The Week in Review: A Well-Deserved Honor, Ray Kerrison is Inducted into Media Wing of Hall of Fame

[Wandering Eyes]

When it was announced last week that former New York Post racing columnist Ray Kerrison had been selected to the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame's Joe Hirsch Media Roll of Honor, New York horseplayers of a certain age had to be smiling. There have been plenty of gifted and talented men and women who have covered the sport over the years, but there's never been anyone like Ray Kerrison. He was fearless, a tremendous reporter, unafraid of whom he might alienate and was a fierce advocate for the $2 bettor.

“It was never about him,” his son Patrick told me when his father passed in 2022 at the age of 92. “He was extraordinarily humble. He was very protective of the $2 bettor. When he came on the racing scene on Jan. 1, 1977, the other turf writers did not like him and neither did racing personnel, trainers, jockeys. That's because it was very insular and the turf writers acted more like publicity agents as opposed to investigative journalists. What my dad did upset a lot of people. He didn't care. He just wanted to protect the bettors and he wanted everything to be on a level playing field. That's how he was with everything in his life.”

A native of Australia, he was working as the editor for Rupert Murdoch's The National Star in his native country. In late 1976, Murdoch bought the Post and asked Kerrison to come over and spearhead the tabloid's racing coverage.

Though that's not all that long ago, things could not have been more different then when it came to the relationship between New York racing and the city's two raucous tabloids, the Post and the New York Daily News, whose star was the prolific handicapper and writer Russ Harris. Both papers covered the sport extensively, realizing that, especially with the opening of New York City OTB, their readers wanted to know what was going on at the track. Now, there's not a single daily metropolitan paper in New York or elsewhere, that covers the sport. The rare exception might be a wire service story around the time of the GI Kentucky Derby.

While Kerrison excelled in all aspects, his greatest strength was his reporting skills. He broke stories on some of the biggest scandals in the sport's history and was once nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Had he worked on some other beat and for a high-brow paper like the New York Times or the Washington Post, he certainly would have won a Pulitzer, and maybe more than one.

His biggest scoop was when he helped to uncover the Lebon-Cinzano betting scandal.

In May of 1977, Dr. Mark Gerard, a New York-based vet, purchased two horses in Uruguay. One, Cinzano, was a champion.  The second, Lebon, was a perpetual also-ran. Because the two horses looked alike, Gerard figured there would be no problem switching their identities. Racing under the name of Lebon, Cinzano made his debut in September of 1977 in a $10,000 claimer. He ran up the track, most likely because Gerard did something to ensure that the horse would run poorly and knew that would drive his odds up for his next race.

Lebon/Cinzano's next start was on Sept. 22 at Belmont. The horse won easily, paying $116 to win. Reportedly, Gerard's winning bets amounted to $77,920. He might have gotten away with it if not for that fact that a Uruguayan racing journalist saw the picture of “Lebon” and told U.S. authorities that he was positive that the horse in the winner's circle was not Lebon, but likely Cinzano. But it was Kerrison who picked up on the story in the U.S. and put the final nails in Gerard's coffin.

Kerrison also wrote repeatedly about what was another black eye for New York racing during his time at his keyboard. Oscar Barrera was doing things that had never been done before in racing and seemed to be able to do the impossible. He would claim a horse on a Saturday for $10,000, run it back the next Thursday for $25,000 and it would win for fun. Like everyone else watching New York racing at the time, Kerrison knew that Barrera's success was too good to be true.

When it came to Barrera, Kerrison often used the term “Miracle Man.” His sense of irony and disgust was evident and he likely knew that Barrera's feats had nothing to do with miracles, but to do with whatever drugs he was pumping into his horses. Kerrison believed that Barrera was using milkshakes, alkalinizing agents that kept horses from getting fatigued. But he saved his fiercest criticism for what was then known as the New York Racing and Wagering Board, which, he felt, did not do nearly enough to try to catch Barrera and bring a stop to the mockery he was making of New York racing.

In 1988, Barrera was finally caught, though for a drug that probably wasn't potent enough to explain his “miracles.” But after he got a 1988 suspension for prednisone, Barrera went on an 0-for-138 streak. Kerrison wrote that the stable's performance had gone from “red hot to ice water” overnight.

Kerrison and fellow racing writer John Piesen, another racing scribe who worked for the Post, helped break the story of the biggest race-fixing scam in New York history. “Racing's Darkest Hour” was the Post's headline. Kerrison's reporting played a key role in uncovering the scandal that led to charges being brought against jockey Con Errico, mobster Anthony Ciulla, and more than 20 others for fixing races during the mid-seventies.

In the late eighties, Kerrison largely stepped away from the racing beat and took on a new job as a news side columnist for the Post. He did, however, continue to cover the Triple Crown and Breeders' Cup races and write about major racing stories until he retired from the paper in 1993.

There will never again be another Ray Kerrison. Newspapers have abandoned racing and all that is left is a handful of trade publications, most of them trying to get by with small budgets and small staffs, staffs that don't include investigative reporters

The sport, and especially the $2 bettor, was lucky to have had Ray Kerrision.

Why I Voted for Flavien Prat

This year's race for the Eclipse Award-winning jockey may be the most competitive ever. Flavien Prat and Irad Ortiz, Jr. have both had spectacular years, and neither deserves to lose.

To show just how close the race is, through Dec. 20, Ortiz's mounts have earned $39,982,010, while Prat is just behind him at $39,378,081. It seems that voters look first at money earned before casting their votes for champion jockey, so Ortiz may have a slight edge.

Flavien Prat | Sarah Andrew

But take a deeper dive and you can make a pretty solid case that Prat had the better year of the two. He accepted 374 fewer mounts than Ortiz did, the major reason why his average earnings per mount figure is much better than that of his rival. Prat has made $32,356 per start, much better than Ortiz's figure of $25,130. Prat has also won 45 graded stakes to 36 for Ortiz. Prat has won 12 Grade I stakes, three more than Ortiz.

Prat also deserves extra credit for what he has done at Aqueduct during the fall. Prat set a NYRA record by winning seven races on a single card at Aqueduct Racetrack on Nov. 2, 2025.

Turfway Deserved Better from Graded Stakes Committee

While I am the first to say that there are still way too many graded stakes run in this country and that TOBA has to start making drastic cuts to the list of graded stakes, there's at least one instance where the Graded Stakes Committee has not done enough to reward a surging racetrack in the surging state of Kentucky.

Sunday's card at Turfway, featured four ungraded stakes that were wiped out eight days earlier due to weather issues. The four–the My Charmer Stakes, the Holiday Inaugural Stakes, the Prairie Bayou Stakes and the Holiday Cheer Stakes–were worth a combined $1 million and attracted a total of 51 horses, many of them top-quality campaigners. These races were easily Grade III events, if not Grade II, and the American Graded Stakes Committee needs to rectify that mistake the next chance it gets.

The post The Week in Review: A Well-Deserved Honor, Ray Kerrison is Inducted into Media Wing of Hall of Fame appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

View the full article