Phelps must act decisively to defuse bombs
Disastrous leak of report and a new drug threat mean BHA chair faces make-or-break moment
She has been in the job for only a few months, but Annamarie Phelps, the chair of the British Horseracing Authority, has two explosive issues to deal with and they may be the making or breaking of her tenure. Before Phelps arrived on the scene, the BHA launched an investigation into the “practices at bloodstock auctions”.
Given that the BHA does not have any jurisdiction in this area of the racing industry, it was always going to be important to get as many participating groups as possible working emphatically
with the findings of the report to achieve a positive outcome.
That assumes that the intended outcome of the report was to encourage people to buy racehorses, rather than discourage them. After all, that is one of the BHA’S stated objectives.
So it was entirely sensible that the BHA set up a working party of leading bloodstock figures, who spent six hours chewing over the report, in an attempt to shape a positive response to its findings.
That was very much a work in progress when a draft of the report was leaked to the Racing Post almost a fortnight ago.
That leak was an act of treachery, because it blew to smithereens the good faith and trust that those industry figures were placing in the hands of the BHA while working positively with them.
It also ensured that it was not possible to balance any criticism in the report with some positive responses that might have been agreed.
So why would someone want to leak this report? It is unlikely it was for financial gain, so it seems to me it is fair to assume it was an individual or individuals who wanted to sabotage this process. Perhaps someone who wanted the report to show the bloodstock industry in the worst light possible without giving the working party the chance to pull together a constructive response.
Informed observers have noted that some of the wording of the leak was only contained in the first draft of the report. The draft that was given to Phelps’ board members.
So either she has to back her board and exonerate all of them from this leak, or she has to clear out the bad apple, who should not be given whistle-blower status as the report was coming out anyway.
But all of those shenanigans pale into insignificance compared to the threat to the integrity of racing posed by the emergence from America of a bisphosphonate drug marketed in Europe.
Bisphosphonates mask minor bone fractures in foals and yearlings. In layman’s language, the drug stimulates the bone to fill in the bone imperfections, tricking anyone taking an X-ray that all is well.
Taking X-rays at all the major yearling sales is routine, and millions are spent, or not, on young racehorses depending on those results. But the long-term effect of this drug is disastrous. Once nature’s own healing process has been disrupted, the bones are unable to stand up to the stress and strains of racing and the horses will be prone to fractures.
So serious is this situation considered to be in America that one of the country’s most respected breeders is securely storing blood tests to give any vendor a “blood health” window of six months prior to any sale. In effect, a guarantee that bisphosphonates have not been used on their stock.
As a result of the BHA being aware of this potential threat spreading to the UK, any two or three-year-old who tests positive for bisphosphonates will be banned from racing.
But here lies the problem. Where is the protection for owners buying yearlings at public auctions across Europe this autumn? Make no mistake, it is now a racing certainty that there will be yearlings offered for sale who will have been given this drug.
It is entirely possible that an unwitting owner or trainer might purchase a horse, only to find it is tested in training by the BHA a couple of months later and banned from racing for two years.
The obvious answer to this conundrum would be that all the sales companies guarantee that the yearlings they sell are tested for bisphosphonates by the same laboratories using the same methods and thresholds that the BHA use.
Racing in the UK and Ireland is the cleanest in the world. It is absolutely vital that status quo is preserved if the highest animal welfare standards are to be maintained.