Sellers vindicated

The first person I thought of when I read about jockeys boycotting races at Penn National that include entries from the Michael Gill stable was Shane Sellers.

Sellers led a "walkout" (don't call it a strike!) of the Churchill Downs riding colony in November 2004 to protest what Jockeys' Guild leadership called unfair treatment of riders with the argument mainly centering around tracks not providing enough on-track catastrophic injury insurance.

In the end, the cause was noble enough that nearly all tracks eventually upped their coverage to $500,000 and some are even in the $1-million range (from $100,000).

In the short-term, though, Sellers was vilified. Churchill had him hauled off its grounds in handcuffs and the guy didn't work (as a jockey) for nearly five years. Churchill also banned such leading riders as Robby Albarado, Calvin Borel, and Rafael Bejarano, who stood in solidarity with Sellers and the Guild by not accepting riding assignments.

I applaud the jockeys of Penn National for taking a stand in the interests of human and equine safety, but I can't help but wonder if their treatment would have been different if they were boycotting the track rather than an owner.

Over the past several years there have been a scourge of breakdowns at different tracks for various reasons. Arlington Park (before Polytrack), Del Mar (Polytrack), Fair Grounds (dirt), and Turfway Park (polytrack) have all had statistical anomalies in breakdowns over short periods of time. I wonder how those tracks would treat jockeys who boycotted races there? I don't think it would have gone as well as when the Penn National jockeys boycotted Gill.

The safety of Thoroughbred racing's equine and human participants is of paramount importance, and all of the industry's stakeholders must assure that efforts to make the game as safe as possible are driven with that importance in mind rather than political agendas against other participants.