Horseplayers can be a cynical group. A trainer gets tagged with a drug or medication violation and most often the reaction is a sarcastic, there-they-go-again. The propaganda machine that is the Water, Hay, Oats Alliance and the Association of Racing Commissioners International has done a good job of convincing the public that racing is overwhelmed with alchemists, determined to win using chemical means at all costs, or that unless horses run free of any medication the sport is tainted.
Let’s be bold and turn to the facts to better understand this “runaway drug use” in racing. A 2010 study commissioned by RCI found the following to be true:
- There were 324,215 biological samples of blood and urine taken from race horses and tested by labs;
- Less than one-half of one percent (0.493) came back with a drug or medication overage;
- As hard as it may be to fathom, this was 20% fewer violations than in 2001;
- Of the violations, 94% were for legal, therapeutic medications;
- 47 of the 324, 215 samples tested (that’s 0.015 percent, or about once every 7,000 tests) came back positive for Class 1 or 2 substances, those drugs that are most serious when it comes to concerns about performance enhancement.
- The study did not differentiate, but a certain percentage of the 47 positive tests were almost certainly due to either errors in administration of legal therapeutic medication, or environmental contamination. This isn’t an excuse. It’s the damn truth.
- If you’re wondering how this compares to just a few years ago, in 2001 the number of violations for Class 1 and 2 substances were 60. This is despite the fact that new testing equipment can find the equivalent of not just a needle in a haystack, but a needle in all the hay grown in Kansas.
- Violations of the target drug for WHOA, Lasix, stood at 36 out of 324,215 samples, a 33% reduction from violations in 2001.
If these numbers indicate a crisis in racing, I’d hate to see the reactions if the number of violations hit one percent.
Things have changed a bit since the 2010 study. ARCI is finding more drugs to control, including cobalt. They are urging the absolutely absurd adoption of zero-tolerance standards for known and commonly used therapeutic medications. They have even better mass spectrometers that can find amounts of substances so small they are incomprehensible to the average human sense of proportion.
If you want to look at the bright side of things, the number of violations for real, performance-enhancing substances hardly rises to the level of “the sky is falling.” It is a clear demonstration that trainers are not trying to win through cheating and that the testing programs in place are working.
The idea that some imagined rampant drug use by trainers is why people are staying away in droves is nothing more than finger pointing by unqualified racing commissions and those who have declared a fatwa on any drug use, including therapeutics. It is as much the adoption of unmeetable standards by RCI that guarantees positives at levels that have no relation to performance enhancement and their relentless crowing about nailing trainers who are sincerely trying to comply and are good and caring horsemen. It is their failure to find and harshly penalize the real cheats. It is some poorly conceived idea that the racetrack chemists are hard at work designing undectable boutique drugs and that trainers are clamoring for more and more of them.
We’re not idiots. Of course there are cheats, and I imagine there are drugs that are one step ahead of the testing protocols, but I want to know. Where are the labs making the drugs? Why is racing not spending money finding these Breaking Bad actors and shutting them down? How many veterinarians are willing to lose their livelihood just to make a few extra bucks injecting horses with secret potions? Are you telling me that lab equipment that can detect picogram (trillionth of a gram) level amounts of over 1800 compounds is getting regularly fooled by amateur chemists compounding drugs in their garage? Is that the story we’re supposed to believe?
How many Balcos were there in the United States, and how long did it take for the FBI to eventually felonize them once they put their minds to the task? It is not particularly easy to compound completely undetectable medications, and to suggest it is rampantly occurring is at best an indefensible distortion of reality. It is a few trainers and a few home chemists that are the bad guys, and just like baseball if we make a modest effort we’ll find them and shut them down.
But it is the governors of the sport who create the perception of rampant cheating far beyond the reality of actual cheating. Call it job security, or public relations if you want. If you consider the violations of only performance enhancing drugs and not legitimate, therapeutic medications, as RCI’s own numbers show, the number of starts per violation is an incredibly low number. It is a problem equivalent to the current problem ebola represents in the United States. Lots of fanfare and arm-waving, two cases total.
The anti-drug people cite spurious statistics like, the number of starters per race has decreased since Lasix and Bute became ubiquitous. Yes, and the number of foals born per year has dropped by two-thirds. Now which do you think might be more likely the explanation for lower numbers of starters per race?
Facts have taken a back seat to opinion in a world where science has never been so capable of explaining things. I was watching a piece on some of the anti-GMO folks who believe modified vegetables can put holes in our cells. The actual scientific community finds that idea completely incomprehensible. All but about three scientists in the world believe climate change is in some significant part due to human activity. Medical science tells us that while nothing is 100% guaranteed safe, vaccines come pretty close to that standard, and the likelihood that they cause autism is so miniscule it’s laughable to consider it. But instead of arguing the facts, we argue about philosophy or anecdote or undocumented opinion. We give serious TV time to someone who would walk onto the floor of the Senate with a snowball to “prove” the earth is not warming. Even if you don’t buy the global climate change science, you have to be smart enough to recognize a snowball in winter is proof of nothing more than it still snows in winter in the northeast, and that isn’t going to change unless the tilt of the earth’s axis changes.
I apologize for the long intro, but all this leads to the case of Kellyn Gorder. Gorder is considered an excellent horseman, and until the fisaco in Kentucky, a guy that has an almost unblemished record for medication violations. In 2013 he had a positive for Clenbuterol, a drug for which many of the top trainers in the sport have been dinged. That’s it in close to tens years of having a trainer’s license
On November 22, 2014, he ran a horse called Bourbon Warfare in a maiden race at Churchill Downs. The horse won and was routinely tested. Gorder was notified a month later that the test came back positive for methamphetamine, a Class A substance and a zero-tolerance drug. The initial level was 57 picograms, and the confirmatory test came back at 48 picograms.
I’ve talked about picograms before, but just to refresh everyone’s understanding, a 3cc dose of a substance would contain about 215,000,000 picograms. I asked Dr. Steven
Barker at LSU for the significance of 48 picograms of meth and he said, “48 picograms of meth isn’t enough to get a flea high.” Whatever the actual amount of meth needed to get a flea high, Dr. Barker’s statement is clearly indicative that the amount of the drug in Bourbon Warfare’s system would have zero impact on the horse’s running time. In fact, if the 48 picograms was indicative of anything, it was that the most likely source of the meth was an environmental contamination.
The table shown here http://resources.psmile.org/resources/information-management/critical-values/Inf1.0-05%20Cut-off%20and%20Toxicity%20Levels%20for%20Drugs%20of%20Abuse%20Testing.pdf says that the therapeutic value (the level at which we would see a physiological effect) is 200 times greater than the level in Bourbon Warfare’s blood.
Bourbon Warfare was stabled at Keeneland in Barn 72. Gorder’s primary barn is 74, but because of space limitations, Barn 72 houses some of the overflow horses. Barn 72 is also used by a handful of smaller trainers, those with 4-6 horse stables. In other words, Gorder was not in as absolute control of the activities in Barn 72 as he was in Barn 74, but even putting that aside, Barn 74 had significance once the meth positive was reported.
Bourbon Warfare was shipped to Churchill for the race and housed in Barn 42. She was returned to Keenland after the race.
After the meth positive, the Kentucky stewards conducted an inspection of Barn 74 at Keeneland and turned up syringes and unlabeled, but legal, medications, but no sign of meth. Gorder explained the syringes were used to treat a horse with antibiotics using a nebulizer and he failed to dispose of them after the treatment was finished, a story that was backed up by his vet. Regardless, the syringes were still considered illegal and the unlabled medication was also a regulatory violation. Gorder has no dispute with those violations or the punishment assigned for them.
I asked Gorder if the inspectors took any samples that might confirm environmental contamination. To the best of his knowledge, he said they took no samples. I asked if they sampled the stall Bourbon Warfare occupied in Barn 72. He said to the best of his knowledge, they never inspected Barn 72. I asked if the people from the transport company were questioned or the transport vehicle tested. Again, no. I asked if Barn 42 at Churchill was inspected. Not that he was aware. I asked if Keeneland or Churchill had video surveillance in place. No to both.
Gorder tested 33 of his employees. All were clean for meth use.
Gorder can, at best, be described as stunned. Like many of the trainers I have spoken with, he feels betrayed by the sport to which he has devoted many of his waking hours for years. Horsemen rise with the sun and toil until after it sets, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. They are in this game out of love for the horses and love of the game, and Gorder is no exception. If there is an upside for Gorder, it is that he has received almost universal support from his owners and other horsemen, people who have recognized him as the competent, caring horseman he is.
Still, that cannot compensate for being labeled a cheater. It cannot make up for the loss of his reputation in the eyes of the public. Gorder understands the seriousness of the situation. “It’s a serious, serious situation,” he said. “Fourteen months. You’re talking about starting over. The clenbuterol was a wake-up call for me and I really tried to tighten the operation, then this happens. It’s very disheartening.”
The ruling of the stewards has farther reaching impacts. 33 stable personnel – grooms, hotwalkers and exercise riders among others – will lose their jobs along with Gorder.
Like most of these cases, the judgment of the stewards is based on nothing beyond the fact that some level above zero for a banned substance was found. Did they research the potential for environmental contamination? (For example, studies have shown that upwards of 90% of the paper money in circulation is contaminated with cocaine, which is why the feds have de minimis levels for a cocaine positive. If this were horseracing, pretty close to 100% of racetrack bettors would show a positive level at picograms for coke.) Did they even try to understand the mechanism by which it occurred? Did they thoroughly investigate the other places where the horse was housed, or the other people who handled her? Did they look at the jockey? The person handling the sample in the testing barn? The person in the lab handling the sample? Did they consider the performance enhancing effect of 48 picograms? Did they consider when a horse might have had to have been actually dosed with methamphetamine to have a residual of 48 picograms? Did they ask themselves why someone would dose a horse and then wait until it had cleared out of its system before running it if they were looking for a chemical edge? Did they feel any responsibility for not having better security in place? No to all of this, and yet at any point between Barn 72 and the lab the horse or the sample could have been contaminated. It’s not as if meth is a rare substance. They didn’t even bother to ask the question.
The overriding question state legislatures need to ask themselves is, when you gave the racing commission the power to oversee the sport, did you mean that they should promulgate rules that are as likely to punish the innocent as the guilty? Was it your intention to rid the sport of the good guys in some misguided zeal to find the bad guys? Have you really helped horseracing to prosper by sending the message to good, honest horsemen that at any time you could lose your livelihood? Are you really happy with how this sport is being managed?
Let’s be realistic. Racing commissions are being pushed by various groups to adopt standards where they have no idea what unintended consequences will occur. Snaring a few dolphins is a small price to pay to grab the tuna.
There is no piece of hard evidence that would convince any rational thinking person that Kellyn Gorder cheated to win a race. On the other hand, there are piles of real and circumstantial evidence leading to the conclusion that cross-contamination is the likeliest explanation for a 48 picogram positive.
The Kentucky Racing Commission still has the chance to do the right thing. Not just for Kellyn Gorder. For horseracing too.
