TQHA Sends A Letter Explaining The Accredited Texas Bred Awards From The 2024 Lone Star Meet

ELGIN, TX–FEBRUARY 25, 2025–For those of you due an Accredited Texas Bred Award from the 2024 Lone Star Park Meet please read the following memo from Scott Sherwood, Director of Racing with the Texas Quarter Horse Association.

Scott mentioned that he wants to provide a detailed explanation regarding the delays in the Accredited Texas Bred Awards. He is hopeful that the issue will be resolved soon so that the recipients can receive their awards. If you are expecting an award, please take a moment to read the memo to understand why TQHA is currently unable to calculate and distribute the payments at theis time.

To: Lone Star Park Owner/Breeder/Stallion Owner Award Recipients
From: Scott Sherwood / Director of Racing
Date: February 25, 2025 RE: 2024 Lone Star Park ATB awards status

As everyone knows the 2024 Owner/Breeder/Stallion Owner Accredited Texas Bred (ATB) awards for the 2024 Lone Star Park (LSP) meet have not been paid out yet. We at the TQHA have been getting numerous calls about these awards so I wanted to give you a detailed explanation of why they have not been calculated and paid out yet. I apologize for the length of this memo but to fully explain it all takes some time.

First off everyone should understand the reason these awards have not been calculated and paid out boils down to the alleged MULTIPLE medication violations at Lone Star Park. In other words, the alleged MULTIPLE bad tests you have read about and heard about that occurred during the LSP meet has made it currently impossible for TQHA to calculate these awards and get even close to what they should be.

That is what I am going to explain. But one thing to keep in mind, the Texas Racing Commission, Texas Quarter Horse Association and the Texas Horsemen’s Partnership are not to blame for not getting your purse money or ATB awards on a timely basis.

The TQHA ATB awards are not a percentage of the purse. We calculate these awards by taking the total funds generated via the pari-mutuels (1% of Exotic wagers and a portion of the breakage) and create a total pool of award money. That total pool is then divided up by the percentages of what goes to Owners (40%), Breeders (40%) and Stallion Owners (20%). Those amounts are then further divided up with Winners (50%), Second (30%) and Third (20%). You can look at that number as being the numerator in terms of fractions. The denominator for the fraction would be the number of winners in each category. (Money in Pool / # of winners) For example, for the 2023 LSP meet the Owner award winners share of the ATB pool was $54,086 (numerator) and the number of Owner ATB winners was 98 with two races still on hold so the number of winners the system used to calculate was 100 (denominator). Making an ATB award for winners at the 2023 LSP meet $540.86. One of the key phrases there is “the number of winners the system used to calculate” which I will be explaining later.

The exact same method is also used to calculate the award amounts for the HIEA funds that TQHA dedicates to pay Breeders and Stallion Owners. In that scenario though the total pool is divided up Breeders (70%) and Stallion Owners (30%). Those two pools are then further divided up just like the ATB pool at 50%/30%/20%. Once again the pool in the fraction is the numerator and the number of winners is the denominator (HIEA Funds / # of winners).

Now to explain where the problem with the held races comes into play. We are given information from the Texas Racing Commission (TxRC) about what races to hold. We have no way of knowing what will happen with these races as far as final outcomes until we are given the final outcomes. So if a race(s) is still on hold when we go to process the awards our system has to hold all three places in that/those race(s) to cover the possibility that an accredited Texas bred horse either remains a winner, remains second, remains third or moves into any of those three places or out of any other those three places should there be any disqualifications. So basically each held race means a first, second and third place award is added to the equation (denominator) for all categories.

In the past it has not been too much of an issue. After each meet there are still a couple of races that may still have their rulings pending but that did not affect the calculations too drastically. For the 2024 LSP meet though, the number of pending races would DRAMATICALLY affect each and every award.

TQHA is not privileged to any numbers that the public has not already seen concerning the number of violations at LSP. As most of you have read you are looking at allegedly 23 for one trainer and 25 for another. Those numbers are what was revealed prior to the retesting that is still going on so it could become higher. From a held race report that was given to us by the THP I have counted 70 races that are still on hold. If we would mark those 70 races as pending in our system it would add 70 winners in our ATB system to hold along with the 100 winners I used in the earlier example for 2023 (and your ATB winners pool for 2023) then your denominator would now be 170 meaning each award, again using the earlier example, would drop to $318.15. Costing you $222.71 PER AWARD!!

This number is CONSIDERABLY higher when you calculate the Breeder awards from the HIEA bonus funds. The funds directed to breeders from the HIEA bonus funds for the 2024 LSP meet is $560,000 of which 50% would go to winners or a pool of $280,000. For an example, If you used the number of 2023 LSP first place breeder award winners (73) for an example, you would divide the HIEA bonus money by the number of winners in this made up example and each breeder of a winning ATB horse would get

$3,835. Now again using 70 pending races your denominator in the equation now goes from 73 to 143 meaning the award would drop to $1,958.08 costing each breeder with a win $1,876.92 PER AWARD!! For Stallion Owners using 2023 winner numbers (58) you are looking at (without going through the long exact explanation) an award of $2,068 which would then drop to $937.50 when you added in the held races.

And this is just using the ATB horses that won races. When you factor in the payments for seconds and thirds you can see a lot of ATB award winners would get cheated out of a lot of award money that would be due to them. We don’t feel that anyone that is due an award would want to take this kind of a hit.

This has also cost us the ability to award year end championships for leading breeder, owner, stallion owner, stallion and broodmare because ATB awards earned is what those championships are based on.

We are in constant contact with the TxRC about the current status of this situation and are hopeful we get to a point where we can do the awards with confidence that every winner gets the amount they deserve.

If you have any questions feel free to reach out Scott Sherwood via email at ssherwood@tqha.com or call the office at 512-458-5202 - Ext. 107.

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