HOW IT UNFOLDED

THaT SINKING FeeLING

■ The unravelling of the Aquanita doping ring involving Group 1-winning Melbourne trainer Robert Smerdon (pictured) and others can be traced to Flemington racecourse and Turnbull Stakes day on October 7, 2017

■ Aquanita stable hand and float driver Greg Nelligan is caught by a racing integrity agent “topping up” Robert Smerdon’s mare Lovani in a staling box, basically a horse urinal, as super mare Winx parades before the main race

■ The Aquanita hearing was shown a video of Nelligan putting a modified syringe containing sodium bicarbonate, Tripart paste and formaldehyde into the horses’s mouth

■ “No one else has got anything to do with it,” Nelligan tells investigators who flood the box but 1000 text messages from about 70,000 later downloaded from his mobile phone tell a different story

HOW IT WaS DONe

■ Members of the crew would administer a mix, commonly of sodium bicarbonate, Tripart paste and formaldehyde, via “tubing” — running a tube through a horse’s nostrils directly into its stomach — to a runner before it leaves the stables or en route to the track

■ Once on-course a “topup” is secretly administered with a modified plunger, within an hour of the race

■ The top-up was often performed after stewards had tested a horse for elevated TCO2 levels, an indication a horse may have been doped

■ The aim of the dopers is to counter the build-up of lactic acid in a runner, thereby reducing fatigue, at the end of a race

■ All treatments are banned a day before a horse races