The inspiration for this article came from a conversation I had with a good friend who works in the horse racing business.

(Editor’s note: Wait, Andrew has friends? We’re as shocked as you are.)

(Writer’s retort: You’re a jerk.)

On the whole, I don’t share the “doom and gloom” outlook on horse racing possessed by some loud voices on horse racing Twitter. I don’t think horse racing is on its deathbed, or that the sport will cease to exist in a certain number of years. I love this game, and as anyone who follows me can attest, I pour a great amount of energy into it on a consistent basis.

The fact is, however, that competition for legal wagering dollars has never been greater. Sports betting is being legalized in a majority of states around the country. The latest state to approve the industry is Kentucky, whose governor signed a sports betting bill last week.

Sooner rather than later, residents of the Bluegrass State will be able to log on to DraftKings, FanDuel, or whatever platform they want. They’ll be able to lock in wagers on their favorite teams, at set odds, with an abundance of free information at their fingertips. The rules of these contests are iron-clad and laid out for all to see, high standards for competition and the settings of competitions are set, winners and losers are known when the clock shows all-zeroes, and, by and large, confusion is at a minimum.

Meanwhile, in horse racing, all of the following items on the list below are true.

• Racetracks, on occasion, have major issues correctly timing races from start to finish.
• Three major racetracks (Gulfstream Park, Churchill Downs, and Fair Grounds) have had significant problems growing and maintaining grass on their turf courses.
• Late odds changes are commonplace across many prominent circuits.
• The California breeding industry is facing immense obstacles, and a major source of Cal-breds, Ocean Breeze Farm, has been put up for sale by the Reddams.
• One state’s racing circuit, which had been handling record numbers over the past few years, stopped sending its simulcast signal out of its state, resulting in millions of dollars in lost handle each month (and that’s being conservative).
• At the time of this writing, nearly two years after the 2021 Kentucky Derby, we still don’t know the official winner of that race.
• Nearly four years after the 2019 Kentucky Derby, we don’t have one uniform answer to the question, “what is a foul that merits disqualification?”

With all of that in mind, why would any novice who doesn’t have the time to dig into specifics choose to bet on horse racing rather than sports? This is true even in Kentucky, a state that prides itself on being the heartbeat of the racing industry. Call me crazy, but I don’t think the history of horse racing matters too much to someone who’s been to the track once a year, has $100 to gamble with, and has a choice of a Pick Four or an NFL game he/she/they can research a thousand different ways without spending a dime.

Take all of the things we horseplayers bicker about on Twitter and throw all of them out the window for a moment. Instead, let’s ask ourselves this question: What are we, as a sport, doing to ensure we get things as right as possible, as quickly as possible, for the benefit of every stakeholder involved?

Optics matter, and not just for whatever part of racing’s multi-legged stool you happen to reinforce. There are no simple answers to the below questions, but they need to be asked.

• What are we doing to educate new fans, make them more informed fans, and give them the confidence they need to put their money through the betting windows more than once or twice a year?
• Why are we breeding fewer horses, and why are the ones we breed now running fewer times, needing more time after races, and becoming harder for the average fan to develop interests in than thoroughbreds of years past? More importantly, how do we reverse this trend to where we’re breeding to race instead of racing to breed (or, even worse, breeding to sell on a widespread basis)?
• What are we doing to get new owners involved in the game when the economics to do so have never been more challenging for the non-gazillionaires out there?
• How do we keep the mid-sized, 10-12% trainer in business when the 20-25% trainers seem to have all the top bloodstock, owners, and riders on lockdown?

I don’t claim to have all the answers. I’m a bettor and a marketing/communications guy. I’m not a horseperson, or a veterinarian, or someone who’s intimately familiar with the challenges barns of all sizes face on a daily basis.

(Editor’s note: Wait a minute. He’s actually NOT a pompous know-it-all?)

(Writer’s retort: Shocking, right? Don’t tell anyone. Wouldn’t want to ruin a good shtick.)

I’m also not trying to insinuate the industry isn’t doing anything at all. A number of outlets are doing good work, and, in many cases, doing so while fighting numerous uphill battles. Acting as though they don’t exist, and/or minimizing their efforts, paints a biased picture.

(Also, say what you will about HISA, a well-meaning but imperfect piece of legislation clearly absent input from horsepeople before it was drafted and signed into law. However, it’s attempting to get everything under one roof with one set of rules. We can debate parts of the legislation all day long, but that particular goal is an admirable one.)

Still, there’s more that can be done across the board by everyone in racing’s ecosystem. Acting as though everything is fine and dandy when it isn’t is flat-out delusional, and it’s long past time for the industry to stop kicking the can down the road.

We don’t have to agree on everything in order for this to happen. If anyone knows about not being agreed with by some very vocal members of horse racing Twitter, it’s me (shoot, I got read the riot act once by someone angry I posted resources for victims of domestic violence). We can check our opinions about HISA, people in the game, and almost any other racing matter at the proverbial door.

The important thing we need to agree on is this: Things in horse racing are broken. If the industry is to survive (and maybe even thrive), a lot of things need to be fixed. The answers aren’t small tweaks. They’re huge, foundation-level adjustments that may require short-term sacrifices (a dirty word, I know, but go with it) to ensure the sport is still around for future generations.

The solution to these problems I’ve mentioned isn’t shooting the messenger. The problems are the problems themselves, not people talking about them (a lesson those quick to criticize the media would do well to learn). Whatever solutions are out there will take lots of thought from lots of smart people.

If we don’t find them soon, the consequences will be real and have longstanding effects for everyone. Let’s start the work now.

On Thursday, I read one of the most-pompous, least-informed “letters to the editor” in the history of journalism. It was published on the Thoroughbred Daily News website, and it contained a variety of wild accusations and untruths about horse racing journalists and media companies. Should you want to read it and subject yourself to the nonsense as we go along, here you go.

Before we go much further, I feel it prudent to point out my experience in the field. I worked with The Saratogian, HRTV, TVG, and The Daily Racing Form on a full-time basis. I’ve written for print and websites, I’ve run social media platforms, and I’ve geared content to a variety of different audiences. Everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve achieved significant growth in key metrics, and I’ve been fortunate to meet a lot of good people doing various things to keep each business going.

I’m not in racing full-time anymore, but I’m fortunate to still do plenty. I host a show on the On The Wrong Lead podcast network, I freelance for The Paulick Report and The Pink Sheet, and this site you’re on right now got more than 30,000 hits during the 2022 Saratoga meet. It hit that total with zero in the way of paid promotion, and with its only hype being on my social media platforms and the occasional blurb in The Pink Sheet.

I’m not saying this to gloat, but to prove that any decent list of competent horse racing writers, editors, podcast/video people, etc., has me on it. That gives me the credentials to be taken seriously when I say that this letter to the editor is barely worth the microscopic amount of space it takes up on the TDN servers.

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look. Firstly, let this sink in: The writer of the letter to the editor, who urged accountability and transparency, requested anonymity.

That’s not a typo or an untruth. Already, the letter starts from behind, as the writer fails to practice what they preach and doesn’t understand the absurdity of what they’ve produced. How is this writer any better than the, ahem, “journalists with an agenda” they complain about, when the letter-writer is content to lob grenades from behind a cloak of anonymity? If you want to show you care about writers being held accountable for what they write, be accountable yourself.

That brings me to the “most journalists have an agenda” comment. Trying to keep this part brief is hard, but in short: No. To paraphrase my good friend and Catena Media colleague Alicia Hughes, news is good, bad, and indifferent. It doesn’t care what you think a reporter should or shouldn’t be covering, and it’s a good reporter’s duty to cover everything, warts and all. Like every sport, racing has its share of warts, and trying to act like they don’t exist is borderline delusional.

Reporters are not publicists, no matter how much executives at many racing and breeding organizations that employ publicists want them to be. Stuff gets tricky, awkward, and messy sometimes. That’s the nature of the beast, and fair reporters get that reputation by covering newsworthy stories that come their way, not by cherry-picking and only writing the warm and fuzzy stuff.

(On a related note: Have you ever noticed the people who say reporters need to be writing happier stories are often the ones saying racing should be covered like a mainstream sport? Go watch ESPN’s coverage of the situation involving NBA star Ja Morant and tell me how good reporters would cover any mildly-controversial issue in racing. If you can’t stand the heat thrown by solid reporters NOW, imagine the scrutiny that would come with being covered “like a mainstream sport.”)

Moving on, we get to complaints about “dishonesty at each stage of the pipeline, from the sources through the writers to the readers.” This also included that sources of most stories “are agitators that pull the strings by contributing to online fearmongering publications.”

This is about when my anger turned into bewilderment. To recap: Most journalists have an agenda, everyone’s lying…and it’s the PUBLICATIONS, not the writer of this letter, that are, ahem, “fearmongering?” These are tactics straight out of low-rent sensationalist political talk shows that paint pictures of “us” versus “them.” They don’t stand up to any level of scrutiny, and it’s another example of why this attitude should never be taken seriously.

I don’t shy away from what I write, and neither do a lot of extremely talented writers I’m proud to call friends and colleagues. They’ve won Eclipse Awards for what they do. They wake up at dawn, take in workouts, go through days at the races and nights at the sales, write brilliantly about the things they see, and in some cases don’t get paid nearly enough for the quality of their work. They deserve better than flimsy, lazy attacks from someone who doesn’t have the courage to publicly identify themselves, and I’m about done staying quiet about it.

Stuff like we saw in the TDN Thursday isn’t okay, and I’m not alone in thinking it. Don Clippinger wrote a rebuttal to that letter that TDN, to their credit, published later in the day. I’ll quote some of his response here, because it puts things in perspective very well:

“The motivation of most all the journalists I’ve encountered in that time, which probably number in the thousands, was to get the story and get it right. That means telling both sides of the story. True, I have seen instances where the text may have been influenced by a losing bet, and industry members have at times tried unsuccessfully to throw their weight around in publications.

But those instances are exceedingly rare. To say that these journalists are ‘dishonest,’ to use the word of the anonymous coward, borders on libel.”

I’m big on accountability. My name is on everything I’ve ever written or produced at every outlet I’ve ever worked for, and as those who know me well can attest, I’ve taken my fair share of lumps for it. If anyone has a problem with anything my name is associated with, I’m a VERY easy guy to find.

With that in mind, there’s no dishonesty, clickbait, or sensationalism when I say this: The letter run by the TDN was a slap in the face to a LOT of good people. It was put into the world by someone who created the kind of negative story they wrote in to complain about, and the writer did so by lobbing wild, unjustified, and unsourced insults and accusations at folks who deserve much, much better.

Shame on them, shame on anyone who thinks this way, and shame on those who enable these people to continue acting as though good, hard-working writers are somehow the enemy of this industry.