Danny Brewer filed a piece for Forbes on May 28, 2026, titled Commitment Makes Kentucky A Leader In Thoroughbred Racing. It is a promotional article from start to finish industry sources praising the industry, purse money celebrated as proof of excellence, Keeneland sales records treated as evidence of institutional health. It runs 1,100 words. It does not mention the Ortiz brothers. It does not mention cockfighting. It does not mention the Kentucky Horse Racing and Gaming Corporation conducting an investigation into documented federal criminal conduct by two of the sport’s most prominent jockeys and then choosing to do nothing.
That silence is not an oversight. That silence is the story.
What Forbes Left Out
Brewer’s piece praises the KHRG and the state of Kentucky racing at length. Speaker of the Kentucky House David Osborne is quoted saying it is “incredibly important for the Thoroughbred industry and our government to work together.” Chauncey Morris of the Kentucky Thoroughbred Association is quoted on the strength of the broodmare population. Kentucky Downs vice president Ted Nicholson speaks glowingly of facility improvements. Churchill Downs and Keeneland are described as destination venues. The HHR gaming machines are credited for fueling a racing renaissance.
Not a word about what the KHRG did, or failed to do when evidence surfaced that licensed jockeys Jose Ortiz and Irad Ortiz Jr. were participants in illegal cockfighting.
Past The Wire reported this story in November 2025. Six months before USA Today confirmed it nationally. Six months before it appeared on the front pages of major newspapers. The evidence was not ambiguous: a video showing the brothers inside a cockfighting arena appeared to show them collecting wagering proceeds. A Facebook advertisement from December 17, 2025, identified them as participants in the Gran Campeón Caribeño tournament. A January 2025 photograph showed the brothers inside a cockfighting pit holding roosters. This was promotional material. These men were not bystanders. They were advertised competitors.
Cockfighting has been a federal felony under the Animal Welfare Act in every U.S. jurisdiction, including Puerto Rico, since 2019. Participation carries a penalty of up to five years in federal prison. Attendance carries up to one year. The Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear Puerto Rico’s legal challenge to that law in 2021. The law is settled.
The KHRG, we now know from documents obtained through a public records request, investigated this matter in November 2025. Chief steward Barbara Borden requested background checks. Investigators reviewed Google searches about cockfighting law. The jockeys were met with. And then the KHRG did nothing — concluding, per the corporation’s own public statement, that the investigation “did not result in any action being taken.”
Forbes describes that same regulatory body, in the same week that investigation’s failure was confirmed by public records, as a model of commitment to the sport.
Leadership Requires a Moral Standard
Let us be precise about what was ignored. Under KHRG Rule 809 KAR 10:008, a licensee may have their license revoked or suspended if they are charged or convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude, a felony, sports wagering, or cruelty to animals or if they engage in conduct that discredits the sport. The KHRG reviewed exactly those categories. It reviewed documented evidence of participation in a federal felony involving animal cruelty and illegal gambling. It chose not to act.
This is the institution Brewer’s Forbes piece praises as the engine of Kentucky racing’s ascendancy.
The article makes much of Kentucky’s 60,000 jobs and its $6.5 billion economic footprint. Those numbers are real. The investment in facilities is real. The purse structure improvements are real. Past The Wire has covered them. We are not here to argue that Kentucky racing has not grown. We are here to argue, plainly that growth in handle and purse distribution does not constitute leadership if the moral and legal standards the sport claims to uphold are selectively enforced when the sport’s most prominent names are involved.
Leadership means the rules apply to everyone. It means when your top two finishers in the Kentucky Derby are documented participants in federal criminal activity involving both animal cruelty and illegal gambling, the regulatory body responsible for the integrity of pari-mutuel wagering in your state takes action. It means a corporation with the authority under its own rules to suspend licenses for exactly this conduct does not retreat behind a Google search and silence.
What the KHRG produced was not leadership. It was the same institutional calculation this industry makes every time a star is involved: the cost of doing nothing is lower than the cost of doing the right thing.
The Wagering Integrity Problem Forbes Missed Entirely
Brewer’s article celebrates Kentucky’s racing handle and the efficiency of its betting infrastructure. That framing makes the omission more glaring, not less.
Cockfighting arenas are, at their core, unregulated gambling operations. Cash-based. Outside any licensing framework. No audit trail. No tax structure. No consumer protection. The $18,000 recovered at a Maricopa County cockfighting bust on April 4, 2026 involving 157 live roosters is a data point, not an anomaly. This is what an illegal gambling market looks like.
The KHRG exists in significant part to protect the integrity of pari-mutuel wagering in Kentucky. Two of the most prominent jockeys in the legal wagering marketplace — jockeys whose riding decisions, mount selections, and competitive choices directly influence the wagering public are documented participants in illegal gambling activity. Past The Wire asked the KHRG directly: how does the Corporation reconcile that fact with its mandate to the betting public? The KHRG has not answered.
A Forbes contributor celebrating Kentucky racing’s betting infrastructure handle without acknowledging that its regulator looked away from illegal gambling participation by the sport’s most prominent riders is not journalism. It is public relations dressed in a business magazine’s banner.
The CDI Standard That Was Never Applied
Churchill Downs Incorporated is the centerpiece of Brewer’s Kentucky racing narrative. CDI owns the Kentucky Derby. CDI owns Turfway Park and Ellis Park. CDI, as Brewer correctly notes, has made enormous facility investments.
CDI is also a company that banned Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert from its properties for years based on a therapeutic medication overage. CDI has repeatedly and publicly asserted that it possesses independent authority separate from any regulatory mandate to determine who rides and trains at its tracks in order to protect the integrity of its events.
Those same jockeys, the first and second finishers in the 2026 Kentucky Derby, CDI’s marquee event are documented participants in federal criminal conduct involving animal cruelty and illegal gambling. CDI has said nothing. It has taken no action. It has exercised no independent authority. It has made no public statement.
The company that invoked integrity to ban a trainer over a medication threshold has not invoked integrity to address jockeys who participated in a federal felony. That is not a difficult standard to identify. It is selective enforcement, and no amount of purse money or facility upgrades changes what it is.
What Forbes Should Have Asked
Danny Brewer has covered Kentucky racing for Forbes with evident enthusiasm and with genuine knowledge of the sport’s economic mechanics. This piece, published yesterday, May 28, 2026 was not a hit piece. It was not designed to mislead. It was designed to celebrate. And that, precisely, is the problem.
You cannot write a serious piece about Kentucky as a leader in Thoroughbred racing in the spring of 2026 without addressing the most significant governance failure the sport produced this spring. You cannot quote the KHRG’s institutional partners on the importance of cooperation without noting that the KHRG conducted and then buried an investigation into federal criminal conduct. You cannot describe Churchill Downs as a benchmark without noting that Churchill Downs failed to apply its own stated integrity standard to the riders who crossed its finish line first.
The questions Forbes did not ask: Why did the KHRG take no action despite its own rules providing authority to act? Why did CDI not exercise its claimed independent property authority? What message does racing’s silence send to the betting public whose wagering dollars the industry collects? And what does it mean for the long-term credibility of a sport that has already spent decades fighting the perception that the rules apply differently depending on who you are?
Past The Wire asked all of those questions. We asked them in November 2025, months before this story reached a national audience. We asked them formally and in writing to the KHRG, to HISA, and to CDI. The industry’s answers, non-responses, sealed settlements, and public statements declining further comment are a part of the record now.
On What Leadership Actually Looks Like
Leadership in horse racing is not a $40 million purse structure at Kentucky Downs, however impressive. It is not 69% of Grade 1 race winners bred in the Commonwealth. It is not Keeneland producing $836 million in sales. Those are achievements. They deserve recognition. They do not constitute leadership.
Leadership is what you do when it is hard. It is the decision a regulatory body makes when the evidence points at the sport’s most decorated riders. It is the standard a track operator applies when applying it costs something. It is the question a journalist asks when the answer might inconvenience the sources that gave them the quote.
On that standard, Kentucky racing and Forbes failed this spring.
The breeding farms in the rolling hills of the Bluegrass are beautiful. The racing product has improved. The investment is real. And none of that requires anyone to pretend that a regulatory body conducted an investigation into federal criminal conduct and chose to do nothing, and that nothing has gone unaddressed by anyone with a platform, a microphone, or a Forbes contributor page.
We reported this story in November 2025. We are still covering it. We are asking the questions that Forbes did not. That is what Access Not Advertising means.
Related Coverage: Six Months of Silence | The Ethics Gap | The Psychology of Complicity | Two Sports. Two Standards. One Question.
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