The GI Kentucky Derby has long been billed as the most exciting two minutes in sports. After a series of lawsuits involving America's signature horse race over the last six years, it might be more precise to start referring to it as the most litigated two minutes in sports.
The week between the first two legs of this year's Triple Crown began with the connections of Derby winner Sovereignty (Into Mischief) opting out of the GI Preakness Stakes based on the assessment by trainer Bill Mott and owner/breeder Godolphin that skipping Saturday's race in Baltimore would be in the colt's best interest. Rather than wheel back two weeks after the Derby, Sovereignty will now be pointed for the June 7 GI Belmont Stakes at Saratoga.
After several days of re-ignited public debate about whether the Triple Crown race spacing needs to be adjusted to meet the modern “less is more” template for training top-level Thoroughbreds, the week closed with the news that Sovereignty's jockey, Junior Alvarado, is facing a $62,000 fine and two-day suspension for allegedly violating the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA) rule for using his whip two times above the six-strike limit when winning the Derby.
Delivered via late-day Friday news dump in the form of a ruling posted to the Kentucky Horse Racing and Gaming Corporation (KHRGC) website, chief state steward Barbara Borden, state steward Brooks “Butch” Becraft, and Churchill Downs steward Tyler Picklesimer signed off on the penalties. The rule infraction is HISA-based, but the local stewards are in charge of interpreting and reporting purported violations of it.
Because news had broken earlier in the week that Alvarado had been asked to appear at a Thursday stewards' hearing to discuss his Derby whip use, the ruling wasn't a complete shock.
But what was unexpected was the severity of the penalty. Because of a previous one-strike-over-the-limit whip infraction that Alvarado had incurred within the past 180 days (on Dec. 1, 2024, while, coincidentally, also winning a race for Mott at Churchill), HISA Rule 2283 (c)(1) mandated the doubling of what otherwise would have been a $31,000 financial hit (10% of the winning purse) and a one-day suspension.
The super-sized fine is believed to be the second-largest monetary penalty ever imposed on a United States jockey.
Put another way, that's three strikes over the limit (within five months on two different mounts) and you're out $62,000.
Alvarado is considering an appeal. “As everybody can see, it's unfair the penalties we're facing,” he told Daily Racing Form's Dave Grening Saturday.
So where exactly does Alvarado's $62,000 fine stand compared to recent penalizations of jockeys?
The highest financial penalty handed down to an American jockey is believed to be the $100,000 fine (and five-year suspension) imposed upon the late Roman Chapa by the Texas Racing Commission after a finish-line photograph showed him holding an illegal electrical horse shocking device while winning a stakes race at Sam Houston Race Park in 2015.
On the lower end of the scale–but for an act that most racetrackers would consider far more egregious than hitting a horse eight times in a race–contrast that penalty to the $100 fine that the stewards at Mountaineer Park imposed upon jockey Jose A. Leon in 2023 after multiple licensees testified that Leon dismounted from an unruly horse and intentionally struck it across the face with his whip during morning training.
Alvarado further told Grening that–like most rational people who are averse to long, drawn-out processes involving lawyers, but also want to fight for what they believe in–“I would like to just get it over with and put it behind me. I don't want to carry this one extra day, but at the same time I don't want to give up that easily like they were right.”
Past performances suggest that Alvarado's appeal process is likely to take quite a while to play out.
He can first contest his HISA charges before an internal adjudication panel. A secondary step would be to appeal to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). A third option might be litigation in the court system.
Every year since 2019, there have been lawsuits in the pipeline related to several Kentucky Derby outcomes.
The connections of Maximum Security unsuccessfully tried to sue the Kentucky racing commission that year over an in-race foul disqualification in a case that lingered in the courts until 2020.
The 2021 Derby yielded the medication-related disqualification of Medina Spirit, and trainer Bob Baffert's subsequent banishment by Churchill Downs and his penalization by the Kentucky commission spawned a three-year series of largely fruitless legal actions that lasted until just before the 2024 Derby.
The prediction here is that Alvarado's case will at least make it to the FTC appeal level.
If it does, his odds of success will get a significant boost if the case gets assigned to chief administrative law judge D. Michael Chappell, who has already twice ruled in favor of a single jockey, the New Mexico-based jockey Oscar Ceballos, the only rider so far to have HISA penalties related to a more-than-six-strikes whipping violation wiped off his record.
Ceballos's two cases dating from 2022 and 2024 (11 total strikes in each instance) were different in that he argued (and the administrative law judge agreed) that the over-the-limit hits were used for safety or to control a dangerous situation.
Alvarado, by contrast, indicated in several published interviews last week that some of his striking motions with the whip never even made contact with Sovereignty, and that those actions were meant to encourage the colt without actually hitting him.
HISA's rules explicitly permit that type of action, stating, “A jockey may show or wave the crop to the Covered Horse without physically contacting the Covered Horse.”
Although those circumstances are different from Ceballos's two overturned rulings, the administrative law judge did write in the 2024 reversal that, “The burden of proof is on the Authority to show, by a preponderance of the evidence, that the covered person has violated a rule issued by the Authority.”
According to Alvarado's version of the May 8 hearing that was conducted via Zoom, the three Churchill stewards couldn't–or wouldn't–tell him exactly at which points in the race he hit Sovereignty with the allegedly over-the-limit strikes.
As Grening reported: “Alvarado said that during his meeting with the stewards, he tried to point out the two times where he swung but did not make contact with the horse, but got no response from the three stewards.”
Alvarado told the Form, “They didn't argue that I did, they stayed silent. They made me count the times that I had contact with the horse. When I asked [them] if they could count where they think I had contact, they didn't.”
The HISA whipping rule does give stewards flexibility to determine if “the merits of an individual case warrant consideration of an aggravating or mitigating factor.”
None were listed on Alvarado's ruling, though.
For background, HISA's six-strike rule that went into effect in 2022 was partially modeled after similar regulations approved in Kentucky in 2021.
At the time of the passage of those state rules, Borden was not silent about a revised penalty structure that gave stewards leeway to employ common sense in meting out fines and suspensions.
“There are many times we struggle with the mandatory penalties that are scattered throughout our regulations and don't always give us discretion when we feel like we need it,” Borden said at a meeting of the Kentucky commission's rules committee back on May 3, 2021.
Ironically, Borden expressed that sentiment about the need for discretion exactly four years prior to the date of Alvarado's winning ride on Sovereignty that netted him a mandatory $62,000 HISA fine.
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