By Bill Finley
The New York jockey colony refused to ride after Sunday's first race at Aqueduct because of a number of recent problems they have said they were having with NYRA management. The latest incident occurred around the time of the first race when the jockeys learned that NYRA Assistant Clerk of Scales Brian Pochman was told to leave work and go home after he balked at additional duties that NYRA had asked him to do. Pochman was not fired.
“I have never seen such disrespect to a jockey colony and the people who work in the jocks' room,” said Kendrick Carmouche, who is the representative to the Jockey's Guild during the winter months when John Velazquez is typically riding elsewhere.
Asked to explain what had happened from NYRA's perspective, NYRA Senior Vice President, Racing and Operations Andrew Offerman explained that the assistant clerk of scales had recently been asked to record the weights by hand in case a computer system that was being used to log the weights malfunctioned. He said that the new work requirement had been in place for a few weeks, but that Pochman had been on vacation. He believed that Sunday's card was the first time Pochman would have been faced with the additional duties.
“NYRA has been going through the process of drafting standard operating procedures for all of its racing officials,” Offerman said. “Documents have been worked on over the course of time, not only with the input of those officials but with the input of the stewards, as well and other individuals in the racing department. There have been recent modifications that included the written recording of the weights in a program as a backup to the electronic scale system that is used. There was concern [Sunday] on the part of the assistant clerk of scales when it came to taking on this duty. He was asked to take the day off and we put a substitute person in that position. My understanding, at least after I was called down to the room after the first race, was that this was part of a list of things that the riders had brought up, a lot of which, in my opinion, were issues that had nothing to do with today and were previously discussed and settled.”
Carmouche came to Pochman's defense.
“I rode the first race, and everything was fine,” he said. “Then when I came back all the jocks and valets said that they had just sent Brian home because he was not going to do the extra work. He thought it might hurt him in the long run because he had so much to do. They asked him to do more and he wasn't comfortable doing that, so they just told him to go home.
“Today was unfortunate. NYRA hired the clerk of scales and the assistant clerk and they put too much work on each person for them to do their jobs properly. [Pochman] didn't want to do it because he said he felt like it would most likely get him in trouble later because they were making him do so much and he wasn't focusing on what he needed to focus on.”
Carmouche said that there were four incidents that had occurred during the last year that the jockeys had objected to. The most pertinent was NYRA's decision to ban the jockeys' wives, girlfriends and children from the jockeys' room. They were still permitted to meet with family members in a small kitchen area just off of the main room.
“Our sport is a family sport and it is important to us to have our kids and families at the races,” he said. “It's not like a normal job being in an office, where you are not supposed to have your kids there. Even when we were riding our kids were always able to come to the jocks' room. You have situations where the other parent has to work and we can't bring our kids just to sit on the bench so that we can watch them. Nothing went wrong in the past letting our kids come into the jocks' room, but then they decided to stop that.”
The question now is when will the two sides come to an agreement that will allow racing to continue? The next scheduled racing day at NYRA is Thursday. Saturday's card includes six stakes races, including four graded races, among them the GII Cigar Mile H.
Offerman said that NYRA plans to sit down Monday and talk to the jockeys and Guild representatives to try to iron things out.
“That's our full expectation, that we will be able to race on Thursday,” Offerman said.
Among those he will be talking to is Terry Meyocks, the president and CEO of the Jockeys' Guild.
“I am going to reach out to Kendrick and I will reach out to three or four other jocks including Johnny [Velazquez],” Meyocks said. “I'm looking to have a call with them [Monday]. I wish this wouldn't have happened when it did. I talked to Andrew Offerman and I told him that I'm not going to tell a NYRA employee what to do. That's between NYRA and its employees when it comes to what they need to get done and what they expect. But before sending the assistant clerk of scales home, I wish they would waited until [Monday] or had a conversation with us first. The jockeys felt that the assistant clerk of scales and the clerk of scales were doing a good job.”
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