Jon Stettin
Watch the Hands, Not the Mouth
I’ve used that phrase before. More than once.
I used it writing about Terry Finley and West Point Thoroughbreds. I used a version of it writing about The Jockey Club quietly rewriting its own “About Us” page after we held a graphic of their own words up to the light. I didn’t realize until recently that it wasn’t just a line.
It’s the theme.
It’s been the theme the whole time, running beneath a year of separate stories that were never actually separate.
This week, Thoroughbred Daily News ran an Ask HISA column disclosing that HIWU spent a little over eleven thousand dollars in 2023 advertising the launch of its mobile application across several trade publications. Lisa Lazarus answered the question directly, named the outlets, listed the amounts, and said there was no expectation of favorable coverage in return.
I have no reason to doubt her. And I’m not spending this piece on eleven thousand dollars.
That disclosure didn’t create my concern. It confirmed why I’ve been asking these questions for months. It is the catalyst, not the subject. The subject is the hands.
Long before there was a Paulick Report, Ray Paulick wrote candidly about his fifteen years as editor of BloodHorse. In a 2010 column, he admitted it plainly:
“I plead nolo contendere to charges that I was influenced at times during my 15 years at BloodHorse, succumbing occasionally to brow beating from advertisers, members of the organization’s board of trustees, its parent at the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association, or from a publisher…”
He recalled a line from a BloodHorse trustee he never forgot:
“We can’t tell you what to do or write. All we can do is fire you.”
In a companion column published the same day, he went even further:
“As the editor of a publication owned by the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association and controlled by an old guard board of trustees dominated by Jockey Club members, I had to pick my spots carefully when I felt the industry’s feathers needed ruffling.”
He also laid out the governance. Bill Farish, son of a Jockey Club Vice Chairman and son in law of then Chairman Dinny Phipps, sat on the BloodHorse board. Stuart Janney, Phipps’s cousin, chaired it. Then Ray repeated a question someone posed to him that he believed was worth publishing.
“Why should The Jockey Club buy the BloodHorse when it already controls it?”
Those are not my words. They are Ray Paulick’s.
That was fifteen years ago. The names have changed in places. The architecture has not.
Fast forward to this year’s Rainy Day Mystery.
The Jockey Club released its 2026 Industry Impact Report. Buried within the consolidated statement of income was the case of Super Corredora, a champion filly connected to Terry Finley, a sitting Jockey Club Steward and principal of West Point Thoroughbreds. The promotional campaign ran through America’s Best Racing, an entity funded by The Jockey Club and identified in its own Impact Report. From there the story flowed into BloodHorse, still majority owned by The Jockey Club, timed conveniently ahead of Eclipse Award voting.
Same architecture. Different decade. Different names. Similar questions.
Once you see that, the rest of the year stops looking like a list of unrelated stories and starts looking like chapters of one book.
The Equibase communication failure, where an idea privately understood eventually became public messaging.
The Ortiz brothers cockfighting investigation, which Past The Wire broke and pursued while much of the industry remained silent until PETA and then USA Today made the story impossible to ignore.
The leaked past performances investigation, where The Jockey Club chose to issue a broad public statement rather than answer the specific written questions Past The Wire actually asked.
The Empty Chairs. The declined interviews. The stories acknowledged only after someone larger made them safe.
None of that, standing alone, proves wrongdoing.
Proximity is not corruption. An advertiser is not a bribe. A board seat is not a crime.
But architecture is not built by accident, and it does not remain invisible forever once enough people begin pointing at the same load bearing walls.
Media.
Marketing.
Governance.
Ownership.
Communications.
In horse racing today those are not always isolated functions. They overlap.
And the overlap is the story.
Which brings us back to Ask HISA, briefly. Why does an official weekly HISA question and answer appear through one publication? Was every publication given the same opportunity? Why not publish every question and answer through HISA itself while making them available simultaneously to every publication covering the sport? Those are not accusations. They are transparency questions. The same transparency questions I have asked about the registry.
About Equibase.
About BloodHorse ownership.
About America’s Best Racing.
About who gets the interview.
About who gets the platform.
About who gets heard.
Horse racing says it wants trust.
Trust is not demanded.
It is earned. And it is earned by opening the books on exactly these kinds of overlapping relationships, not by waiting until someone outside the building shines a light on them. For months I have been told I was writing about HISA. Or Paulick. Or BloodHorse. Or The Jockey Club. Or The Breeders’ Cup.
I wasn’t. I was writing about the architecture. Horse racing keeps asking us to watch what it says. I think it’s time we watched what it does.
Watch the hands. They’ve been telling the story the whole time.
Related coverage:
The Rainy Day Mystery: Stewardship or Self-Interest at the Jockey Club? | The Illusion of Independence | The Consequences Paulick Forgot To Mention | The Ethics Gap: Paco Lopez, Cockfighting and the Selective Outrage of Horse Racing | When The Record Changes, The Truth Doesn’t | The Jockey Club Finally Speaks, They Just Didn’t Answer Anything
