The Road to Success

I think the best question I asked Alex Waldrop was, "Could you have come in when you started and tackled horse safety?" The answer was he didn't think so. The NTRA has been around for about 9-10 years, and the feeling I got from many there was that it had been on the brink of irrelevancy for 8 of the years. Not knowing if the next paycheck was coming, not knowing who was with or against them. Why are they now in such a better position? Success The NTRA launched trying to tackle marketing, politics, safety, anything & everything it could, go read the annual reports. Saying it had "growing pains" in some of these areas is an understatement. However, the NTRA was strong in one of those areas: politics. The NTRA made sure that online wagering, the interstate horsewagering act was protected when the Justice Dept came after it. [edited for clumsiness]. That one sentence should be so more. It single handedly kept the entire sport afloat while many others went away. And because of that success you see people slowly lining up to support the NTRA. The smartest person in the room this weekend, wherever she went was Peggy Hendershot. I unfortunately didn't get to speak with her, but she was part of many of the panels that were put on. She is the big engine driving this success. She knows everything, is clear on everything, and has been a leader since joining. I hadn't heard of her prior to this weekend. My bad, and if you haven't heard of her, your bad. The other success story of the NTRA is NTRA Advantage. They are a revenue source for the NTRA, and they are doing a great job growing every year. It's been a slow somewhat rocky story for the NTRA but with support from their lobbying effort and the cash base from NTRA advantage the NTRA is poised to do something having both support and money. Speaking to Alex the next initiative will be horse safety, across a platform of reform. This was hinted at by the great Richard Eng who was at the summit, and I'll let a professional journalist cover this: “It will be transparent, enforceable and foment change,” said Waldrop. “We’re cutting a path to integrity. You need to jump on the train because it’s leaving the station.” This is what prompted my question to Alex that starts off this post. Posing a question to tracks that involves getting on the train would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. There was no chance people were getting on the NTRA train, there was no track, no station, definitely no train. "Wait & see" has been the rallying cry for the NTRA for a long time, and some will have that perspective again, but I ask you to see that the NTRA is doing things, there's no need to wait.