Barry Irwin presents $25,000 to Dr. Dionne Benson of the RMTC, as Team Valor’s
Jeff Lowe displays the unclaimed Stan Bergstein Writing Award trophy.
The New York Times was the first recipient this week of a unique media award made by a familiar player in South African Horseracing.
Barry Irwin, CEO of Team Valor, instituted the Stan Bergstein Writing Award last November after Bergstein died at age 87.
Bergstein was a major player in harness racing for 50 years as an executive, advocate, writer and announcer, and he wrote extensively in recent years on the common ills of Standardbred and Thoroughbred racing in a regular column for Daily Racing Form
Irwin named the $25,000 writing award in Bergstein’s honor to encourage and reward substantive writing on racing’s issues.
With Bergstein’s son, Al, in attendance at the luncheon on Tuesday at the Thoroughbred Club of America in Lexington, Irwin saluted the New York Times piece as a worthy inaugural award winner.
“While I cannot say for certain that we were in any way responsible for a nominated piece being written, our hope is that by bringing them to a wider reading audience, we will encourage this type of writing to flourish anew in the sport of horse racing,” Irwin said. “The New York Times story was the third in a series. I think I am speaking for a large contingent of horse racing folk when I say that the first two pieces in the Times series presented a largely distorted view of racing that disappointed many of us badly. On the other hand, I am certain that a fair minded group of people would feel that the authors hit the nail squarely on the head in their award-winning third piece. They did a thoroughly professional job in presenting the conflicts with vets dispensing drugs to racehorses on a daily basis.”
Executive Director Dr. Dionne Benson accepted the cheque for the Lexington based non-profit organization, which lists supporting and furthering integrity in racing as its primary goal.
Benson noted that Bergstein was an RMTC board member for a number of years and helped bring harness racetracks into the organization.
“The $25,000 will go quite a long way to fulfilling the spirit of the award,” Benson said. “In listening to the speakers today, I felt I didn’t really need to say much because you said it all for us. We are in a challenging time, definitely one in which we have drugs at the forefront. The recent McKinsey report said that drugs can be very damaging to this sport if we continue to allow them to pervade the culture and be the front-page story about racing.”
Benson said the consortium has made recent strides in increasing withdrawal times for therapeutic drugs and will soon issue new rules for the use of corticosteroids.
“I think you’ll see that the goal with our regulations is to cause an overall shift in the way we do business with drugs in our industry,” she said.
