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Apr 8 Backstretch Welfare Programs

THE office with the best view at Churchill Downs will close April 15. Some would say it is the best office, period. No, it isn’t an executive suite whose occupant is leaving. It is, instead, the office of the Lifestyle Program of Churchill Downs. Hard by the gap on the backstretch near a clocker’s stand where trainers gather to kibitz, swap gossip and tell jokes, the view from the front window is a postcard in real life. In the mornings, horses in workouts can be followed around the clubhouse turn down the backstretch; there is the traffic of horses entering and leaving the backside; and behind it all are the twin spires and grandstand. It is the best office, in the opinion of many, for what has been done within its walls. From 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. hotwalkers, grooms, and exercise riders come in for coffee, salted peanuts from a bowl that is seemingly never empty, and talk with Linda Doane, on-track liaison for Lifestyle. The talks – what those in counseling and those with addictions call “check-ins” – are the lifeblood of recovery from drug, alcohol and gambling addictions. Other backstretch workers come in for help with legal problems or immigration issues. The demise of the office is probably two years overdue. Churchill Downs, which initiated the program in 1989, cut funding in half three years ago then eliminated it altogether a year later. The Morton Center, a Louisville rehabilitation program with offices throughout the state, stepped in to fund the program from then until now. Lifestyle’s closing should be kept in context: another backstretch worker assistance program, T.A.C.K. (Thoroughbred Addiction Council of Kentucky), will continue to operate at Churchill Downs and other Kentucky racetracks. It serves not just hotwalkers, grooms, exercise riders and assistant trainers like Lifestyle, but trainers themselves, jockeys, mutuel clerks and others on the racetrack with a need. Given T.A.C.K.’s existence, Lifestyle’s closing isn’t, perhaps, totally catastrophic, but it should serve as a wake-up call to the industry. New York’s Backstretch Employee Service Team (BEST), a marquee program in the racing industry, is addressing what director Cate Dolan describes as a “serious debt.” Other programs, like California’s Winners Foundation, are weathering funding difficulties in tough economic times. Even a financially stable program like Delaware Park’s Backstretch Employee Assistance Program, funded through revenues from slot machines and gate fees, is looking at a significant downturn in revenues. 60 TRAINERMAGAZINE.com ISSUE 12 Two years before Mary (not her real name) stopped drinking, she visited Linda Doane in the Lifestyle office at Churchill Downs. “I told her I was going to Saratoga, and I said, ‘I think I’ve got a problem with drinking.’” She left for New York with the book, “Sober For Life,” provided by Doane. It was the first step towards recovery but not the final one for an otherwise successful racetracker. Mary had climbed the backstretch career ladder, progressing from hotwalker to groom to exercise rider and finally to assistant trainer. “My racing career was booming. I was in the limelight. I met influential people. I was on TV. I had nice horses,” Mary said. She had even led a favorite from the backside at Churchill Downs to the paddock on Derby day. But as her career spiraled in one direction, her life went in the other. A twoyear departure from the racetrack when Mary was in her twenties (she is now 45) was the first step toward alcoholism. Holidays and weekends that would have been occupied by work on the backside created the opportunities to fill time and medicate a broken relationship with alcohol. Social drinking led to drinking alone at home. A return to the racetrack provided a temporary retreat from heavy drinking. “I stopped with the bottles at home but drank with the guys...a lot. “In my mind it was OK to start drinking at 10 in the morning because I had already put in seven hours of work. That’s the way I justified it. I never drank on the job,” she said. The effects of alcohol on her emotions and passion for racing, however, told Mary that things were not as they should be. “I never cheered when a horse I helped Lifestyle Program case study “F These and other programs are squarely in the middle of a situation as old to the business of racing horses as the sport itself: the most expensive animals in the world are cared for by one of America’s most inexpensive and also most challenged workforces. The pay is what the market will bear, but the wage recipient has, by and large, changed, creating difficulties literally foreign to trainers and others. He or she may not speak English, is removed and isolated from a family back in Mexico or Guatemala, and, of course, faces the rigors of a seven-day-a-week job that begins typically at 4a.m. and ends at 11a.m. The grind, the loneliness, the boredom, and – maybe most critical – the early end to the workday and the idle time that follows it is, perhaps, a formula for a disaster. “You look at a national average and the rate of addiction is somewhere around 8-12%,” said Bud Newman, Lifestyle director and counselor. “With backside workers you could probably go up to 20%.” It is the trainer who, almost as much as the worker, suffers the consequences of absenteeism, impairment on the job, the legal difficulties that a worker might experience, and circumstances attendant to these and other problems. In plain terms, the drunk hotwalker who allows the million dollar horse to get loose on the backside won’t have to answer for a permanently lame or dead animal; it will be the trainer. Dr. Curtis Barrett, founder and retired director of the Lifestyle program, recognizes the straits into which worker welfare puts trainers. “There’s no question the trainer is in a vise,” he said. The economic model for trainers is ageold in the industry: owners pay trainers to train horses. Out of that, trainers buy feed and veterinary care, pay assistants and all barn help, and earn their own living. Aside from paying into Workman’s Compensation, medical and social services required by workers is usually someone else’s cost, hence, the advent of programs like Lifestyle, TACK, BEST and, on the West Coast, the Winners Foundation. But who should bear responsibility for maintaining these programs? The answer varies from state to state; from person to person, depending on the role in racing; and even among those on the front lines in providing assistance to workers. Barrett recalled a “deflating moment” after what he thought was a brilliant presentation to the racing committee of the American Horse Council years ago. He had presented costs that could be reduced by employee assistant programs to backstretch workers. “There was this dead silence among these top guys – racetrack managers and executives – and finally one of them stood up and said, ‘Doc, I run a racetrack. I don’t run a social work organization.’” The moment illustrated a root problem, according to Barrett, that plagues all parties involved in racing and the well-being of backstretch workers: “If it’s everybody’s problem, then it’s nobody’s problem.” From his perspective, Barrett believes the problem ultimately falls on the desk of racetrack managers. “Anything that affects what is in that starting gate is the racetrack manager’s problem. “The racetrack manager, as far as I’m concerned, is responsible for making sure that necessary programs exist.” In New York, Cate Dolan has been the beneficiary of exactly what Barrett has not had in Kentucky. The New York Racing Association provides $1.4 million on an train won a Grade One. I had no emotions and no feelings but desperation and insecurity.” The book provided by Doane and some others may have laid a foundation for recovery but was not the solution. At another racetrack after the Saratoga meet Mary found herself going to different liquor stores each day so employees wouldn’t recognize her and realize how much she was drinking. “I’d drive far to get it here one day, farther to get it another day. I was totally humiliated.“ Ironically, Derby, the most frenzied time of the year at Churchill Downs, when the race is almost an excuse for heavy drinking for many, was when Mary’s journey to recovery came full circle. Two years after her encounter with Linda Doane and disclosure that she thought she had a drinking problem she walked into the office and said, “I need help, what do you have?” “I haven’t had a drink since” she says now. Counseling and classes at the Morton Center in Louisville, visits to the Lifestyle office, and calls to Doane from wherever racing has taken Mary in the past two years replaced alcohol. “There was no better feeling when things were getting to me at work than to know I could just walk over to the office and know that someone would be there.” annual basis to her program that provides medical, counseling and other social services – support she called “extraordinary.” She compared it to $70,000 contributed annually from horsemen and trainers. “You look at that and you wonder if the appropriate groups are taking on the responsibility?” The issue and variances from state to state parallel a legal requirement and difficulty faced by Latin American backstretch workers. Currently they are granted only 10-month agricultural visas, necessitating an annual return to their homeland. Like virtually everything else in racing, efforts to re-classify workers as skilled to enable them to stay in the U.S. year-round (which might ultimately minimize the number of illegal immigrants) is a battle fought individually by racing jurisdictions from state to state. Working out the consequences of this issue, like most of the others affecting backside workers, falls on trainers, some of whom stagger 10-month stints among workers to keep adequate barn help on hand. If this issue requires hands-on “human resources” management by trainers, other things like counseling needs are often ignored. The axiom that backstretch employee welfare is “everybody’s and nobody’s problem,” in short, carries over into the trainer’s community. Bud Newman estimates that at Churchill Downs 25% to 30% of trainers would automatically seek out Lifestyle if there was an employee problem, another 20% “didn’t know we existed” and the balance were too overwhelmed by and/or tolerant of drunk or drugged employees to do anything about it. The one constant for programs not just at Churchill but at every track is utilization by smaller barns where each employee is well-known and more critical to operations. Larger stables, typically, have a virtual revolving door of nameless, faceless workers. Compassionate assistant trainers, however, who will reach out to a worker in need in larger outfits aren’t uncommon. The problems do not go away and it can only be hoped that other solutions like Lifestyle don’t either. Eclipse Awardwinning jockey Garrett Gomez, previously addicted to drugs, credits the Winners Foundation for keeping him in the saddle. As well, the foundation provided Al-Anontype support to his wife while he was away in rehab. In New York, former jockey Andrew Lakeman, disabled from a spill, says, in a recently produced video, that BEST’s addiction counseling saved his life. Untold, of course, are the hundreds and thousands of stories of persons – most without resources – whose lives have been altered if not saved by the efforts of backside employee assistance programs. Bud Newman recounted one such story: “We had an assistant trainer who had a lengthy history of chemical abuse who was actually over in Lexington at Keeneland. A veterinarian over there called Ken Boehm [the track chaplain at Churchill Downs]. He called Linda. Linda called a staff counselor at the Morton Center who contacted a rehab facility in Elizabethtown [45 minutes south of Louisville] that had a bed for him. Those people talked to him on the phone and he is there now getting treatment.” The process took less than 24 hours. It is this story and others that account for an offer made by Barrett, who retired from the Lifestyle office several years ago but who has volunteered there and takes on consulting projects. Interviewed a week before news came that the office would close, a clearly passionate Barrett said, “The first five trainers that call me as a result of this article, I will consult with them for free. And I don’t care whether they are in California, Puerto Rico or wherever.” The irony is that the one place a consultation won’t take place is Churchill Downs and what was maybe the best office there.

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Ken Snyder (08 April 2009 - Issue Number: 12)

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