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Wasn't the USADA the group doing testing on cyclists and Olympians?
About one-half of one percent of over 324,000 post-race samples come back positive, and most are for approved therapeutics. Less than 50 are for Class 1 and 2 substances. Many horsemen would agree that the extreme emphasis on post race testing leaves little funding for investigatory work, including investigation into the great boogeyman "undetectable performance enhancing substances."
I agree that the federal legislation is primarily about banning Lasix and is being pushed by a small subset of the racing community. My questions are: with a 0.5% violation rate, what exactly is the problem with the current testing system, other than the singular focus on post-race analyis? What would lead us to believe that USADA would have greater success than 0.5%? To put it another way, given that USADA does about 9,000 samples a year, how would they increase capacity to do 324,000+ samples without essentially contracting with the exact same labs that are currently responsible for the testing? And finally, how would they have the resources that states currently do not to do investigations that need to be done?
ARCI has essentially bullied the states into adopting the uniform medication rules, so there really isn't a wide disparity between jurisdictions. It sounds like we would add another layer of oversignt (and cost) without having an assurance that whatever the problem is would certainly be solved.
Last edited by HalvOnHorseracing; 08-15-2015 at 04:05 PM.
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