“One of the important factors in Thoroughbred racing is a process in selecting superior genes to the next generation. For that, we think that it is very important that horses compete in races without the influence of any medication and a level playing field is in place,” said Japan Racing Association international department general manager Dr. Mutsuki Ishimaru. “The increase in participation of Japanese horses in U.S. racing is believed to stem from various factors, and we recognize that HISA’s efforts to promote safe and fair racing is one of them.

“In particular, the federal and unified regulations on anti-doping are highly regarded as a critical initiative directly linked to the fairness and integrity of racing. These efforts are positively received by Japanese racing connections.”

That warm international reception for HISA also has been seen at sales. At the 2024 edition of the bellwether Keeneland September Yearling Sale, buyers from 31 different countries participated in the highest-grossing Thoroughbred auction in the world at just under $412 million. Keeneland officials said renewed confidence in the U.S. industry, rich purse levels across the country, the success of American-bred horses racing around the world, and stronger medication regulations at tracks and auctions contributed to the success. 

“We are very pleased with the sale; hats off to the breeders,” Keeneland senior director of sales operations Cormac Breathnach said after the final hammer fell. “The most gratifying thing for us is to see buyers from 31 countries who have bought from the September Sale 

catalog. Twenty-four different buyers bought the 36 seven-figure horses, which is a record in terms of the number of individual people who have participated at that level, both international and domestic.”

HISA CEO Lisa Lazarus said overseas owners and breeders have welcomed changes in the U.S.

“What we hear from international owners and breeders is that they have faith now in the U.S. and when they bring their horses, they believe they are competing on a level playing field,” Lazarus said. “Clean sport is being enforced.”

Since HISA launched its safety initiatives July 1, 2022, and its anti-doping and medication control May 22, 2023, horses at every level of U.S. racing are being protected. Lazarus believes improved oversight and enforcement of racing’s anti-doping and medication control has made the sport safer.

“The vast majority of our positives are for medications. But we can’t underestimate (that concern),” Lazarus said. “It’s really important to realize that a lot of the improvements we’ve made in safety are directly correlated to the fact that horses are receiving less medication pre-race, so they’re not masking injury.”

In making racing safer for horses, the sport becomes safer for riders. But beyond that, and working with the Jockeys’ Guild, HISA has been able to make progress on rider issues that have lagged behind other sports for years: such as emergency plans for when a jockey is injured, concussion protocols, and mental health initiatives.

“I think one area that the industry has dramatically underperformed and underdelivered is providing services, essentially support and benefits, across the board to jockeys,” Lazarus said. 

Guild president and CEO Terry Meyocks said that while his organization believes some of the sanctions being applied to riders for infractions are too high relative to the violation, he’s been pleased to see progress in the area of rider safety.

“The progress on safety has absolutely been a positive,” Meyocks said.

As for what’s next, HISA plans to use the unprecedented wealth of information it has accumulated since its launch to shape policy going forward. That policy will aim to further improve the sport’s safety and create an environment where tracks can focus on showcasing standout horses and provide fan-friendly race days.

“The way that I look at HISA is that we can be doing all this in the background, while the tracks can really be at the forefront and shine,” Lazarus said. “We will just be there in the background making sure that instead of seeing a horse pull up with an injury crossing the line, you’ll see this fantastic story of the horse that won the Triple Crown. That’s really where we’re going; what we want to do in the future.” 

Information Brings Focus

Thanks to efforts such as The Jockey Club Equine Injury Database that launched in 2009, racing has built a better understanding of equine fatalities during racing through collected data. These instances have always been rare, which meant it took time to build a database that could supply answers.

That database did not reveal a silver bullet, but rather many factors of concern. The problem would require a multi-factorial solution that was put in place at varying levels from state to state. A centralized HISA is in a better position to focus the information collected on 

solutions that protect horses.

A private entity operating under the Federal Trade Commission, HISA has provided centralized self-regulation that has improved a big area of concern important to the public—equine safety—while advancing some initiatives to put the industry in position for success. As HISA tries to improve upon already record years for equine safety, it’s putting trust in the troves of information collected through the EID, veterinary records, pre-race exams, and surface information.

As an example of how far the industry has come, HISA now has the relative mystery of exercise-induced sudden deaths in its sights. These are equine deaths that occur in racing but are not associated with catastrophic breakdowns. They’ve always made up a small percentage of equine deaths during racing—breakdowns as a percentage are the much larger concern—but now that enough data has been collected, these rarer instances can be targeted.

“Exercise-associated sudden death represents 16% of equine fatalities, and it’s a black box. No one, globally or within the U.S., really understands what causes them,” Lazarus said. “Researching and getting information about what some of those risk factors might be, we think, is a really significant opportunity to be meaningful and to help us going forward.”

Information arrives through a number of sources. Since July 2022, HISA has 36,000 registered persons and 76,000 registered horses in its portal. Vets working for HISA have conducted about a half-million race inspections across the country and it has collected millions of veterinary treatment records. 

“Since we now have 4 million veterinary records, you can start to be a lot more intentional about matching the data to the regulations—making sure that we have regulations that are supported by the data,” Lazarus said. “We can make sure the regulations make sense and they’re achieving the goals we want, which is keeping horses and riders safe. This is what the future is going to look like.”

Beyond shaping rules, apps that tailor information empower regulatory veterinarians as they perform pre-race exams. In November HISA launched a digital tool for regulatory vets called Horse In-Sight. The platform, integrated within the HISA portal, combines a horse’s career and medical history to provide a singular view of its health and performance to help vets make informed, timely decisions. This technology that helps regulatory vets efficiently assess horses reviews 46 risk factors that produce thousands of trillions of combinations. 

“The algorithm looks at a number of different metrics across the board: the last time a horse had a bad outcome in a race, any pre-existing injury, veterinary treatments, medications, layoffs. It even considers whether or not a horse is a stallion, a gelding, or a mare because that has different risk profiles,” Lazarus said. “There are many, many factors—46, but they’re not all weighted the same. Based on an AI tool that incorporates machine learning, the model weighs each factor separately based on how important the data has shown that factor can be in predicting an outcome.”

And things are just getting started. Lazarus said the next version will review 2,000 variables that will see “trillions and trillions” of combinations, resulting in a more sophisticated analysis of risk.

Also on the horizon is an app that uses artificial intelligence to provide any specific answers for regulatory vets in the field. Just as one would ask Siri, vets will be able to use their phones to ask the app, currently named Buttercup, specific questions and receive an 

immediate response.

“(Regulatory vets) have incredibly hard jobs that are extremely long hours, and we want to be able to give them the tools to be more 

effective and also make their lives easier,” Lazarus noted.

While in the years before HISA some states and tracks certainly made strides on the equine safety front, they also had other business that might limit the times they could review safety numbers or spot concerning trends. HISA reviews the numbers daily and has the mandate to take action, if needed. As clusters of equine breakdowns have been a problem throughout the years, swift action can make a difference in disrupting those concerning patterns.

If HISA intervention keeps two catastrophic breakdowns at a track from becoming three, that can be progress.

“We track industry fatalities in real-time,” Lazarus told a crowded room in December at the University of Arizona Race Track Industry Program’s Symposium on Racing, noting that HISA chief technology officer Steve Keech has built a portal and dashboard to track these incidents. “We can look every single day to see what the national numbers are with respect to equine fatalities and injuries. Are they musculoskeletal? Are they exercise-associated sudden death? We can react immediately when we see those numbers.

“We’re not just looking at them at the end of the year; we’re looking at them on a daily basis. … So that (portal) has been a real game changer.”

Lazarus said AI has provided an incredible tool for HISA to leverage the collected data for the benefit of the industry.

“Probably the biggest game changer, and this is true across every industry, is leveraging technology,” Lazarus said. “There are a lot of different groups and actors within our industry who do a fantastic job with technology, and we are really happy to work alongside them and with them. Some of the ways that we’ve been able to do that is we use our technology to primarily empower the regulatory vets and the officials within horse racing to make quicker decisions, better decisions, and to be able to explain their decisions more effectively to our stakeholders.”

On the Surface

The wealth of information also has been used to improve the safety of racing surfaces and as more data is accumulated, more progress is possible. 

The Racing Surfaces Testing Laboratory evaluates every track before it opens a meet, getting measurements of important metrics that can then be measured daily for comparison. 

“We’re now getting measurements daily from the RSTL. We have a track superintendent advisory group that we’re very fortunate to have,” Lazarus said. “If there’s a problem, we dispatch someone from that group that’s made up of some of the best superintendents in the country, and we ask them to take a look at a track that’s not theirs and see how it’s performing.

“If there’s a problem, we help get it solved. Again, this is all in real time, which has been a big advancement.”

Lazarus said there is an integrated racetrack surface tester that is going to be launched soon that potentially will collect more relevant metrics, be easier for use, and easier to integrate and analyze. She said HISA also is looking at how other sports have made progress improving their playing surfaces. 

Same Page

HISA and its enforcement arm, the Horseracing Integrity & Welfare Unit, reached an important milestone in January when lab accreditation shifted from the industry’s Racing Medication and Testing Consortium to the HISA Equine Analytical 

Laboratory accreditation program.

The goal is to have all the labs on the same page in terms of testing, methods, thresholds, and the like.

HIWU executive director Ben Mosier said the RMTC program did a nice job but HEAL will provide a more robust evaluation of lab 

performance.

“We’re just taking that to another level,” Mosier said. “In addition to what are called single-blind samples where samples arrive and labs know that these are test samples; now we’re conducting what are called double-blind samples. Those are being done multiple times a month. So double-blinds are designed to look like any other sample collected at a racetrack. They’re actually coordinated by our staff and thrown into the sample collection cooler and the laboratory knows no difference from any other test sample. It’s to test (the lab’s) performance.”

The HEAL program also will feature sample exchanges, where if one lab calls a sample negative another lab will receive what’s left of that sample to reanalyze as a performance check.

“We’re going to always be making sure that we’re checking each lab against one another. They’re no longer working in individual silos for each individual state racing commission,” Mosier said, noting the program is modeled off the World Anti-Doping Agency’s lab accreditation that has existed for nearly 25 years in human anti-doping sports, Olympic athletes, and professional leagues.

“The ultimate goal is to have harmonization of the laboratories–harmonization and cooperation. The labs have worked together in the past but not at this level,” Mosier said. “We meet with the lab directors every week and talk about things that we’re seeing. We talk about ensuring that positive tests in one jurisdiction or track would be called positives in another–out of fairness to horsemen. Harmonization is not only key to the laboratories but the entire program itself.”

While HISA shifts to the HEAL standard, it already has brought scrutiny and quality checks on the labs it uses. In September HISA said that the equine analytical lab at the University of Kentucky did not meet standards. The six-month probe pointed to 91 alleged instances of the lab not performing confirmatory analyses of samples.

Mosier said there are four labs currently in place and he added that Illinois could soon qualify and Kentucky is working toward a return to good standing. Lazarus said cooperation between labs is important.

“The laboratories have to work together; they’ve got to share information; they’ve got to show their work, they’ve got to collaborate. In those situations where laboratories aren’t performing, they can’t hide anymore,” Lazarus said. “We’ve been able to really make significant advancements on ensuring that the stakeholders, the horsemen, get what they deserve, which is laboratories that are performing properly, at the highest level, and that are fair.”

Jockey Safety

When a jockey or exercise rider is injured, every minute counts. In developing emergency care plans for racetracks to be ready for such incidents, HISA is working with a company called Sports Medicine Concepts that helped develop emergency care practices for NFL teams. 

Lazarus said test runs of emergency plans have been put in place at tracks. She said one of these tests turned up a responder who was afraid to get too close to horses. Discovering such potential flaws in a plan before an emergency occurs is important. 

“Even if all of the racetracks are satisfying our criteria for ambulances and all of the right equipment, it doesn’t mean that the people inside those ambulances would know what to do in the moment and will actually work as efficiently and as effectively as possible,” Lazarus said. “We’ve been having (Sports Medicine Concepts) look at some of the procedures for racetracks where we have some concerns about their protocols to help reform them to standard best practices.”

HISA also has furthered the national concussion protocol policy. HISA’s national medical director, Dr. Peter Hester, and HEADCHECK Health, which conducts baseline concussion testing every couple of years, have brought more consistency from track to track on this front.

Meyocks, who has worked to improve safety for riders throughout his 17 years leading the Guild, applauds the progress made in these areas. Under state-to-state regulation of the sport, the Guild would have to make its case for safety changes in each jurisdiction as opposed to the centralized HISA approach.

HISA also is working to help riders experiencing mental health challenges. Lazarus said when she first became involved in racing, she was shocked to see the amount of verbal abuse jockeys receive on social media.

“I think it’s worse than a lot of professional athletes because of the betting component. Other sports have betting but our sport is sort of based around the gambling,” Lazarus said. “Between that and having to make weight, and the danger, and pressures from owners and trainers; it doesn’t surprise me that jockeys would have some struggles.”

In working with the Guild, HISA has partnered with a company called Onrise, an athlete-focused telehealth program focused on mental health. The confidential service can match riders with other professional athletes, a therapist, or a psychiatrist, depending on the need.

“So there’s a range of services available,” Lazarus said. “We’re so happy that we now have this. We’ve received positive feedback from jockeys. Even though we don’t know who is using it, we know it’s being used.”

Meyocks said it’s been an important addition for riders.

“They face a lot of things they have to deal with, from making weight, diet, losing stakes horses, losing streaks, backlash on social media,” Meyocks said, noting that Onrise also providing an outlet to think and plan for a post-riding career is terrific for the jockeys. “I hope in the years ahead this can be expanded to more people in the industry, horsemen, exercise riders, people on the front side. Everyone has their issues.”

For a sport that has become more foreign to the general public, Lazarus said it’s critical that racing commit to these initiatives to protect horses and riders.

“We’ve learned through a lot of our research and polling that’s been done for us is that the public wants to know you’re trying,” Lazarus said. “They’re not going to hold you to unrealistic goals and expectations for the most part. But they want to know you care and that you’re doing your best. I think that genuinely the industry can say for the most part that we are doing our best and that we care and we’re really uniting to find the best solutions that we can to get the best outcomes.”

HISA has moved racing forward in these areas and believes more progress is on the horizon.

“Now we’re at a point where we can take all of that work and everything that we bought from the industry and give back to the industry in terms of information and products, and really bring it to the next level,” Lazarus said. “I think horse racing is the most amazing, incredible sport. With such a story, tradition and history, and working together, you can continue to really highlight its best features.”