On Friday, the Maryland Racing Commission stewards who oversaw the Preakness Stakes at Laurel Park issued their finding on Paco Lopez’s winning ride aboard Napoleon Solo: no violation of HISA’s riding crop rules. No action warranted.
Past The Wire has reviewed the same broadcast footage those stewards reviewed. We watched the replay multiple times. From the three-sixteenths pole to the wire, Lopez raised his wrist above his helmet before striking the horse on three separate occasions. The images are not ambiguous. The rule is not ambiguous.
The stewards apparently saw something different.
What The Stewards Said
Administrative steward Adam Campola spoke to both Horse Racing Nation and The Racing Biz on Friday, offering the same explanation to each. Lopez, Campola said, has an unorthodox style, he stays busy on a horse, moves around quite a bit. The stewards did not feel that he violated the rule. Campola confirmed Lopez struck Napoleon Solo four times in the stretch, comfortably below the six-strike limit.
The number of strikes was never the question. The question was the position of Lopez’s wrist relative to his helmet before each strike. HISA Rule 2280(c)(1) is explicit: a rider may not raise the crop with the rider’s wrist above the rider’s helmet when using the crop. It is a single bright-line standard with no qualifications, no thresholds, and no exceptions for riding style. “Unorthodox style” is not written into the rule because it has no bearing on the rule. The wrist is either above the helmet or it is not.
HISA, which had announced an investigation earlier in the week following TDN’s reporting on the matter, deferred entirely to the stewards. A HISA spokesperson said the authority found “no basis on which to assert before an appeals panel that it is ‘clearly erroneous’ or ‘not supported by the evidence.'” HISA said it would not comment further.
That is the entirety of the public record on this ruling. No written finding was published. No frame-by-frame analysis was released. No explanation was offered for how the stills circulated publicly, reviewed independently by multiple journalists including Past The Wire were evaluated and dismissed. The stewards said they didn’t see a violation. The record of how they reached that conclusion is not publicly available.
What Past The Wire Saw
This publication does not rely on PETA’s characterization of what the footage shows. We watched it ourselves.
From the three-sixteenths pole to the wire, Paco Lopez raised his wrist above his helmet before striking Napoleon Solo on three separate occasions. That is what the replay shows. That is what the stills show. That is what any person watching the head-on or even pan footage can observe with their own eyes.
The stewards’ finding does not change what the footage shows. It changes only what the official record says happened.
The Escalation
PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo responded to the ruling with a statement that, whatever one thinks of the organization’s broader agenda, captures the central problem accurately: the stewards are asking the public to disbelieve what multiple videos and stills appear to document.
PETA is now calling for an inquiry by the Maryland Racing Commission into the stewards’ ruling itself. That is an appropriate escalation given what the footage shows. Whether the MRC acts on it will be its own answer. I know which way I’d bet on that one.
The question is not whether PETA’s remedy demands forfeiture, banishment, are proportionate or appropriate. Reasonable people can disagree about that. The question is whether the footage documents a violation of a rule that exists in plain language, and whether the stewards’ finding that it does not is defensible on the evidence.
Past The Wire does not believe it is.
The Context That Doesn’t Go Away
This ruling lands inside a documented pattern that this publication has been reporting for months.
Lopez received a six-month suspension in September 2025, HISA’s most significant whip violation penalty and effectively never served it, riding through the suspension period in Louisiana while HISA counted those months as time served due to ongoing federal litigation. Past The Wire raised this issue publicly, submitted it formally at the HISA April 21 Town Hall, and received the same answer twice: litigation prevented action, months counted as served. Our follow-up why not count from Lopez’s return to HISA tracks, received no public answer.
Churchill Downs Inc., which owns Fair Grounds where Lopez rode during the suspension, never exercised its independent property authority to honor the suspension, the same authority CDI invoked for years to exclude a Hall of Fame trainer. That choice also has never been explained.
Lopez returned to HISA tracks April 1. He won the Preakness on May 16. Three video stills document what appear to be violations of the exact rule he was suspended for violating. The stewards reviewed the footage and found no violation. HISA accepted that finding without appeal.
HISA CEO Lisa Lazarus wrote to Lopez’s counsel in a May 2025 email, documented in the HISA ruling: “Raising the crop with his wrist above the helmet is unacceptable.” She added that her goal was “not to penalize him, but instead to encourage him to comply with the rules.”
The encouragement did not appear to take. The penalty did not appear to deter. And now the stewards have determined without explanation, without a published finding, and contrary to what the footage appears to show that there was nothing to penalize at all.
The Maryland Racing Commission has an inquiry request in front of it. Past The Wire will report on what it does with it. Again, I know which way I’ll go on any prediction markets.
Related coverage: Lopez Wins Preakness — And Appears To Have Done It Breaking The Same Rule That Got Him Suspended | The Ethics Gap: Paco Lopez, Cockfighting and the Selective Outrage of Horse Racing | A Seat at the HISA Table — And Questions That Deserve Answers
It is what it is:
