Podcast - How the NTRA Is Building Trust and Growing the Equine Industry

Kayla Pragid: Welcome to today's episode of "The Tack Room," where we will explore the world of horse racing. I'm your host, Kayla Pragid, chair of Holland & Knight's Equine Industry Team. And I am so thrilled to have with us today attorney William, or Bill, Shepherd, who's a distinguished attorney here at Holland & Knight here in our West Palm Beach, Florida, office, as well as distinguished guest Thomas Rooney, or Tom Rooney, who will help us unpack the complex nature and landscape of horse racing. Our guest, Tom Rooney, is president and CEO of the National Thoroughbred Racing Association, where he brings a unique blend of political acumen, legal expertise and a genuine passion for horse racing to one of the sport's most influential leadership positions in the country. Before taking the reins at the National Thoroughbred Racing Association, Mr. Rooney served five terms as a U.S. congressman for Florida from 2009 to 2019, where he was known for his work on the Agriculture Committee and his advocacy for military veterans. Mr. Rooney was a legal instructor at the United States Military's Academy at West Point and a former Army attorney. Mr. Rooney also worked as a prosecutor for the state of Florida. His family's deep roots in professional sports as part of the Rooney family that owns the Pittsburgh Steelers, combined with his own background as a horse owner and racing enthusiast, gives him an insider's understanding of both the business and the passion that drives thoroughbred racing. Since assuming leadership of the National Thoroughbred Racing Association, Mr. Rooney has focused on modernizing the sport, enhancing integrity and safety standards, and expanding racing's appeal to new generations of fans. I cannot be more thrilled to introduce you both to Bill Shepherd and Tom Rooney for today's episode. And Bill, I will turn it over to you.

William Shepherd: Thanks, Kayla. Thanks for having us here, and Tom, welcome to "The Tack Room." Thanks for joining us.

Thomas Rooney: Thank you for having me.

William Shepherd: All right, Congressman Rooney, you've made a big shift from politics to professional sports, but it's not been that much of a shift for you in some ways because you've been a horseman and a lover of things equestrian for most of your life. Tell us a little bit about how you got into equestrian sports and ultimately into horse racing.

Thomas Rooney: Well, it's been in our family's history for generations. My grandfather, who's well known as being the founder of the Pittsburgh Steelers, really was infamous or famous prior to that as a professional boxer and baseball player, but also probably one of the best handicappers of horse racing in the country. With that winnings, it's famously known that he started the Steelers, which have had several names before that in club football. But back before TV, professional football was kind of behind college football and getting funding to pay the team and things like that. He bought several racetracks around the country and kind of supplemented the payroll of the football players with his winnings at the track. So, our history with football also is very intertwined with racing. My earliest memories are walking around the stable area with my dad and my grandfather at some of his various tracks and hanging out with jockeys and jock room, and just being part of that whole backstretch life was really, really cool for a young kid and somebody's looking up to their dad and their grandfather, it was pretty neat.

William Shepherd: Not only have you come a long way since then, but so has horse racing. Really, one of the things that I think has helped horse racing around the country is the organization that you now lead. Tell us a little bit about the NTRA and what its mission is, who the members are, what are the big issues you guys are facing right now?

Thomas Rooney: The NTRA is pretty much the largest advocacy group, a trade association, if you will, for most of the major and minor racetracks across the country. We represent the Breeders' Cup, the Jockey Club, the Triple Crown. Basically, the who's who of our sport is my board. And our job is to advance legislative advocacy in Washington. It's also to promote and foster safety through certain initiatives and programs. We obviously engage in a lot of fan engagement. We run a kind of world series of poker-like tournament in Las Vegas every year called the National Handicapping Championship, where the winner gets a million dollars. And we also host kind of our Academy Awards of horse racing every year with the Eclipse Awards. So we're kind of like a league office without being a league office in the sense of the NFL or Major League Baseball, in the sense that we do not have punitive powers, but we advocate to the government, and to the rest of the industry, what's in the best practices and best interests of our sport. And to sort of answer the beginning part of your question, what has changed in our sport over the years has been a real focus on that advocacy and safety and recognizing that just like football with things like concussions, you know, the fans today want to know what they're cheering for is something that is good and something that the people that are the caretakers of that sport are conscious of trying to do the best for the athlete — in this case the horses and the jockeys — and that that will give them sort of license to be able to continue. Our sport has condensed from where it was at the turn of the last century, because we're the only legal gambling venue that you could go to, where you might have several racetracks in any kind of metropolitan area. I think we're condensing to the right number, kind of similar to other sports, to where horse racing is recognized and appreciated like other sports in major cities and to a level where the kind of racetrack safety and horse safety that we can focus on is something that is manageable and recognized by the public.

William Shepherd: Tom, to me, one of the things that I've seen as an outsider in many ways, is a growth of equine sports in general. The growth of rodeo, the concern of safety of those athletes, both the equine athletes and the bull riders, the show jumping. It seems like it all sort of feeds off itself in that there's a greater public interest, not just in show jumping or rodeo or thoroughbred racing, but together they're all growing the equine sports and the equine world. Would you say there's a relationship between those sports, or am I getting that wrong?

Thomas Rooney: I think that the relationship is fostered by the fact that you're absolutely right. There is no doubt that the public perception of what happens when we race a horse or jump a horse, or, you know, in the rodeos that the animals that we are using for entertainment purposes or gambling purposes or what have you are being treated humanely. Maybe 100 years ago or 150 years ago, it was less about the welfare of the animal and more about the prize. That, I think, is something that has changed in our minds as a society and, you know, whether that be through education or exposure or what have you, I think the American public and even the world public — because we're seeing this across the globe — is the concern that we're doing everything that we are supposed to be doing for the welfare of the animal. And I think that that's a good thing. And I think that the more that we publicize and show, like the National Thoroughbred Racing Association does through things like its Safety Runs First campaign, what we're actually doing with things like biometrics in the saddle to make sure that the gait of the horse is consistent with what the computer says it's always been, or whether or not the racetrack is meeting the very basic standards if there was a lot of rain, or if there's something going on with the track, that it's at least at this minimal standard that every other racetrack in the country also has to live up to. There's various metrics that the sport has now put into place so that we are doing a much better job.

And one of the first things that I worked on when I was in this job was the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act, which was a bill proposed by a Republican named Andy Barr in Kentucky and a Democrat named Paul Tonko in New York, which recognized those things, that they should be codified in law so that what happens in Florida is the same thing that happens in Kentucky, the same thing happens in New York, etc., that you're not running into a different state and having a different standard. Because trainers would tell you, like when I first started this job I said, what's the one thing that concerns you about our sport? And they say safety, and the fact that it's fair from venue to venue, that I'm not taking my horses to X state and that state has a couple of trainers that are using questionable methods and my horses just get beat handily. And we've addressed that with this act. It costs money and it's making the sport more expensive and we're working on ways to bring that cost down. There is no denying that with the leadership of Lisa Lazarus who runs the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority, which now oversees the safety apparatus of our sport, that fatalities on our sport consistently have gone down in the couple years that it has been enacted and that our fatalities in national thoroughbred racing is at an absolute all-time low, which is something that we take very seriously and we're very proud of. And so I think other sports, to answer your question, there's no doubt that I think that they all look at the horse and the animal and the athlete the same way as our fans see our horses. So I think it runs true across all spectrums.

William Shepherd: Well, congratulations on those improvements, which make it better for everybody from the fans and from the equine athlete perspective. That's a great thing to accomplish with bipartisan support from people from very different parts of the country with different takes on those sorts of things. So congratulations on that. One of the things that you talked about, I find interesting, is the application of technology. The biometrics in the saddle, measuring different turf conditions, dirt conditions, using technology, having those resources available to tracks around the country. What are some of the other ways that technology or frankly even AI maybe, Tom, are impacting your sport [in] the way we're seeing technology be used by coaches and general managers and other sports across the sports industry?

Thomas Rooney: I mean, there's so many things that people are implementing at the track, including just some things that you'd think would be obvious like, you know, vets now have a lot more leverage and situational awareness before a horse gets put in the starting gate, that if there's anything wrong with that horse it's scratched. You're seeing that a lot more when you watch the races where a horse is getting ready to load in the gate, then all of a sudden he's trotting off the track without his saddle on. And that's because the vet saw something and was scratched. That could be something that they saw earlier. A lot of these racetracks, especially the bigger ones, are implementing these, it's kind of like getting an MRI of your legs before you even leave the paddock area. Where every horse has to walk through this thing and see is there anything going on? But like I said, there's other metrics in the jockey's helmet. There's metrics in the saddle, which basically people just measure like having a baseline gait when the horse is healthy versus what the horse is doing now. So one thing I think that you're going to see in the very near future is the judges in the race or some kind of safety judge, so to speak. If there's something wrong in the gate or they're noticing something before the jockey can pull a horse up electronically, that they can call down to the jockey who will have an earpiece in his ear, much like a quarterback does now in the thing and say, "pull up now," rather than taking three more strides and the horse goes down. That's the kind of thing that, you know, obviously in years past, we would not have been able to accomplish. I think with AI, you might be able to get even better with those type of things as time goes on. And I think the American public, even if you're betting on that horse, say you've got money on that horse to win or whatever, and all of a sudden he looks fine and he just pulls up and it was veterinary concern for the pull-up, I think that the American people and sports fans of our sport would all accept the fact that that is going to be part of the norm in the future. And they would appreciate that. Just like in football, we've taken a strong stand in trying to improve the helmet. You're seeing players with odd-shaped helmets all the time now, and there's also metrics in those helmets to show what's going on. Football was in a really bad place, Bill, a few years ago where people were starting to wonder whether or not they wanted their kids to play in the sport or even participate in being a fan. And I think what the NFL did with showing the public that they're trying to make it better has given the public license to say, OK, well, they're at least trying, so I'm going to watch. And we're in a very similar situation in racing. And so we're trying to show them all the things that we're doing. And I think it's just going to get better.

William Shepherd: Well, and your point about the vet having concern and pulling the horse and people uniformly being supportive of that, I think the trick to people being uniformly supportive is that it happens uniformly around the country, right? And it's in the same manner in every race. One of the things that has really taken off — it's always been part of it, but taken off in years — is sports betting. More and more people are actively engaging in sports through gaming. But we've seen in the news just recently, the issues around college basketball and a number of people that were arrested related to fixing of games. What does your organization do to try and help maintain the integrity of the sport? For those who are following the sport for gaming.

Thomas Rooney: You know, it's always difficult when there's bad actors working for nefarious reasons to try to prove that somebody was acting in a way that was not the natural race. I'm sure, in the history of our sport, like in the movie Casablanca, there's been jockeys that have not run their best race or hold horses up or what have you. And we've seen some pretty stiff penalties over the last couple of years. I've noticed an increase in America and internationally. Our sport really is an international sport where you see a jockey and a certain ride and people are looking at this race and I, quite frankly, am watching this race and I can't see he's doing anything to my eye that's wrong. And then other jockeys that are part of, there's various jockeys groups that will look at that and be like, yeah, that guy stopped riding and other horses caught him at the last second. And that horse, that jockey is suspended and he loses his paycheck for however long. And so they definitely have things in place to monitor those types of things because the ultimate arbiter is the gambler. And people that gamble on horses, especially the ones that really know what they were doing, will see that and be like, that guy stopped riding. So if the racetrack or the state of Florida doesn't do anything about it, then the gambler will lose confidence. And now, if you want to bet on races at another track, you just go on your phone and say, OK, fine, I'm not betting on races at Gulfstream. I'm going to bet up at Saratoga or at the Belmont, or in Maryland, you know, so there's other options and you've got to be conscious of that. And I think that we do a good job at that.

The good thing is, is that the anecdote that you are alluding to with the team sport, I mean, you know, if it's one guy, it's one thing, or if it's one jockey, it is [another] thing. If it's a coordinated effort, that's the stuff that movies are made of with the White Sox and those types of things. But I think that we police that very well, because we are a legalized gambling sport. The purpose of our sport is based around gambling, where those sports, they're not. So we're very conscious to make sure that what the gamblers are seeing and what the handicappers are handicapping, that it's actually happening on the racetrack. But we are a sport that is regulated differently in every state, as far as race dates and whose license and things like that. Now, I talked about the safety being uniform, and that's a new thing. There's actually some legal action against HISA, the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority, because they're basically saying that this is a states' rights issue. And there's also an issue of it being under a government agency and whether or not that that's really oversight by the federal government. Those are the questions before the court. And so far, in most of the lower courts, we've won, but still remains, this should be a state-by-state issue. But the problem with that is the levels of security and scrutiny and that kind of thing at different states is different. And so just like in other things that you remember at law school where if that product — in this case, it's our horses — travel across state lines, that they're inside interstate commerce. These horses go, I'll tell you right now in Florida right by my house at Payson Park in Indiantown, they're training there, they're going to go to New York. Hopefully, if they're good enough, they get to go to the Derby, and then they're going to go to Maryland, and then they're going to go back to New York, and then wherever the Breeders' Cup is this year, which is in Keeneland, so we're all over interstate commerce. So far we've been winning a lot, and I think that you'll see a lot more uniformity in our sport as we move forward, and I think that that's what we need.

William Shepherd: Tom, you mentioned not only the national scope of this, but frankly, the international scope, right? A lot of these horses are flying across the Atlantic, they're flying across the Pacific. Horses from abroad are trying to come into the U.S. What are you seeing on the flow of horses and trainers internationally, and what kind of impact is that having that you guys at the NTRA are keeping track of?

Thomas Rooney: Well, one of the big things that the Triple Crown folks have done is, to get into the Kentucky Derby, you have to amass a certain amount of points in the prep races. Like coming up here, we have the Tampa Derby on March 7^th, you have Louisiana Derby on the 21^st, Arkansas Derby, etc. These are all prep races for the Kentucky Derby. And if you amass a certain amount of points, you get an entry. Well, what the people that run these races have also figured out is that it's also very attractive for horses in Japan. They have prep races for our Kentucky Derby in Japan, the same thing in Europe. So if you've got a top European horse or a horse from Japan, Australia, China, wherever, there is an avenue for you to participate in our top races in the United States. Alternatively, you also see some of our best champion — that's 3-year-olds — some of our best champions that don't go into breeding right away, you'll see them go abroad and sometimes race at Royal Ascot in England, which is their big meet over there. Got a chance to go to that last year, it was quite exciting. And then we have the Arc de Triomphe in France, you have the Melbourne Cup in Australia, I got to go to the Japan Cup a couple years ago. That was incredible, there was tens of thousands of people there. And incidentally this year in the Kentucky Derby you saw, or two years ago you saw a Japanese horse called Forever Young almost be part of a triple dead heat. That horse came back this past year and won the Breeders Cup Classic and is up for some of the biggest honors at the Eclipse Awards. We have a huge Japanese contingent coming to the Eclipse Awards this year, and it's very exciting. Obviously also in the Middle East, you got the Dubai World Cup, you've got the Saudi Cup. By the way, those standards that they race in those venues versus ours, when they come here they know that they have to meet our standards. So you can't train a horse in Japan or Dubai or England or Ireland a certain way and then come here and use the same standards if it conflicts with ours. So in that way there is sort of forced uniformity. But yeah, it's very exciting how global we are. And obviously on my app, when the races are over here in South Florida or in Maryland, they immediately go to South America and you can bet on your app for the races in South America, and then if you want to be up all night long you can start betting in the Far East and down the line, so.

William Shepherd: Yeah, it truly has become, I guess, the way many things in commerce have, much more international. Even though, the Ascot race has always been famous, or the race in Melbourne, or I was just in Sydney. Those races and those racetracks are known worldwide, but now they really are part of a more universal ecosystem of horse racing. Which I guess brings me to another question, which is big business versus small business. What kind of consolidation are you seeing both at the state level and national level, but are there some international players? Are tracks that were once family-owned now going into large corporate operations? If you think about other sports and you think about skiing, for example, there was a couple of big public companies that are buying up all the old ski runs and turning those into one big company. What are you seeing in horse racing, and is there a role for the NTRA to play in that?

Thomas Rooney: I don't know that there's a role for the NTRA to play in ownership of the racetracks, but racetracks really have consolidated, I think, to where you don't have several. I remember when my grandfather used to go down to Maryland, that's where he ended up starting a stud farm there. There was like eight tracks around Baltimore. Now there's two, but it's eventually going to be just Pimlico, where they run the Preakness. And that's probably about right. Now, one trend that you're seeing is a movement in states like Maryland and possibly even Florida coming up. You've already got this in New York with NYRA, which is the New York Racing Association, where essentially those tracks are run by the state. They're public, almost like if you go to Saratoga, it's like a public park, that they have a race meet at. And the state of Maryland has now taken over racing for Pimlico, and Laurel will be closing after it hosts the Preakness, I think for the next two years. And that's a privately owned company but they've sold to the state. You may see the same thing in California. Del Mar is a public track, meaning it's run by, I think, the county down there, but overseen by the state. But then you have the private racetrack at Santa Anita. So it's condensing, but I think that the governments are seeing the interest in the sport and the tradition, wanting to keep it going. So rather than just letting it collapse, sometimes they take it over like in the state of Maryland. But you're right. I mean, there's still some mom-and-pop shops left. I mean, down here in Florida, we have Tampa Downs, which is a family-owned racetrack. It's the only racetrack in Tampa. So it's survived fairly well, even though competing with the casinos there and the Hard Rock, but people that are horse fans, race fans, that's the only game in town over there. So even though it's a mom-and-pop shop, it survives. I think you see that also in Philadelphia with Parks Racetrack, Harrisburg with Penn National. So you can have smaller tracks that survive, as long as they don't really have much competition in the area. But that is the biggest challenge, Bill, is when you have on your phone the ability to bet in your living room and watch the race from the comfort of your La-Z-Boy, why would you go down to the racetrack where it might be cold outside or what have you, even though watching the sport is majestic. It's up to these racetracks to figure out things to do in between races like music or, you know, some kind of promotion. And they do that.

But there is something happening with our sport that I think is very good. When I was at the Derby, if you go to the Kentucky Derby, you see by and large a lot of young people. The same thing at Saratoga. It is a lot of young people. Saratoga's kind of mixed. But then I went to the Monmouth for the Haskell, which is a big race down on the Jersey shore. It was all people under 30, and the same thing at the Pennsylvania Derby in Philadelphia, it was by and large young people. So I think our biggest challenge is to make sure that people have shown that they're interested in our sport. We've got to make sure that they stay interested, not just on a party day, but like that they want to keep involved. And one of our biggest challenges is that with sports betting, you've seen that a lot of, especially the younger generations, like to parlay several entries in like a $20 bet, so, you know, the Miami Heat, the Miami Dolphins, the Philadelphia 76ers, like if these sports were all [on] at the same time, you would be told with your $20 bet, if you parlay all these games into one bet, then you're going to win $500. The problem with horse racing is that we are parimutuel, and our odds keep changing up until the gate opens. And so you can't enter the Kentucky Derby winner into your parlay of like three or four other sports that are going on because the odds keep flickering, whereas those other sports you're getting your fixed odds. So one thing that we've been talking a lot about, and they're doing this in New Jersey already, is having a fixed odds for certain races to start, the big races. Parimutuel to be allowed for the odds to change is something I think that you won't see go away anytime soon, because there's so many exotic bets and those type of things. But just purely a win bet on the Kentucky Derby where a horse in the morning line is 5-1 — when the gate opens, he's going to be 5-1, and he not come down to 2-1 or go up to 8-1 because he looks a little sweaty in the paddock or what have you. So that's [a] very complex situation there, but we have the young people interested in our sport — the majesty of our sport and the excitement — but we have to keep them interested in the gambling side of our sport, because we are a gambling sport. And to do that, they're not necessarily learning how to handicap a horse race, but they will be willing to make a bet on a Derby winner or a Breeders' Cup winner or something like that, we've got to be able to incorporate that into regular sports betting.

William Shepherd: And that's part of the challenge, right? Because you talk about how the crowds are big and, in some cases, bigger than ever, and shifting younger demographic that are at the track for these special events, right. But streaming and the changing way of delivering content, whether it's through the app or through social media, those are ways to engage the younger generation and people who are coming into the sport and keep them active beyond the glory and majesty of the one big race at the track that month. So is that something that you are working on as an association to try and help tracks market and think about, how they can all sort of take advantage of that demographic switch, and frankly, this boom and interest in gambling-related sports?

Thomas Rooney: Absolutely. And I'll tell you, we had the jockey club host this roundtable in Saratoga every year. And one of their speakers was an influencer, which I didn't know what that was. But it's apparently, you know, people that for whatever reason get a boatload of followers on X or Instagram or what have you or —

William Shepherd: Tom, when you were in Congress, you were an influencer. But now it's all changed and influencers, it's a job onto itself.

Thomas Rooney: Hey, we had Facebook pretty much when I was in Congress and that was it, maybe a little Instagram at the end. And that definitely changed what it meant to be a congressman. Instead of being a team player, you were like trying to get likes and the goals were completely different. That's pretty much, when I got out of Congress, cause that was a shift that I didn't really know how to navigate. But in racing and in our sport, probably in politics as well, these younger people know how to manage that and get a lot of followers. And then if you can collaborate with these influencers through racing, we've seen some of these owners of these horses that have given a stake in their horse to influencers just so they can tweet or post on Instagram or do a TikTok video with the horse in the barn after the race. I mean, it's amazing. Some of these younger influencers are now owners of these horses in part. And so they'll post about — we had a famous horse a couple of years ago called Seize the Grey. And part of that horse was owned by some influencers, and that horse became famous inside and outside of racing. So this guy came and talked at the roundtable, and he said that where before you would buy TV spots, ads in the newspaper or ways that you would try to pump up the track, the card, the races, whatever, it's totally different now. Now you get an influencer to collaborate with you on your horse and you put that out through social media. You do things like this, this podcast. And podcasts, social media and maybe one or two other things are taking the place of buying commercials on radio, TV and newspapers by far. And it's a whole heck of a lot cheaper. So you've got to be able to adapt, evolve with that. And there's great platforms out there, like Light Up Racing. They're a group that responds when there's something negative to our sport or there's questions about our sport for the public, especially on social media, to where they answer them in a way that is understandable for everybody to say, OK, I get that now. I didn't know, why do you use a whip with a horse? And what is the whip made of? And things like that. And groups like Light Up Racing, they take to social media and they explain all this stuff. And it's very, very well produced, and I think it's good for the sport.

William Shepherd: Well, we're glad to have you here on The Tack Room to talk with the Holland & Knight equine practice group, but we're not looking for any equity stake in any horses. But we appreciate you being here. Before I let you go, as we think about a couple of last topics, you talked about horse safety, we're talking about horses running hard, we're talking about them competing internationally. Eventually a time comes for a horse's sports life to sunset, right? So people are very interested in the retirement of horses and what happens. What is it like, what kind of care goes on for those folks, the trainers who were involved, are they still involved, or is it a different kind of person that's involved? Talk to us a little bit about retired racehorses and the importance that is in your world.

Thomas Rooney: Yeah, we call it aftercare, and it is different trainers. It's a whole different group of people. I just had a horse: big, beautiful gelding named Steeler Nation. I raced him exclusively in Baltimore just to kind of try to stick it to them.

William Shepherd: How'd you come up with that name, Tom?

Thomas Rooney: Well, unfortunately, he wasn't a very good racehorse. He was beautiful. He was huge. And so I asked my trainer, [and] there's several aftercare groups in the Baltimore area, and so it was not hard to find that horse a new home. They first teach the horse how to just basically be a riding horse, maybe a jumping horse. There are some disciplines. I have a horse here at our place that raised in the Preakness and, you know, his career on the flat track, as we call it, sort of came to an end. He peaked as a 2-year-old and 3-year-old, 4-year-old kind of went down and 5-year-old he wasn't the same horse or he lost interest. I'm thinking of putting him maybe in steeplechase because he just turned 6. That's kind of a good age for him to do that. And I just don't want him to be done having a job. Horses definitely are good when they're in a routine and they have a job. And that job could just be a riding horse for a new rider. It could be a jumper. It could in dressage, polo or it could be, a lot of the mares that I've bred to are behind my house right now, just eating grass for the rest of their life because their careers went from being a racehorse to a broodmare, and now they're just turned out, as we say. But there are several groups, Bill. I mean, you have the Thoroughbred Aftercare Alliance who oversees a lot of this stuff. They apply for grants, they get donations to help other farms. The National Thoroughbred Racing Association is working on the Appropriations Committee to get funding through the VA for retired thoroughbreds to be therapy horses for people that have post-traumatic stress disorder from their service in the military. It's a hugely successful concept. I think, you know, without going into too much of the science, because horses are generally a flight animal, whatever is happening with those people that are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder is a very soothing and calming presence when you have a horse that trusts you and accepts your vulnerabilities and whatever's going on. That's something that we've been working on at the NTRA at the federal level to get those kind of funds. But every state and every jurisdiction has different 501(c)(3)s too. But a lot of it, especially if you have a good trainer like I do, a lot of it has to do with my trainer making the phone call to me saying, Tom, this horse does not want to be a racehorse. He's great, he's beautiful, he is friendly, he loves life, let's find him a new home. And I pay for that horse — room and board and all that kind of stuff — until he gets a new one. They re-home him to learn how to ride a different, maybe Western or what have you. And then they go from there for wherever their forever home is going to be after that. The one positive thing about the constriction of our sport to just regional bigger tracks, kind of like a real league, is that there's a lot less horses out there. I mean, there was some pretty horrible things that happen to horses after they race, I'm sure there still is in extreme isolated situations. But by and large, with computer chips in the horses, people tracking almost every horse that comes on and off the racetrack, it's really hard to make a horse disappear. I'm not saying that in the past that wasn't probably common, but in this day and age, I think from birth to death, a horse is pretty easy to track them and where they are and what they're doing. So, at the NTRA, one of the first things I did, not to go on, but one of first things that I said when I took this job is the National Thoroughbred Racing Association, I just wanted to change it to the National Thoroughbred Association, take the racing part out. Because I really think it's important for the racetracks and the people that are at the top of our sport to manage the horse from birth until natural death. And not just while they were you know, getting bred, racing, and then what happens after that, who knows. Unfortunately, that name was already taken by a group that doesn't even use it. But that is what we do, regardless.

William Shepherd: Yeah, I was just going to say, whether you were successful in changing your name or not, you've certainly been successful. And want to compliment you for perhaps not changing significantly, but changing the perception of how real horsemen like yourself take care of the animals and are concerned about them as athletes and look at it as a responsibility, frankly, not just as a business. But I couldn't let you leave The Tack Room without asking you what's in the future? What do you see going forward? We've talked about some of the dramatic changes that have happened over the last couple of years and the consolidation of the sport, applications of technology, internationalization of some of the competition and the sports betting. But what do you see forward in the next five years and what do you think is the biggest challenge, before you leave The Tack Room today?

Thomas Rooney: I mean, the biggest challenge and the biggest thing I think you're going to see over the next five years is something that I've talked about regarding wagering. And that's making sure that horse racing is the same as football, basketball, baseball, every other sport, and that we're part of that. And making sure that we are not on a separate app from the sports wagering app. And right now we are. One of the major betting platforms out there has a sports betting app and it has a horse racing app. And most of them have that. It's the same wallet, so to speak. You can use the money interchangeably, but you can't gamble on those two sports together. And so that is obviously a huge thing that we need to accomplish. And I think everybody wants to do that. It's just a matter of whether or not the odds are fixed or parimutuel, like they keep changing. The media is obviously a huge thing that we have to continue to stay on the cusp of and make sure that we're doing things the way that most people are seeing them, especially young people, and not the old-fashioned way. I deal with that conundrum a lot. "Well, it's never been done that way." It's like, well, we're moving forward.

And then, you know, so we have all this, but we also have some interesting things coming on. I don't know if it's good or bad. You know, we have things like prediction markets, which I'm sure you've read a lot about, which is essentially a type of gambling on what's going to happen in election, or what's more likely to happen, this or the other. Those gambling-type sites are not regulated by states. There's no cut being taken by a racetrack if somehow a prediction market starts betting on who's going to win the Kentucky Derby. You know, the way that we pay for these horses and the way we pay these venues and the races to be run is that the gambling part of it, there's a cut that goes to the track. Even if you're betting from your living room on an app, part of that wager goes to the track that houses the horses, that has training time for the horses and those type of things. So if there's a gambling apparatus out there which does not give a cut to the track and does not give a cut the horses, then there's no reason to run the horses because we're a gambling sport. And so I think one of the things that you're going to see is either one of two things: an effort to outlaw those prediction markets because they're not regulated, or an effort to somehow make them in line with other wagering outlets to where whatever is being wagered on there, there is a cut going to the state, there is a cut going to the track. And if those things are allowed to move forward, I'm sure there's going to be major lawsuits, but we'll see how it all shakes out in the end. We're just sort of watching that right now, but I know that the American Gaming Association that represents all the casinos is very concerned about it, and rightfully so. It's one of those things that if it's going to go through, you want to be part of it rather than on the wrong side of it and out of business. And so that's going to be something to watch, I think, in the next couple of years.

William Shepherd: Well, Tom Rooney, president and CEO of the National Thoroughbred Racing Association, thanks for joining us here today at Holland & Knight and being a part of The Tack Room. It's great to see you. Thanks for everything you're doing to help racing, and I'll see you at the track, Tom.

Thomas Rooney: Thanks, Bill.

Kayla Pragid: Yeah, thank you. Just want to say a big thank you to both Tom and Bill today on The Tack Room for what I will say is a truly engaging discussion of the developments in the sport and what is to come in horse racing, both in the U.S. [and] internationally. So thank you so much to both of you.