The More They Win, the Less Stable It Gets

The more races owner Mike Gill and trainer Mark Shuman win, the more closely people are watching them. But not in a way any horseman would welcome.

This winter and spring, as Gill and Shuman churn out wins at Gulfstream Park at a record pace, Florida racing authorities are subjecting them to severe scrutiny. And now a track in Delaware where they have dominated in recent years has banned the owner from its grounds and his horses from racing there when its meet opens later this month.

Without stating a reason for their decision, officials from Delaware Park late last month wrote a letter to Gill, notifying him of the ban and citing two state rules of racing that allow management to exclude individuals and entries at its discretion.

While no one will come out and say it publicly, the off-the-record implications are that Gill and Shuman have cheated their way to the top by staying one step ahead of the chemists who test racehorses for illegal drugs and other banned substances.

Gill, owner of a lucrative New England mortgage company, is the runaway national leader with 134 wins this year. He and Shuman have angered some owners by buying horses out of claiming races almost daily and running them back with astounding success.

Gill had expected racing officials to prohibit him from stabling his horses at Delaware Park -- a somewhat routine slap on the wrist track operators use to discipline horsemen they’re not happy with -- and had already been planning to buy a farm in nearby Pennsylvania and van his stock in from there.

But being banned entirely took him by surprise, and he responded last week by suing both Delaware Park and Gulfstream in U.S. District Court in New Hampshire, attacking what he says is a conspiracy to blackball him from racing.

The Times could not reach Gill for comment this week, but he was quoted by Thoroughbred Times saying racing officials at the tracks were “trying to drive me out of the business” and “trying to make me look like I cheated.”

Gill’s suit against Delaware Park seeks to thwart the track’s ban on him. The suit against Gulfstream is over what the owner says was the track’s improper handing of an investigation it launched after one of Gill and Shuman’s horses fatally broke down during a race there earlier this year.

Although Gill and Shuman have run afoul of state racing authorities in the past, they are currently in good standing even though two of their veterinarians were banned as the result of separate incidents this season at Gulfstream.

Florida authorities said Philip Aleong, one of the vets, amputated and took the leg of a horse shortly after it broke down during a race and was euthanized. After getting the leg back, state chemists tested it for illegal drugs but found none. Another veterinarian, Leonard Patrick, was sanctioned after a search allegedly showed he had violated Drug Enforcement Administration rules for storing drugs.

Gill is not popular in many racing circles, but even those who question his success wonder whether Delaware Park may have gone too far with its ban. Gill, 47, and Shuman, 32, insist that they are good for racing; they control hundreds of horses and enter several of them almost every day, filling races that otherwise would be unattractive to bettors because of short fields.

“It is not easy to root for Michael Gill,” Steven Crist wrote in the Daily Racing Form earlier this month. “... [But] he is ... a citizen of a country where people supposedly cannot be denied their livelihood if they play by the rules. In the absence of any evidence that he is currently engaged in wrongdoing, it is a lot easier to root for Gill than for the racetracks that are trying to drive him out of the business.”

The record for most wins at a Gulfstream meet -- set by Hall of Fame trainer Bill Mott when he saddled 39 winners in 1996 -- was broken by Shuman in February, less than halfway through a schedule that ends April 24. Through Wednesday, he had 84 wins, more than double the old record and more than the next three trainers -- one of them Mott -- combined.

Shuman, who cares for 90 horses at Gulfstream Park and the track’s Palm Meadows training center, declined an interview request this month at his office at Gulfstream.

“Enough’s been written that I don’t like,” he said. “I’d need to sign off on any story you did, before it was published. That’s on advice from my attorney.”

While there is plenty of speculation that Gill and Shuman are cheats, there seems to be little hard evidence.

Aleong, who removed a leg from Casual Conflict, a 9-year-old gelding, on Feb. 3, was sanctioned by track officials for acting without authorization. But he clearly has the support of the horse’s owner. Earlier this month, Gill sizzled over the phone as he discussed the leg-removal incident.

“It wasn’t like this was a full amputation,” Gill told The Times last month. “It was a horrible breakdown, and the leg was barely attached. [Aleong] wanted to study why the breakdown happened. My horses get scrutinized more than anybody’s, and I look at it as a systematic attack on our success. They [the Florida division of Pari-Mutuel Wagering, which supervises racing in the state] took the leg and have been looking at it ever since. I’ve heard that they’ve known for four weeks that there was nothing wrong with that leg. Where are they with that information?”

Two days after Gill’s comments, David Roberts, director of pari-mutuel wagering in Florida, said that three drugs were found in the horse’s detached limb. Two of them were related to the euthanasia, and the third was an insignificant amount of phenylbutazone, a legal anti-inflammatory agent that’s commonly used to treat racehorses.

“There were no violations as far as the removal of the leg was concerned,” Roberts said. “But there are ancillary concerns that have come up as a result of this investigation. There could be other violations. I want to point out that this investigation is not about Mr. Gill. It’s an investigation of [Aleong].”

One veterinary practice traced to many of the horses Gill has claimed is a relatively minor throat surgery called a myectomy that can improve breathing and has a short recovery time.

The procedure, which costs Gill about $500, is relatively common; major horses Badge Of Silver and Formal Attire recently had the surgery. However, it is unusual for virtually an entire stable of relatively cheap horses to undergo such treatment.

“When a horse flips his soft palate,” Gill said earlier this month, “there’s a vacuum to the lungs, and that can make a horse bleed. Flipping is fairly common, so that’s something we try to eliminate” with a myectomy.

Gill, who said his mortgage company grosses about $100 million a year, said his investment in his horses is “not about making money.”

“Between buying horses at sales and claiming them, I’ve probably spent $8 million in Florida this winter, and I haven’t come close to making that in purses,” he said. “I just like to win as many races as I can, and my goal is to win the Eclipse Award as leading owner.”

To that end, Gill and Shuman have turned the claiming game upside down at Gulfstream, where the trainer has claimed more than 100 horses this meet, and many others in past stays at Delaware Park.

Trainers at both tracks have complained to management about all the horses they’ve lost via claims.

Delaware Park President William Rickman is named in Gill’s suit against the track, as are Racing Secretary Sam Abbey and trainers Scott Lake and Allen Iwinski.

“Sam Abbey told everyone I was not allowed to claim horses there and he’s not allowed to do that,” Gill told the Thoroughbred Times. “Who is a racing secretary to deny me the right to claim, to deny me stalls, and then help in a blackball campaign?”

Rickman did not return phone calls seeking comment about Gill’s lawsuit.

Gill and Shuman also recently learned that they will be unable to operate as usual at New York’s Belmont Park, though they are not banned from the track.

Mike Lakow, Belmont’s racing secretary, said Gill applied for 30 stalls but was turned down because there isn’t open space. He said renewals had filled the 1,800 stalls at Belmont and 400 at Aqueduct, its sister track.

Lakow said Gill is welcome to run his horses in New York, but because of a long-standing state rule, Gill and Shuman won’t be able to claim horses at Belmont.

The rule, which states that only trainers stabled at Belmont or Aqueduct are eligible to make claims, hamstrings what Gill and Shuman do best -- purchase other owners’ horses and run them back in a spot where they are likely to win.

Gill says he doesn’t cheat, he’s just competitive. “I played basketball as a kid,” he said earlier this month. “I was the guy who’d go diving for loose balls even though we were 20 points behind and there was 20 seconds on the clock. I’m still that way.”

Gill’s mother taught catechism and her son spent four years in a seminary without taking any religious vows. He grew near Rockingham Park in Salem, N.H., and struggled with other businesses before launching his mortgage company.

Gill has been in and out of racing since the mid-1980s. In 1995, he received a three-year suspension as a trainer in New Hampshire after one of his horses tested positive for clenbuterol, a powerful bronchodilator that is now legal in small quantities in some states. California legalized clenbuterol for racing purposes last year.

“I was a trainer for one day, with my first horse, and I get a positive?” Gill said, hinting at a conspiracy theory. “Come on. They [state chemists] could find an illegal drip in an Olympic-sized pool if they set their minds to it.”

Gill hired Shuman to train his horses in Maryland in 2000. Shuman, even though he had only a handful of horses to his name, said no at first, but Howie Tesher, his former mentor, suggested that he reconsider.

“Mark’s a smart guy about horses, he’s low key and he’s got no complications in his life,” Gill said. “He’s exactly the kind of guy I need.”

In 2000, racing mostly on the Maryland-Delaware circuit, the Gill stable won 205 races, finishing third in the country. In 2001, Gill won 133 races, the fifth highest total nationally, and last year his horses not only won 228 races, but their purses totaled $5.6 million, which put him fourth on the money list.

One of Gill’s rare stakes wins came at Gulfstream this season when Native Heir, a $50,000 claim by Shuman, won the $100,000 Deputy Minister Handicap. Native Heir tied the track record for 6 1/2 furlongs with a time of 1:15.

Shuman’s phenomenal success at Gulfstream this season has reminded some Floridians of 1996, Mott’s 39-win year but also a season when Frank Passero saddled winners in 14 consecutive races, breaking the North American record by five wins.

Passero claimed that he had been targeted by racing investigators during the streak, and eventually the Gulfstream stewards charged him with running horses that his stable hands had treated with a hot substance derived from cayenne pepper. Several months later, all charges against Passero were dropped when an administrative law judge ruled that the confession of a Spanish-speaking groom was inadmissible.

“There are two records that will never be broken,” Passero said. “Mine and Mark Shuman’s this season. They’ve gone after Shuman just like they went after me. They took all the fun out of that streak when they hounded me. You’d have thought they were looking for O.J.’s glove or something.

“Shuman’s good for the game, and so is Gill. Look at all the money Gill’s spent on horses. The game needs guys like him.”