Ivan Axelrod – Biography

Ivan Axelrod is chairman of the board of the USTA as well as chairman of District 3 and a USTA director since 1988.

From his early entry into harness racing with the purchase of his first horse in 1981, he has expanded his interest and commitment to the sport over these 30-plus years with a Standardbred breeding operation in Ojai, Calif., as a director of the California Harness Horsemen’s Association and a short stint with the operations management team at the Cal Expo Fairgrounds in Sacramento.

The horse farm in Ojai was known as Mariah Ridge Farm and many of the horses born at the farm carry the name Mariah. From Rowdy Mariah to Mariah Storm, many of these Cal-bred horses were well known around the California circuit.

Outside of harness racing, he is the chief operating officer of Provident Financial Management, a business specializing in managing the financial affairs of high-net worth individuals and members of the entertainment and sports industries.

He is a graduate of California State University at Northridge, with a B.S. degree in accounting. He currently serves as a director of the CSUN Foundation.

He and his wife, Nikki, reside in Tarzana, Calif. They have two daughters, Kimberly and Marrisa, as well as two grandchildren, Madelyn and Joseph.

Ivan Axelrod – Candidate’s Platform

From the time I was elected your USTA Chairman almost 10 years ago, my role in our Organization has expanded to be more than just the Chairman of each annual meeting.

As a member of the Executive Committee, enabling me to become part of the process to develop programs before bringing them to the Directors as a group to further discuss, take action and implement, to my role as the Chairman of the Finance committee where I work closely with the Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer in dealing with the management of our Organization’s finances, budgeting process and the setting of priorities to protect our assets while working to develop programs of importance to the USTA and its members, I have become an integral part of the organization’s management group.
I have gained the trust of our Directors over these years and have always weighed my decisions based on what would be best for the Organization’s members and not any particular group.

If elected for an additional term as your Chairman, I am prepared to continue the work required to strengthen our industry. I have listed below some of the priorities for this coming year.

1. As we will have a new President and Vice Chairman, my highest priority in the first several months will be to work with the new leadership team to bring them up to date on the various issues we have been addressing at the USTA and to assist in setting priorities during the first months of the new term.

2. I have learned to recognize the differences in each of our member’s priorities; horsemen groups, race track management, breeders and owners and will continue in my efforts every day to bring them closer together on key issues when I can and be respective of their individual priorities. I respect them and continually look for opportunities where we are aligned on various issues and work through solutions that will benefit the industry as a whole.

3. The USTA role in most situations is to support our members when their efforts in different racing jurisdictions can benefit from our involvement and where they will be providing a significant amount of the funding. The USTA’s primary role is to support our membership and provide services to our membership. I will continue to provide ideas and assist in expanding services to our membership. However, many of our members want the USTA to take on many different roles and responsibilities for the industry. This is just not possible all the time as major funding is required for many of the projects that our industry would like us to address. At times we do take on an expanded role for the industry; however, this takes significant funding as with the recent Social Media Campaign, and in this program we were not able to obtain the funding necessary to effectively reach our goals.

4. I have previously set up summits where we gathered many of our key industry leaders to discuss specific issues our industry faces in an attempt to pull together these groups for the good of the industry. We have worked on topics including race days and overlap, creating more racing opportunities for young horses enabling owners to recoup some of the costs of raising and staking their horses, marketing programs that would combine the successes achieved by certain race tracks and mirroring those at other venues. While the two significant summits held to date did not result in major changes to our business operations, they did show that our groups are clearly interested in trying to find common ground that would benefit our industry as a whole. I also headed a committee to develop a more specific mission statement for our industry having to do with marketing and television advertising. This group has been used to evaluate requests for financial support from the USTA for broadcast of major race events. I will continue with this type of work as your Chairman and look for opportunities that will benefit the industry as a whole.

5. As a final point, we continue to be at a crossroads where we have some of our members solidly entrenched with outstanding racing programs and substantial purse money. Those are some of our “slot” tracks and their purses are generated primarily from slot revenues. This has given these racing venues opportunities not available to the non-slot tracks where their purses come exclusively from handle. The slot tracks must remain strong as they will continue to be looked at by the various legislators seeking ways to recoup some of the funding that was earned by and negotiated in good faith by our industry. I will work with our President and Executive Committee and Executive Vice President to have the USTA continue its support both with personnel and well as financial support when these issues arise in the various racing jurisdictions and provide support for them in maintaining what we have worked so hard to obtain.