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Originally Posted by HalvOnHorseracing
I'm certainly not naive, and I want to be clear that there are trainers who look for any edge they can. I also want to be clear that any trainer who purposely looks for an edge should be dealt with harshly. I've spent a lot of time with a lot of trainers and I'm just having a hard time believing 95% of them have to cheat, much less they do cheat. Maybe 5% do, and they aren't Fletcher or Chad Brown or Baffert.
The one thing I didn't say is that there is a serious failure on the part of racing commissions and it is two fold. One, spending pretty much all the enforcement money on post race testing is not a good policy. There is not a security agency in the world that eschews prevention in favor of trying to catch scofflaws after they have committed the crime. Two, many - not all - of the people on racing commissions are political appointees who are woefully underqualified for the job.
The focus on prosecuting blood or urine test positives without doing any investigation is part of the reason why we have trainers getting nailed for positives that are likely cross contamination. What the tracks need to realize is that they need to have a security presence and an investigative capability so trainers think twice about keeping illegal substances around and that anyone personally using illegal substances should be found and ruled off the track.
Here's a simple concept. If you never set up a speed trap, you'll never catch speeders, and if drivers know where speed traps are often set up they'll slow down.
Pre-race testing and out of competition testing should be part of every enforcement program.
I've heard the EPO argument and I want to say I've had this discussion before on this board. I've asked my experts who I work with (vets and equine pharmacologists) about the charge that these EPO's are in use, widespread or otherwise. I can only tell you what they tell me. EPOs do not have the same effect on horses that they have on humans because of how the equine spleen works.
I read the Paulick Report piece on EPO. Paulick obtained a copy of a letter written by a veterinarian who he keeps anonymous, and who denies ever having written the letter. Two things about the letter are interesting.
Also need to be giving iron (pills or shots), folic acid, B12 + an anabolic steroid (Equipoise or Winstrol) and don't overtrain. The horse has to be healthy and not exhausted to build red cells. The steroids put the horse into a building state and the B12, folic acid and iron are all needed in increased amounts to make the increased number of red cells.
So it apparently isn't a simple case of injecting EPOs and sitting back and waiting for the result. First, remember that Epogen is a controlled substance and you have to have a legal or illegal dealer. If the dealer is legal, it's traceable. Second, Winstrol is no longer sold. If you want to get the generic you have to go to a compounding pharmacy, and if it is a legal pharmacy it is traceable.
A red cell lives for about 100 days so do monitor the CBC's. Too much Epogen could lead to strokes and/or heart attacks, and in the horse, may increase the likelihood of bleeding in a race.
And remember that if a horse dies suspiciously in most jurisdictions a necropsy is required.
All this is to say if a trainer is getting drugs legally they are traceable, making my suggestion that active rather than just passive enforcement is needed. If they are getting drugs illegally, it would be harder to find, and of course impossible if you do no investigation at all. But you have to probably involve a vet, who by doing it puts his license at risk. You have to obtain some legal over the counter drugs (B-12 and Iron) which are traceable. The Balco type lab has to have a big enough client base to make it profitable. You have to do blood testing (also traceable) and you have to have somebody carefully watching the dosing so you don't give a horse a stroke or a heart attack. You run the risk of increasing bleeding, which winds up undoing any good you might have done with the Epogen.
I'm not telling you it doesn't happen. I'm telling you that you can't find medical and pharmacological experts that believe it has an effect beyond what we see due to the equine spleen. In the relaxed horse, not all red blood cells are in use. Extra cells (about 30% of the total) are stored in the spleen, a large organ located in the horse’s abdominal cavity between the left kidney and the small colon. When the horse performs strenuous exercise, the spleen contracts, pushing these extra red blood cells into circulation and thus greatly increasing the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood.
This simply doesn't happen in humans, which is why EPO was in popular use. Give me one statistic, even a small study that shows the red blood cell count increases beyond what happens when the spleen contracts.
I'm also telling you that the complications arising from using it create a lot of risk, especially considering you have to use steroids and vitamins. A trainer can't keep any of this stuff on hand. He may have to make his vet and the testing lab complicit. He may have to find an illegal source and keep it secret, no small feat on the backside.
But mostly I'm telling you an aggressive enforcement program that doesn't wait until you get a positive to spring into action finds these kind of things eventually. They got Balco that way.
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