Drug-free horse racing: is it a pipe dream, or is it achievable?

Jockey A.P. McCoy falls in a race on September 11, 2009 in Bangor-On-Dee racecourse. Many horses and jockeys are injured every year on race tracks around the world. However, when injured and sick horses are running while on medication, as they do in the United States, the risk to both horses and riders increases. (Photo: Paolo Camera)

In recent weeks, the New York Times has been running a scathing series about the toll that horse racing takes on the horses and jockeys who ride them.

The reporters have taken aim on the over-use of medication to mask pain and treat injuries and illnesses that, without the drugs, are sufficiently severe to require that the horse be either extensively rested or retired. Instead, the horses are medicated and raced, with alarming results: shattered legs, broken ankles, paralysis — and that's just the jockeys who are injured when a horse falls during a race or in training. Many of the horses end up so badly hurt that they are either euthanized or sent to slaughter.

The reports on drugs in horse racing made by the Times in the past six months included a list of the top 20 Thoroughbred trainers in North America by purse earnings from January to October 26, 2010, and listed the number of races (known as "starts") their horses made that year, the number of drug violations each trainer has, and compared them based on one violation per X number of starts. Using this method, one violation for every 300 starts is three times worse than one violation for every 900 starts.

Since I'll Have Another won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness this spring, the media has jumped all over trainer Doug O'Neill's record of medication violations as published last November. However, Bob Baffert, trainer of Bodemeister, the runner-up in both races, had nearly double the number of drug violations per start that O'Neill has. Baffert is third on the list with one violation per 465 stats, compared to O'Neill, who was seventh with one violation for every 807 starts. Yet Baffert's record was not mentioned during the televising of either race. Curious — and it becomes even more so.

Other top trainers in the Derby who were on that list include Richard Dutrow Jr. (second worst, with one per 343 starts), Kieran McLaughlin (6th, one per 710 starts), Mike Maker (8th, one per 883 starts), Jerry Hollendorfer (9th, one per 978 starts) and Steve Asmussen (10th, one per 985 starts). After that, the violations drop significantly, with Dale Romans (11th with one per 1,438 starts), Mark Casse (14th, one per 2,054 starts) and Todd Pletcher (15th, one per 2,413 starts). That's 10 out of the 17 Derby trainers. Most notably, Graham Motion, who also had a horse in the Derby, had zero violations in 7,659 starts. The other six trainers in the Derby were not in the top 20 trainers by earning in 2010, so their records of violations, if any, were not reported by the NY Times. Why was O'Neill singled out?

There's more. O'Neill finally received his punishment for a summer 2010 violation in California: a conditional 45-day suspension to begin July 1 (down from the 180 days he could have received) and a $15,000 fine. This despite the fact that, as reported by Jack Shinar in the Blood-Horse, "The hearing officer determined there were no suspicious betting patterns in the race. He further determined there was no evidence of any intentional acts by O’Neill in connection with the incident." O'Neill has claimed from day one that he did not give this horse anything to cause it to test positive.

To make it worse, another trainer in California accused of the same violation in October 2010 had his sentence handed down about six weeks, not almost two years, after the violation, and he was fined $5,000 and his 45-day suspension was stayed (which meant that, instead of serving it, he was on probation for a year). His horse finished second; O'Neill's finished well back in his horse's race, so obviosly the performance of O'Neill's horse was not enhanced. Why the difference in time required and punishment inflicted? Something is not right here.

To get back to the NY Times and its list of top 20 trainers, aside from being more than a year old, it is misleading in other ways. It only included the top 20 trainers by purse earnings, not by total number of starts. A trainer running lower-end horses could have a thousand violations and not make this list simply because the purse earnings weren't high enough. The list also does not state whether any of the charges were for performance-enhancing drugs or therapeutic treatments, or how long before race day the medications were given. The last is important, because horses retain drugs in their systems for different lengths of time. Two horses, receiving the same dose of the same drug on the same day, can show different test results, with one testing clear within the norm for that drug (for example, three days) while another still has traces of the drug several days longer than usual.

But the real problem isn't with illegal drugs like cobra venom, stimulants and so forth. It's with the legal ones, and the tripling, quadrupling or more to create a cocktail of legal medications to be used in one horse before it races. Those aren't included in the list, because it is perfectly legal to use them. Two examples are Lasix (also called Salix), an anti-bleeding medication designed to treat horses who suffer exercise-induced pulmonary bleeding, and Bute, or phenylbutazone, an anti-inflammatory. Currently, many of these drugs are coming under scrutiny within the horse-racing industry, and that is long overdue.

There is a huge question that has not been addressed, although it is sure to emerge very soon. Where do the trainers get these drugs, and who administers the drugs to the horses? Veterinarians. That's right, people whose mission is supposed to be to heal sick and injured animals, not mask their pain so that they can run while hurt. So why are these vets not receiving the same kind of scrutiny as the trainers are?

The bottom line is that is is veterinarians who are supplying the legal drugs that enable injured horses to race when they should be resting and healing. There needs to be much more accountability on the part of the veterinarians who treat race horses, and there needs to be a way to officially prevent horses from running while being treated for injuries and to keep them from running until they are declared healthy and able to do so.

For more information about the move to get rid of the use of race-day drugs in Thoroughbred racing, go to Clean Horse Racing. To learn about the severity and frequency of breakdowns in race horses, go here.