 Baby steps are better than no steps
By Bill Finley
Special to ESPN.com
It appears that the racing industry is more intent than ever about doing something about the problem of illegal drugs. It will be done, however, in baby steps. That's not necessarily bad news. Baby steps are better than the old way, which was doing nothing. But having dipped its toe in the proverbial water, the sport needs to bear down even harder on the cheaters. In the meantime, the American Graded Stakes Committee has taken a much needed and positive step in the right direction.
It announced last week that, starting in 2004, any stakes race that does not conform to a strict post-race drug testing standard, which can find as many as 140 banned substances, will lose its graded status. The new and improved drug tests will already be in place by the fall at Keeneland, Belmont and Santa Anita.
"Everybody has talked about these issues until they are blue in the face,"said Dan Metzger, the president of the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association, which oversees the graded stakes committee. "If there's one specific area where TOBA has direct influence it's over graded stakes races. The graded stakes system is in place to help identify the best of the best. For the integrity of the breed, we need to ensure that horses competing at the highest level of the game are winning legitimately. Victory in graded stakes races increase a horse's value and that's what people go by when they purchase their offspring at the sales. Millions and millions of dollars are involved. We believed this step was needed to help protect the industry."
While the decision from the stakes committee is a welcome one, it's not nearly enough. Though the TOBA-backed tests that will be done following stakes are, by and large, superior to those now done, it's inevitable that they will still allow too much room for chicanery. The bad guys are always one step ahead of the good guys, coming up with new drugs that no one tests for. Even something that tests for 140 drugs will not be able to catch everything out there.
The answer is detention barns, barns in which every horse is being watched around the clock and veterinarians cannot come and go as they please.
The New York Racing Association was prepared to require every Belmont Stakes starter to go to a special stakes barn no later than 3 p.m. the day before the race. The policy angered some trainers, most notably Bobby Frankel. Saying it was unfair to take a nervous horse and change his environment prior to a race, Frankel said he would refuse to take any of his Belmont starters to the stakes barn. NYRA backed down and came up with an ineffective compromise, in which it conducted pre-race testing on the Belmont starters.
Hopefully, next year, NYRA will not buckle quite so easily. The organization might want to look at the success the standardbred industry has had with detention barns.
For virtually every major race run in Canada or in the United States, the competitors must go to a detention or retention barn at least 24 hours before a race. In some instances, it can be as many as 72. With the horses and the trainers being watched, there's really no way that anything untoward can happen.
"Are detention barns a cure-all or and end all to the problems?" said Paul Berube, the president of the Thoroughbred Racing Protective Bureau, which has branched out to include standardbred racing. "Probably not. But they are an effective step to shut off any improper treatments of the horses for however many hours they are in this environment."
Berube said that there was the expected fussing among standardbred horsemen when detention barns started to pop up, but most have grown used to them, or at least resigned to the fact that they are here to stay. Thoroughbred trainers will argue that their horses are more high-strung than the typical standardbred, a reason why they can't be moved around. Some are the same trainers who have no problem shipping a horse thousands of miles and then dropping them off in an unfamiliar barn to prepare for a stakes race. Perhaps the solution is to require a horse to be in a detention barn for 72 hours, more time for them to settle in.
Why wouldn't thoroughbred trainers be for a detention barn? All it does is guarantee that everyone is playing on a level field. If there are in fact any problems involved with a horse leaving his own barn, everyone will have to deal with the same disadvantages. Besides, who's running the game, is it the trainers and the vets?
Racing clearly isn't ready for this step, though it puzzles me why that would be the case. In the meantime, let's applaud the organizations like TOBA who are trying to do some good and hope that their efforts will inspire others to take even bolder measures.
 | 
BETCRIS 
07-04-2003, 07:50 PM
