If not Paget, then who did it?
Jock Paget, the winner of Badminton and Burghley, will now be called a drug cheat after his horse tested positive for the calming agent reserpine.
But this is a far more interesting case than the cycle of lies told by professional conman Lance Armstrong.
This is a story with a cast of characters from a Shardlake novel, part detective story, part thriller.
Paget, himself, comes with a host of references. Fellow Kiwi eventer Andrew Nicholson calls him ‘‘a very genuine person’’ and does not believe there is any way Paget would have willingly doped his horse.
Nicholson’s word carries some weight because his two horses, Avebury and Nereo, finished second and third at Burghley and will now be promoted to the top two spots if Paget is found guilty.
So who done it, gov, if Paget was not responsible, although we cannot rule him out? How did a drug that was originally obtained from Indian snakeroot and used by Gandhi for meditative processes, find its way into the bloodstream of Paget’s horse Clifton Promise?
That is the question to which Paget desperately needs to find the answer and the question that will cast suspicion on many innocent people.
The search is broadened by the fact that Clifton Pinot, a horse under the same ownership, has also now tested positive for reserpine.
Clifton Pinot is ridden by the Aussie trainer Kevin McNab, the bloke who took young Jock on when he was just a builder’s apprentice.
McNab has been a mentor for many a horse and rider, but now has his own ambitions to represent Australia at the Olympics and ambition can taint the soul.
Eventing horses are dosed as a matter of course. They are given natural herbal supplements to calm them before the dressage, a discipline at which Clifton Promise excelled.
Nicholson says that all the supplements in the horse’s feed are the most important part of the preparation apart from the work with the rider.
The horses are given illegal substances out of competition, but these are stopped over three months before competition.
Nicholson told LiveSport radio, ‘‘Jock’s been caught out with this and it’s a tough time for him. It’s an awful lot of pressure on him and hopefully sample ‘B’ will be different but it seems a pretty long shot. He is very new in the big league. Possibly he’s been a little naı¨ve.’’
Now just what did Nicholson mean by that? Does he have doubts about McNab? Has Nicholson taken some dodgy supplements in from a snake oil salesman? Or is Frances Stead, the owner of the horse, a figure of suspicion?
She is certainly another fascinating character. Stead told LiveSport, ‘‘I know very little about it [reserpine]. I’ve never tried to understand the details on the vet’s side.’’
This is strange testimony. Stead has anMAhonours degree in chemistry from Oxford University and spent a good part of her professional career in marketing at consumer goods company Proctor and Gamble.
Yet she has almost no knowledge of reserpine and takes very little interest in what is given to her horses.
Really? Stead goes on to say that she is 100 per cent sure of Paget’s innocence.
The only way I would be sure of a sportsman’s innocence is if I knew who had administered the drug. Stead then says she sees no reason why a sedative would be administered to a horse.
She should know, having earlier this year described Clifton Promise as, ‘‘very quirky and complicated . . . he can get quite stressed and worried about it’’. Nicholson would tell her that stressedout, strong-headed horses need calming. But Stead instead points the finger at the 500 people who have access to the stabling area, any of who could ‘‘do something unpleasant’’.
With Paget and Clifton Promise both described by Stead as tall and handsome, I am now unsure about whether we are straying into a Dick Francis novel, with the rogue nobbler from another stable, or a jodhpur-ripper by Jilly Cooper.
And then there’s the Federation Equestre Internationale, the body responsible for finding the guilty parties and administering justice. The president of the FEI is Princess Haya.
President Haya is a wife of Sheikh Mohammed, whose endurance horses have repeatedly tested positive for anabolic steroids.
The sheikh, a world champion at endurance riding, did cop a six-month ban, a sanction that caused the outraged Princess President.
Stead is adamant the entire Clifton team is innocent and she has now employed a scientist in order to determine how reserpine could have got into her horses’ systems.
I suspect poor Jock is out of his league. He says, ‘‘I haven’t even heard of it [reserpine], I have never done anything with that sort of stuff. I’m absolutely dumbfounded by it all. You don’t plan for this. You hear about it happening to other people and think ‘shit, I’m glad that will never happen to me’ but here we are.’’
Or as they say at the Federation Equestre Internationale: ‘‘merde’’. But who is the ‘merderer’? That is the fascinating question.