The horsemen of the Iroquois Steeplechase and the women of its longtime partner, Vanderbilt's Friends of Children's Hospital, are riding off in different directions.

The Friends have split up with the Volunteer State Horsemen’s Foundation, which runs the Steeplechase, amid differences over what role the Friends should play in overseeing the annual high-society horse race.

The end of the relationship means that in 2010, for the first time in 30 years, no co-chairmen or other volunteers from the Friends will organize the social events connected with the race, which has generated more than $9 million in funding for the Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt.

In an e-mail sent Wednesday afternoon to board members of the Friends organization and obtained by NashvillePost.com, Friends' Immediate Past President Shannon Finucane said that ten months of discussions about setting up "a formal agreement that would allow all parties involved to have representation on a decision-making body to oversee the Steeplechase race," had yielded no agreement between the Friends and the Horsemen’s Foundation.

Finucane said all parties agreed that the Friends would no longer have "an official relationship with the VSHF," adding: "It is both with regret and great pride in the past that we say our good-byes and best wishes to the VSHF."

Davis H. Carr, a partner at the law firm Bradley Arant Boult Cummings in Nashville and a trustee of the Horsemen’s Foundation, said in an interview this afternoon that the breakup followed a change in the role Vanderbilt University Medical Center played in the annual event. Last year, VUMC encouraged the foundation to take over fundraising and organizational activities that it had provided in conjunction with the Friends.

Carr said that in the wake of Vanderbilt's decision to "get out of the steeplechase business," members of the Friends sought an official role within the foundation — including representation on its governing race committee.

"There's nobody on the race committee who is not an active steeplechaser," Carr said. "That's the way it has always been. Those people don't have any interest in having women who've never been on a horse as members of the race committee."

Carr emphasized that the race will continue to benefit the Children's Hospital, devoting almost all of the surplus funds generated by each year's race to Vanderbilt. In 2007, the most recent year for which information is available from its annual report to the Internal Revenue Service (available at this link), the Horsemen’s Foundation gave the hospital more than $485,000 after generating gross revenue of $2.1 million.

The foundation has hired full-time staffers to organize the races and related activities, including the Hunt Ball, Carr said.