For anyone who hasn’t already heard the story, Doug O’Neill was suspended 45 days by the New York State Gaming Commission for a positive test for the drug Oxazepam, detected in a post-race sample taken from Wind of Bosphorus on June 2, 2013. Initially O’Neill had negotiated that the suspension start the day after the Breeder’s Cup but the Breeder’s Cup officials invoked the “Convicted Trainer Rule” that bans trainers convicted of a medication violation involving a Class 1 or 2 drug in the 12 months preceding the Breeder’s Cup. This means O’Neill cannot be the trainer of record for any horse in the Breeder’s Cup.
In the horseracing world this was big news. O’Neill is a well known trainer who has a Kentucky Derby win with I’ll Have Another, three Breeder’s Cup wins and a slew of major stakes victories. He’s also been cited 19 times for various violations. Regardless of his success, among serious handicappers, fairly or unfairly, he’s generally seen as a trainer who practices better winning through chemistry.
O’Neill fired back in an open letter and at first reading he makes a pretty good anecdotal case that he is a victim of circumstance, at least when it came to Wind of Bosphorus.
Let’s start with the drug itself. O’Neill said, “When I was notified by the Gaming Commission, I googled the drug, Oxazepam, to see what it was. It is used by humans to help with alcohol withdrawal, and doctors prescribe it for folks with irritable bowel syndrome. I have included information on this drug in this section of the letter.”
O’Neill was not precise in his description. Oxazepam is actually used for the treatment of anxiety, including anxiety associated with alcohol withdrawal. He is correct in noting it is occasionally prescribed for irritable bowel syndrome.
And since trainer O’Neill got his information on Oxazepam from Google, I found that Oxazepam is in a class of drugs called benzodiazepines. It works by slowing activity in the brain to allow for relaxation, and this is why it is often prescribed for alcohol withdrawal patients. The key word in that sentence is relaxation.
O’Neill also said in the letter, “I can’t possibly imagine that any horse trainer or anybody in the horse business would purposefully, intentionally give a horse this drug. Why in the world would they?”
I have no knowledge of any trainer specifically using Oxazepam to treat horses, but given it’s use as a drug to treat all sorts of anxiety, it doesn’t seem inconceivable that some trainer might try it on a high strung horse. The case for whether or not that horse was Wind of Bosphorus seems circumstantial. As for Oxazepam’s availability, it’s also not inconceivable that there is a recovering alcoholic or two on the grounds taking the drug, even if veterinarians aren’t normally carrying it in their kits.
So O’Neill’s first line of defense is that no trainer would knowingly use Oxazepam, ostensibly because horses are not recovering alcoholics (although some enjoy a cold barley pop after a race), nor do they have irritable bowel syndrome. Unfortunately, it is not beyond a simple line of logic for a non-medical person to conclude that a relaxation drug just might help a horse that is so keyed up before a race he expends most of his energy prior to entering the starting gate. If that conclusion makes no sense, perhaps we can get a respected veterinarian to tell us why not.
O’Neill adds this for emphasis. “Besides the absolute absurdity to think it could possibly be a good idea to give a horse this drug, there is no evidence that I’ve been able to find, of any examples of anyone ever using this drug on a horse to enhance a horse’s performance. And that is what I am suspended for? That is what my reputation is being kicked in the mud over? About giving a horse a drug that helps with alcohol withdrawal and for folks with irritable bowels? I couldn’t make this up if I tried.”
The key in that first sentence is “enhance a horse’s performance.” As O’Neill acknowledges, benzodiazepines (specifically diazepam) are commonly used in veterinary practices, especially prior to surgery, including gelding, to calm a horse. If enhancing a horse’s performance is a euphemism for making it run faster, perhaps O’Neill has a point. But if we include anxiety relief, perhaps it isn’t so absolutely absurd after all. O’Neill’s protestation smacks a bit of having his cake and eating it too.
O’Neill also argues that, “They found traces of this substance (Oxazepam) in the blood of our horse. If I had to guess (and it’s only a guess), it probably has something to do with the fact that Wind Of Bosphorus happened to move three times into three different stalls in the ten days leading up to his race. Many horses would have been in those same stalls over those ten days. Horses eat the feed that falls on the ground. Lots of folks are walking in and out of those barns. Could someone that was in the barn accidently drop something in the feed? I suppose anything is possible. My vet said that a possibility is that a drug in the same “family” of this is diazepam, and that it is in just about every vet’s truck. (It is known to cause false positives for oxazepam) He said vets apply it when horses need to be castrated, and this drug is used in surgery rooms, also. Could a horse that had been recently castrated been in one of those barns- and urinated on the soil of the stall? My vet says absolutely because this has happened with other medications found in such small amounts, and most recently happened in Canada.”
This is really where the issue turns for me. Wind of Bosphorus was claimed the race before O’Neill took him and was claimed out of the race he won for O’Neill. The horse was moved around and the possibility of cross contamination definitely exists. He’s right that other horses in those barns could have contaminated feed that fell on the ground. And of course given the way horses move around, it doesn’t seem possible to tell whether it makes more sense to blame someone other than O’Neill. The puzzling thing is why this kind of evidence was unpersuasive to the Gaming Commission.
Beyond that, Dr. Steven Barker reviewed the evidence in the case and concluded, “Given that there was no opportunity to retest the blood and because the data presented by the Commission’s laboratory regarding the blood cannot and should not be considered evidence, it is my opinion that any discussion of the presence of oxazepam in the blood sample of the horse in question is legally and scientifically unfounded.” His full report can be found here http://www.dougoneillracing.com/images/DrBarkerSt.pdf
Ok, Barker may be O’Neill’s witness, but where is the outcry telling us he’s talking out of his hat? Based on Barker’s report, it seems highly probable that if O’Neill took this to court he’d win drawing away. The fact that he didn’t take this one to court is probably as much a reflection of him not wanting to buy a team of legal eagles at $500 an hour and realizing the negotiated penalty was hardly much of a problem. It’s cheaper and easier for O’Neill (and most trainers) to pay the fine, take the days, and go right back to training however he trains.
If anything, this incident continues to underscore the deficiencies in the system around drug testing and assessing guilt. O’Neill was guilty as much under the age old maxim that the trainer is ultimately to blame for anything in a horse’s system as based on the evidence, which on the surface seems ambiguous at best. And it doesn’t hurt that O’Neill has been cited for medication violations 19 times. That many violations – he must be guilty.
Trainers often don’t see a violation citation as the end of the world. You perhaps get some days, pay a relatively small fine, and run horses under your assistant trainer’s name. Given the trainer’s world doesn’t wobble too badly, most of the time it isn’t worth fighting a Commission ruling. While O’Neill has derisively been called “Drug O’Neill” he’s not alone in being repeatedly cited for medication violations. In a 2010 article, the NY Times noted that, “In fact, of the top 20 trainers in the United States by purses won, only two — Christophe Clement and Graham Motion — have never been cited for a medication violation.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/sports/04racing.html
Despite O’Neill’s reputation, according to the same article, well known trainers such as Jamie Ness (one violation per 217 starts), Bob Baffert (one per 465 starts), John Sadler (one per 478 starts), Bret Calhoun (one per 525 starts) and Kiaran McLaughlin (one per 710 starts) all exceeded O’Neill’s rate of one per 807 starts. And trainers such as Michael Maker, Jerry Hollendorfer, and Steve Asmussen have all been cited at a rate more than one starter per thousand.
What exactly is it about O’Neill that makes him the poster boy for drug use in racing?
A long article from The Horse Fund said, “Clearly the frequency of these violations together with the fact these individuals continue to train while suspended, regardless of the offense, demonstrates how ludicrous the North American system of penalty enforcement and severity is. Time and time again these trainers circumvent the rules and are rewarded for their penchant to cheat with punishments that all too often are in name only; their stables remain open and their horses are permitted to race, typically under the name of a trustworthy assistant.” http://www.horsefund.org/the-chemical-horse-part-9.php
The O’Neill case exposes myriad problems with drugs, testing and racing commission decisions. In an American court you are innocent until proven guilty, but in the court of racing you can be convicted on almost any evidence, solid or circumstantial. Moreover, until O’Neill got slapped with excommunication from this year’s Breeder’s Cup, he seemed to have worked out a pretty good deal that would have kept him off the track for only 45 days during one of the slower parts of the racing season.
O’Neill is not the problem. The system needs an overhaul starting with the consistency of drug rules and penalties from state to state. You can’t tell me we needed a whole year to figure out what happened to Wind of Bosphorus. You can’t tell me that New York couldn’t have figured out if O’Neill was really the culprit if they had complete records on which horses on what medication occupied which stalls at what time. You can’t tell me that the NY State Gaming Commission couldn’t have done what the cycling people did with Lance Armstrong when he protested his innocence – threatened to bury him with a mountain of evidence – after O’Neil came out with his letter that made it seem like he was railroaded, assuming they actually had that evidence. If you have incontrovertible proof that O’Neill is a liar and a cheat, produce it. We can handle it. Instead we are left with Doug O’Neill once again protesting his innocence and the sport being left with the odor of a stall that hasn’t been mucked for a while.