In a great initiative by world famous horse syndicate company, Team Valor International, they honored writer Lucas Marquardt with the third annual Stan Bergstein Writing Award for his story in the Thoroughbred Daily News magazine on the introduction and growing departure of synthetic racetracks in the United States.

At a luncheon at the Thoroughbred Club of America in Lexington, Team Valor founder and CEO Barry Irwin presented Marquardt with the $25,000 winning prize, along with a bronze trophy from sculptor Nina Kaiser. The 5 judges Team Valor entrusted with selecting the winner were NBC Sports’ Tom Hammond, Turf writer and HRTV producer Karen Johnson, former Baltimore Sun Turf writer Tom Keyser, HorseRacingInsider.com Executive Editor John Pricci and Daily Racing Form bloodstock writer John Sparkman. Marquardt’s story received four of their five votes. In “Is This the Death of Synthetic Racing? And If So, Why?,” Marquardt tackles the rise and continued fall of synthetic racetrack surfaces in America, challenging anecdotal conclusions with an array of statistics about the safety of those tracks compared to traditional dirt. “Few would argue that racing has a problem keeping its stars healthy,” Marquardt writes. “Do synthetics help or hurt the cause?” He provides quite a bit of evidence to ponder as the standalone story in the TDN’s seasonal e-magazine, available here. Stories published between November 2, 2013 and November 1, 2014 in North America were eligible for the award, which Irwin created shortly after Bergstein’s death in 2011 to encourage and recognize hard-hitting journalism on the subject of horse racing. The judges chose from 11 finalists. Barry Irwin said “This year the types of stories nominated spanned a wide territory of interest, from drugs to con men, from synthetic tracks to compounding labs, from jockeys plugging in horses to a trainer that just cannot seem to keep his horses on the proper level of drugs, from a scandal that rocked the sport to its very foundations to a story about labs that test medications for racing jurisdictions. The writers are doing their jobs. I am proud to sponsor an endeavor that honors such outstanding and courageous journalists. “In his winning story, Lucas Marquardt pointed out that if horsemen and owns really care about the lives of racehorses, then they may have been misguided in their efforts. Those preferring dirt tracks may have won the battle, but they just as easily might lose the war to win the hearts and minds of a public sick and tired of watching horses die on the track from catastrophic breakdowns, which statistically occur less frequently on all-weather surfaces and more frequently on dirt.” Ned Bonnie, delivered the keynote speech, drawing on his more than 50 years in the Thoroughbred industry, as an equine attorney, owner and breeder and a member of the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission. “We need to show respect for journalists willing to speak truth to power in spite of possible ramifications,” Bonnie said. “These are the journalists who write without fear of failure and communicate to the public because it is the right thing to do. When they see an injustice, a cheater, an abuser, they have to get it off their chests. When they write about it, they can help change it. These are the journalists that Stan Bergstein epitomized and which Barry Irwin supports and which I know are essential to effect positive change in the racing industry. They surely don’t do it for the money. They do it because they can’t help themselves.”