Get your reservation for our annual Kentucky Derby seminar now! Details Here
Let me start with a sentence that doesn’t get written often enough in this space: HISA did something right. More than one something, actually. Tuesday’s virtual town hall was a two-hour demonstration that Lisa Lazarus and her organization are at least trying to be accountable in ways the industry’s other power centers — The Jockey Club, the Breeders’ Cup — have flatly refused to be. I know what it looks like when an organization dodges transparency. I’ve been covering it. This wasn’t that.
That said, credit is not a pass. And there are two areas where the answers given Tuesday were not answers so much as carefully constructed shelter. We’ll get to those. But first, the record needs to reflect what went right.
The Question Nobody Else Would Touch
When video of a jockey involved in cockfighting became a topic of conversation in racing circles, the silence from the industry’s governing and licensing bodies was deafening. Racing commissioners said nothing. Track stewards said nothing. The Jockey Club said nothing. The Breeders’ Cup said nothing.
Lisa Lazarus addressed it publicly. The only racing regulator or industry leader to do so. She stated clearly that HISA and its authority does not extend to conduct occurring off a HISA-controlled racetrack, and that HISA therefore had no jurisdiction to investigate the matter. She identified the appropriate bodies who do have that authority: the individual state licensing committees in the states where the rider holds a license, and the individual track authorities.
That is the correct answer. It is also the courageous answer, because it required going on the record about something every other leader in this industry treated as too hot to touch. For that, she deserves credit.
Volume, Transparency, and the Budget
The town hall ran over two hours. It would still be running if every question submitted had been answered. The volume of stakeholder participation alone tells you something about the hunger in this industry for a forum that functions. HISA provided one.
On the budget, $77.2 million gross, $60.6 million net after credits, with 66.5% of the pie going to the anti-doping and medication control program, Lazarus was more forthcoming than required. When pressed on vendor transparency, she committed to disclosing the full vendor list above and below the $10,000 threshold for open-bid contracts. “There is nothing secret, nothing that we’re not happy to be transparent about,” she said. She should be held to that.
Compare that posture to the Breeders’ Cup, whose board declined to appear on camera for Past the Wire TV. Compare it to The Jockey Club, where a steward told us, just ask us, talk to us, bring us solutions, than no showed on our broadcast rather than address the questions and also answers raised. There is a meaningful difference between those responses and what happened Tuesday.
The ‘Big Elephant’: Lasix and the Problem of Who’s in the Room
The May 22 Lasix vote is the most consequential decision HISA’s nine-member board will make in its existence to date. Unless the vote is unanimous to maintain the status quo, the diuretic gets banned from all races, not a gradual rollout, but a ban. Lazarus downplayed the unanimity threshold by noting she can’t remember a board decision that wasn’t 9-0. That may be reassuring or it may be concerning, depending on how you view the deliberative independence of boards that always find consensus.
I wrote about this recently: to understand Lasix from a truly unbiased perspective, you have to look at veterinary studies and science from outside the industry, not within it. The industry has too much at stake economically to be the primary author of the analysis on which a decision of this magnitude rests. Lazarus said the board is being “extremely thoughtful, extremely deliberate.” I hope that’s true. The report, described by David Ingordo as exhaustive, with one research topic alone requiring 74 days of work, is reportedly thorough. Good. It needs to be.
But here’s what the room itself revealed. The panel moderating this town hall consisted of Ron Moquett, an active trainer, and David Ingordo, an active owner and bloodstock agent with deep commercial ties to the industry. Both are knowledgeable. Both appear to genuinely care. I’m not questioning their character. I am questioning the structure.
When your livelihood depends on an industry and you publicly opine on its rules and regulations, separating self-interest from what is genuinely best — for the horse first, the industry second — becomes structurally difficult. The topics that received the most passionate floor time from the panel were Lasix, regulatory veterinarian overreach, and the potential closure of smaller racetracks as breeding grounds for future horsemen.
Those are all legitimate concerns. They are not the highest concerns. Aftercare. Slaughter. Illegal doping infrastructure. The practice of running injured horses through claiming races to transfer liability. These topics did not lead the room. That tells you something, not about the individuals, but about the structural limitations of a forum where the loudest voices are necessarily the most invested.
Lisa is in an almost impossible position in this regard. She has to surround herself with people who know the game, and the people who know the game best are the ones most entrenched in it. The challenge for HISA going forward is finding advisors who know racing but whose economic survival doesn’t depend on any particular regulatory outcome.
Where the Answers Fell Short
I go by what you do, not what you say. Two answers from Tuesday fell significantly short of what accountability requires.
The Conflict of Interest Question
HISA’s outside legal counsel, John Roach, acknowledged that HISA operates with outstanding loans from the Breeders’ Cup, The Jockey Club, and the NTRA. His explanation — that no bank would lend to a newly formed organization facing constitutional litigation, and that HISA couldn’t accept track loans because tracks are regulated entities, is factually accurate as far as it goes.
It doesn’t go far enough. The conflict dismissal rested on the claim that HISA doesn’t “directly” regulate The Jockey Club, the Breeders’ Cup, or the NTRA. That language is doing a lot of work. Barbara Banke sits as a steward of The Jockey Club and serves as Chairman of Breeders’ Cup Limited — both lending institutions. Bret Jones, elected as a Jockey Club steward in 2025, has served on the Breeders’ Cup board of directors since 2011. We don’t need a list, there are more.
The people behind these lending organizations participate in racing. They breed horses. They own horses that run at HISA-regulated tracks. HISA’s regulatory decisions directly affect their economic interests. The “not directly regulated” construction may be technically defensible. As an attorney, Roach knows how much weight that phrasing is designed to carry. As a observer, I know what it sounds like when technically accurate language is deployed to avoid a substantive answer.
The remaining loan balance of approximately $4 million is not forgiven debt. It is an active financial relationship between a regulator and the entities whose broader industry interests the regulator affects. That deserves more than “trust us.”
The Paco Lopez Suspension
Louisiana Downs is in active litigation fighting HISA’s regulatory authority. As a consequence, HISA has no jurisdiction there. Paco Lopez accumulated additional riding violations while on a HISA suspension, at Louisiana Downs, where that suspension could not be enforced. HISA subsequently treated that time as served and welcomed him back to the tracks it does regulate.
Technically, you can construct an argument for that outcome. He was suspended. He rode somewhere HISA couldn’t stop him. He returned. The clock had run.
The problem isn’t the technicality. The problem is the message. “Get suspended by HISA, take a Louisiana working vacation” is not regulation, it is a gap in the fence with a welcome mat on the other side. The more credible regulatory response would have been requiring the suspension to be served upon his return to HISA-regulated tracks. That would have sent the appropriate message. What actually happened sent a different one.
A Task Beyond Monumental
When Lisa Lazarus first came on Past The Wire TV, I told her she had undertaken a monumental task. I was wrong. Monumental underestimates it. She took a position leading a federal regulatory body for an industry whose culture of self-governance runs deep, whose cheating infrastructure has historically been years ahead of the detection apparatus, and whose most powerful stakeholders lent her organization the money to get off the ground.
What would genuine, functional regulation of this sport require? Cameras in every stall. Every entrance. On-track pharmacies with nothing administered to any horse that wasn’t dispensed from that pharmacy and fully tracked. No outside veterinary medications permitted on the grounds. A criminal enforcement division with the authority to act when probable cause of a crime exists.
None of those ideas are popular. All of them are necessary if the stated mission is real. HISA is underfunded for what genuine regulation and enforcement of this sport would require. That’s not Lisa Lazarus’s fault. It may not be fixable given the current structure. But it is the context in which every “we’re doing our best” answer has to be evaluated.
The history of racing regulation is this: the ways to cheat are not only ahead of the ways to catch cheaters, they outnumber them. Tuesday’s town hall was a genuine attempt at accountability, better than anything I’ve seen from the sport’s other power centers. It was also, in at least two significant respects, a demonstration of how far the gap remains between the appearance of oversight and the reality of it.
It was my first HISA town hall. I viewed it as a test. Passing tests is not the same as acing the course. But in a sport where most of the principals won’t even show up to the classroom, it’s a start worth acknowledging.
Face to face:
