Barry: You are free to hire any trainer or veterinarian you want. You are free to post here that “I’m going to hire any trainer or vet that I think will help my stable, even if everyone thinks those guys are juicers or aren’t clean.” Team Valor is a private entity, it has responsibilities to its investors, so if you wanted to be completely silent about those choices you are free to do so. That is not the course you have taken, however, and as long as you choose to post and give statements to the racing press, what you write and say is fair game. Your explanations about hiring and firing (and rehiring) trainers make no sense.

Here are the reasons you have publicly given for the decisions you have made.

1. The zero tolerance standard. You first explained that you fired Ralph Nicks as a result of Team Valor’s zero tolerance towards drugs. “Team Valor has a zero-tolerance policy with regards to drugs,” Team Valor President Barry Irwin said. “We had no choice other than to do what we did." (Thoroughbred Times, June 20, 2004). So the rule is zero tolerance, right? Apparently not, because a) even if TP’s violation was as a result of contamination (and to be fair to him, that does appear to be a reasonable explanation), it’s still a violation, and zero means zero, and b) you’ve rehired Ralph Nicks, whose case led to the zero tolerance standard in the first place. So much for the zero tolerance standard.

2. The “impure intent” standard. You have now shifted ground and wrote that you are making hiring/firing decisions based on what I’ll call the “impure intent” standard. Here is what you wrote on this board in July about Ralph Nicks:

“The rules state that no injections are allowed on raceday in New York other than Lasix, which must be supervised. He broke the rule by administering the shot. It could have been water and it still would have been illegal. His intent was not pure.” Again, last night, you wrote “I draw the line on cheating based on intent . . . When I canned Ralph Nicks, it was because he knowingly took a shot by breaking the rules.”

Of course, this is a completely different justification than the one you offered at the time (see above – zero tolerance). Further, if you do make these decisions based on your analysis of a person’s intent, and you thought Ralph Nicks had an impure intent, why in the name of Secretariat have you rehired him? Likewise, the "impure intent" standard cannot be used to explain the decisions you have made.

It is not possible to reconcile your statement to the Thoroughbred Times in June 2004 with most of what have written on this board on the subject of hiring and firing trainers. That statement positioned Team Valor as a standard-bearer in the debate on drugs: WE WILL NOT TOLERATE DRUG VIOLATIONS BY THOSE WE HIRE. Putting the best face on it, that statement is misleading. I will give you the benefit of the doubt and not attribute any impure intent on your part to deliberately mislead, to cast Team Valor in a more favorable light than subsequent events suggest it deserves.