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View From The Eighth Pole: HBPA Leader Hell Bent On Creating ‘Chaos And Disorder’
Eric Hamelback, chief executive officer of the National Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association, apparently has been convinced he has to destroy the horse racing industry in order to save it.
Hamelback and the National HBPA, along with a number of state affiliates, have been on a nearly four-year crusade to derail the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act, passed by Congress in 2020 as part of an omnibus spending bill and signed into law by then-President Donald Trump.
They’ve filed multiple lawsuits, shopping for judges they feel would be sympathetic to their anti-federal government impulses and declare the Act unconstitutional. When clean-up language was added to the legislation, accommodating one judge’s concern, they doubled down, appealing their case to various appellate courts. They were shot down in all but one of those courts, an outlier in the federal judiciary in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, which ruled that the amended law still violated the Constitution’s non-delegation clause. That court determined that it was okay for HISA to establish rules, but not okay for HISA to enforce them.
The case, it is widely believed, will be settled by the Supreme Court of the United States, as soon as early next year.
But Hamelback isn’t content to wait. Spurred on by attorneys like Daniel Suhr who likely have no great interest in the long-term health of the Thoroughbred industry but seem laser-focused on dismantling federal programs, Hamelback and the National HBPA have indicated they are planning to go to federal court in Lubbock, Texas, in the Fifth Circuit’s jurisdiction, and seek an injunction that would exempt all HBPA members nationwide from having to follow HISA rules and regulations.
According to a letter from HISA’s CEO, Lisa Lazarus, sent to Alan Foreman, chairman and CEO of the Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association – a rival to the HBPA and an organization that has worked with officials to improve HISA – Hamelback’s move would “plunge our sport into chaos, shatter the even playing field we’ve worked so hard to create, destroy the trust of the wagering community and lead to an increase in equine fatalities.”
The full letter from Lazarus to Foreman is shown below:
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John Roach, outside counsel to HISA, was blunt in his assessment of what could happen if Hamelback and the HBPA are successful in getting an injunction exempting HBPA members from HISA rules.
"It would mean, literally, there would be no rules for any of the HBPA members in terms of racing," Roach said. "They could literally do whatever they wanted to. ... If we can’t stop it, one of Mr. Hamelback's members could go out and race in the Breeders’ Cup and race on anabolic steroids and nothing could be done. Obviously we’re going to do everything we can to stop this from happening."
The horse racing industry is in a fragile state, its members walking on eggshells over the last five years, starting with the widely publicized spike in fatal injuries at Santa Anita during the winter of 2019. The following year, on the eve of the COVID crisis, we saw veterinarians and leading trainers in both Thoroughbred and Standardbred racing handcuffed and eventually sent to federal prison for doping racehorses. That confirmed a narrative held by many in the general public that horse racing is a cruel and unethical sport. The status quo, a patchwork of state regulatory agencies, clearly wasn't able to effectively stop the cheating and protect the horses.
The creation of HISA has been a strong and important response to that crisis. The biggest start-up entity in the history of the sport has not been without missteps and errors, but its programs are already having a positive impact, especially on safety.
Anyone who argues horse racing will be better off going backwards to the previous ineffective state-by-state structure is misguided and uninformed. Racing needs national regulatory oversight.
Hamelback, seemingly oblivious to the crisis HISA began to address when it was officially launched in 2022, has stomped on those eggshells. Hell bent on destroying HISA and the progress that's been made, he and his attorneys are about to launch what Lazarus called a "strategy of chaos and disorder that threatens to dismantle uniform regulations, create unfair competition, hurt the economics of the industry, and increase equine fatalities."
If Hamelback and the National HBPA win, we all lose. Horsemen deserve better.
That's my view from the eighth pole.
