Horse doping ’s clever mice
In the middle of a winter Olympics that has already been rocked by a major doping scandal — the controversy swirling around 15-year-old Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva — we are anything but starry-eyed about the current state of doping in professional sports. Successive waves of cheating revelations have already swept through baseball, cycling, bowling and even curling.
It’s not hard to understand why performance-enhancing drugs are so prevalent: Science pushes at boundaries as surely as athletes do, and competitive drive matched with profit motive can be a lethal combination.
And so it is with horse racing, which lends excitement and elegance to Saratoga Springs every summer. As the case of Bob Baffert, one of the nation’s leading thoroughbred trainers, grinds through regulatory boards and hearing rooms in New York and Kentucky, racing is experiencing the kind of reckoning that brings to mind the 2012 fall of cyclist Lance Armstrong, a onetime national hero now acknowledged as a serial liar and relentless cheater.
Armstrong, of course, was a more
than willing co-conspirator in what he was shooting into his system. Thoroughbreds have no such agency when a crooked trainer or unscrupulous veterinarian shows up at the stable with a syringe full of some dodgy cocktail.
These days, those shots are getting more exotic and hard to detect, as discussed last week in a special report by the Times Union’s Emilie Munson that examined how the resources available to the labs that test for banned substances have been utterly outstripped by the science available to cheaters.
A case in point: George Maylin, director of New York’s Equine Drug Testing and Research Laboratory, notes that his facility and others across the nation can only test for three varieties of the banned performance-enhancing hormone erythropoietin — Armstrong used it — though there are more than 80 varieties identified in scientific literature. Making matters worse, many illicit drugs are only detectable in a horse’s system for a short time, even though their effects can linger for weeks.
Another state lab director compared the current state of testing to “a game of cat and mouse . ... The sophisticated cheater in this industry is very good at being a mouse.”
For the sport to survive and thrive — and continue to serve as an economic driver in Saratoga Springs and other communities across the nation — it’s past time for horse racing nationally to develop an army of equally clever and well-trained cats in the form of scientists empowered and equipped to test for a broader array of substances on a greater number of animals every year.
In the wake of a sprawling series of doping arrests in 2020, Congress provided the thoroughbred industry with a genuine lever for change: The Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority, which is currently developing the kind of national regulatory system that should have been imposed decades ago.
Whether this new entity will get the resources it needs to do the job — to remain at the cutting edge as cheating science marches on — remains to be seen. But as the racing industry goes into fierce competition with new online sports for the attention of gamblers, it needs to know that its survival is on the line.