The ghostly gray portrait stares down from the painted brick wall flanking the grandstand tunnel at Rillito Park, the little Arizona county fair track located near downtown Tucson. Larger than life, the sketch captures the stern visage of jockey Richard Gamez, killed in an accident at Rillito March 1, 2020, when thrown from his mount and trampled on the far turn of the Rillito Hopeful Maiden Stakes, a Thoroughbred race of 5 1/2 furlongs.

As a memorial to the daily dangers of riding racehorses, the Gamez remembrance seems as effective in its own way as the statue of George Woolf greeting Santa Anita Park patrons or the statue of Avelino Gomez standing sentry at Woodbine. Since Woolf’s fatal fall at Santa Anita in 1946, more than 100 jockeys have died while in action at North American racetracks.

These days the Gamez image is just another lonely feature of cozy Rillito, built in 1943, where racing has been suspended pending the approval of an operating entity and improvements that would fulfill the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority’s standards. There is hope that the traditional 14-day meet spread over seven weekends in February and March can be resurrected in 2026. In the meantime, the paddock rimmed in V-mesh horse fencing remains empty, along with the room labeled “Lady Jockeys” and the Mutts Restaurant stand, featuring its cartoon horse and jockey logo recommending its Usinger’s premium sausage.

A visit to Rillito Park seemed a good way to put a real-world cherry on top of a high-calorie feast of modern technological wonders on display Dec. 9-11 at the 50th Global Symposium on Racing sponsored by the Race Track Industry Program of the University of Arizona, with the tireless Robert Hartman again acting as host and ringmaster.

Hartman also is deeply involved in Rillito’s rejuvenation, since the hometown track has played host to scores of RTIP students through the years in a variety of learning roles. Rillito Park is not only a valued part of the local culture, it is also on the National Registry of Historic Places.

Still, the place must meet HISA standards before the Arizona Racing Commission will grant dates.

“The necessary improvements come to about $2 million, with $700,000 available now,” Hartman said. “If the most important items are addressed first, starting with a new safety rail, HISA has agreed to allow a phasing in of the other requirements with a good faith commitment.”

Depending on which symposium conference panel you attended, or which booth snagged your attention at the associated trade show, the various versions of horse racing’s future appear to lie with an amalgam of social media influencers, historical horse racing, sports betting, handicapping contests, and artificial intelligence applied to everything from veterinary diagnostics to condition books.

HISA itself had its moment in the symposium spotlight courtesy of CEO Lisa Lazarus and her by now familiar talking points that urge patience and cooperation with the growing pains of the Authority. A panel featuring HISA’s investigative and enforcement arm, the Horseracing Welfare and Integrity Unit, was informative but did little to calm the notion that important goalposts in testing and penalties seem to be moving more than growing pains should allow.

They’ll get that figured out, eventually. Of more interest (concern?) is a predictable stampede to apply AI to all possible corners of the horse racing universe, tapping into the shiniest new object of monetized technology. Let’s face it, with its data-dependent environment, racing is a ripe target for such a gold rush by companies that embrace the inevitability of a brave new AI world, just as entrepreneurs hawking synthetic racing surfaces swarmed the industry earlier this century as saviors of the sport.

As we learned, they did not have their act together. Failures of synthetic surfaces at major racetracks were costly in terms of time and treasure. The emerging, important technology suffered from terrible PR, while the game’s participants felt reduced to guinea pigs. It has taken more than a decade for synthetics to regain the momentum lost, but fortunately, the surviving Tapeta brand has kept the concept alive.

No doubt, AI applications can streamline some aspects of racing’s densely layered operations, at racetracks, farms, and wagering platforms. Let’s also hope that racing’s eventual embrace will be able to avoid versions of AI disasters that have ranged from amusing to tragic.

Last June, McDonald’s abandoned its experiment with an AI application for something as simple as its drive-thru orders. AI-powered recruitment software has been found to be programmed by data that allows the downgrading of résumés on the basis of race and gender. Last April, X’s AI chatbot Grok accused Klay Thompson of the Golden State Warriors of a brick-throwing vandalism spree when it failed to properly interpret the basketball slang in reports of a game in which he went 0-for-10 from the floor. Bricks, get it?

Rillito Park came up in a symposium session that featured Hall of Fame trainers Bob Baffert and Todd Pletcher. Between them, they have amassed more than 9,200 wins and $860 million in purses. The session, moderated by Santa Anita senior vice president and executive producer Amy Zimmerman, had its moments. But it would have been a lot more fun had they thrown a hedge fund manager between Bob and Todd and stood back to watch.

Through the years, both trainers have credited attending the University of Arizona Race Track Industry Program as an important building block to their wildly successful careers. It was Baffert, however, who won his first Thoroughbred race as a trainer at Rillito in January of 1979 with the 3-year-old filly Flipper Star, although he spent the next decade devoting his time to Quarter Horses before transitioning. (For the record, Pletcher saddled his first winner, the 3-year-old maiden claimer Majestic Number, in January of 1996 at Gulfstream Park.)

Trainers Simon, Truman Remembered

Later in the day, the symposium offered an intimate memorial to horseman Chuck Simon, whose death in September at just 57 was mourned by all who knew him as a respected trainer, mentor, media communicator, and tireless advocate of racing’s best interests. Radio personality Steve Byk led the memorial.

The following day, word was getting around of the death of Eddie Truman, 77, a veteran of the California training wars whose reputation for horsemanship was rivaled only by his generosity of spirit and devotion to friends and family. From his early West Coast days as an exercise rider for Bobby Frankel to his training scores with the occasional stakes horse, Truman never let an encounter pass without imparting words of encouragement or a heartfelt good vibe. He left a wife and daughter, and a sadness thankfully leavened by knowing him.

Between them, Simon and Truman won about 1,100 races courtesy of a lucky bunch of horses who ran up around $26 million in purses while under their care. This is evidence enough that raw statistics don’t mean squat when it comes to telling the real story of the people who call themselves Thoroughbred trainers. Both men were blessed with boundless emotional intelligence, and there was nothing artificial about them.