of the Lasix issue. 

“I think the benefit of the horses is the number one criteria,” the trainer remarked. “And unfortunately, we do have a lot of Thoroughbreds that do bleed. It’s taxing on the horse’s system. Then the horse needs to be put on antibiotics, because you don’t want to chance infection and the horse getting sick. So then there’s even more expense and more time lost in getting that horse back to a healthy state that you can feel comfortable getting him back to a race.” 
Richard continued, “There are horsemen who want to get away from Lasix, but then there are horsemen saying ‘Let’s take care of these horses the best that we can with legal therapeutic medications. So it will be absolutely interesting to see where this goes within the next couple of years.”