By now most racing fans have heard the short version of the A.C. Avila and Masochistic story. If there was any doubt about Avila’s guilt, it wasn’t coming through on social media.
But I was curious. I wanted all the details associated with his violation and suspension. I suspect most people don’t care about that as much as I do, so if you want the short version, Avila looks about as guilty as it gets. But if you want the whole story, keep reading.
Most of my irritation was with the reporting that was technically accurate but not really complete. I believe that if we’re going to nail a trainer’s hide to the wall we should have something incontrovertible.
In Avila’s case it appears that we do.
Let me take you through the details as described in the California Horse Racing Board decision.
Avila purchased the horse Masochistic in August (or September) 2013 for himself and Los Pollos Hermanos Racing Stable as equal partners. For those of you who think Los Pollos Hermanos sounds familiar, it was the name of a fictional restaurant on the TV series Breaking Bad, a series about the manufacture and distribution of “meth.”
After Avila started working the horse, he found that the horse was, in his opinion, moody. He’d work too fast or too slow. In his five and six furlong works, according to Avila he’d go fast early and then flatten out late. Avila recognized the horse had plenty of talent, and in his testimony to the CHRB he mentioned consulting with a veterinarian in Lexington (no name mentioned) who told him that based on something called the “LambertTest” Masochistic was going to be best as a late running sprinter.
I googled Lambert test and came back with nothing. However, there is a veterinarian named David Lambert who manages Equine Analysis Systems, Inc. in Lexington, a company that does genetic testing to identify likely classic distance winners. In the article I saw, he doesn’t identify any of his clients so we won’t know for sure if he tested Masochistic, but this is probably the Lambert test to which Avila was referring.
This reference to Masochistic being a late running sprinter becomes mildly important as we’ll see later in relation to Avila’s credibility.
Avila’s testimony was that he told his groom that he intended to enter Masochistic “for Saturday” and Avila suggested the groom misunderstood him and thought that he was going to enter the horse ON Saturday for a race the following Thursday. This explanation was supposed to give credence to the Avila’s explantation for the presence of acepromazine in the horse’s system – he was accidentally double dosed based on a miscommunication.
However, the confusion was apparently cleared up quickly because the groom decided he needed to trim the horse’s mane on Wednesday so that he would look good on Saturday. Whatever Avila said, it became clear to the groom that the horse was racing on Saturday and that he knew that on Wednesday. So any confusion about the date becomes irrelevant with respect to the administration of acepromazine. Another place where Avila doesn’t really have an explanation that holds water.
Because Masochistic was, well sadistic, the groom decided it would be necessary to tranquilize him. This is a common practice (a lot more horses have behavioral issues than the public might realize) and in later testimony the veterinarians agreed that treating the horse with acepromazine was the right protocol. Avila testified that the groom gave the horse two separate doses of acepromazine, but it did not calm the horse down. Avila’s veterinarian, Dr. John Araujo was called, and according to Avila administered another dose of acepromazine.
Unfortunately, when Dr. Aruajo testified, he decided that since the acepromazine wasn’t doing the trick, he would administer a combination of Demosadan, a powerful sedative, and Torbugesic, a strong painkiller, not acepromazine. Another important point if we are looking at Avila’s credibility.
That definitely sounded like a lot of drugs just to snip the horse’s mane, but it is important to note this is not uncommon, nor is it a strange protocol. Many horses are notoriously skittish about being handled near their heads, and tranquilizing is the accepted way of dealing with it. So on Wednesday, nobody has done anything wrong or “nefarious.”
Acepromazine is a fairly mild tranquilizer, but it does have the effect of lowering blood pressure and expanding the horse’s lungs. It is one of the 26 medications allowed by the Racing Medication and Testing Consortium, and is used frequently not just for horses but other animals as well. Many trainers and veterinarians favor the drug because a small dose generally will calm the horse without negatively affecting his ability to train. Acepromazine is fast acting – usually the horse settles within 15 minutes of being dosed – and long lasting – up to six hours per dose. However, it is flushed out of the horse’s system within 48 hours of administration. For those reasons it is a good choice for race horses. On the other hand, a large dose close to race time would almost certainly affect the horse’s ability to run.
Masochistic did run on Saturday March 15, 2014 and finished 5th. The Santa Anita Stewards normally wouldn’t test other than the first two finishers, but they thought that jockey Omar Berrio held the horse back. When they interviewed Berrio, he stated that Avila had given him instructions to not push the horse early and let him roll at the end of the race.
I watched the race several times. As best as I could tell, the horse broke well and Berrio strangled him back quickly, giving an interesting interpretation to the idea of not pushing the horse early. It looked to me like the horse was fighting for his head but Berrio was doing his best to keep him behind the main pack, about mid-track down the backstretch. Around the turn Berrio moved him to the rail and as best I could tell was not riding him aggressively. He showed him the whip a few times, gave him one or two light taps on the rump and let him run on his own courage to the wire. He did not appear to be scrubbing the horse at any point in the race. I would never have noticed it during the race unless I had bet the horse or I was specifically following him, but once I did look at it closely, I would have thought Berrio did not ride aggressively, especially in the stretch. Considering where the horse was at the eighth pole, I’m not sure even an aggressive ride would have put Masochistic in the top three, but considering the horse was, at best, running on his own courage, he did well to finish fifth.
I wouldn’t have said the horse was lethargic at all. It wasn’t as if Berrio had to urge the horse to get into the race. Quite the opposite from my perspective – Berrio kept the horse toward the back early and never rode him hard at any point during the race.
Berrio’s explanation that he was following instructions with regard to the ride Avila wanted the horse to get was still a bit suspect. If Berrio really wanted to make a furious close with the horse, why did he stick him on the rail and why did he not ride the horse like a jockey would a closer?
Honestly I don’t think Berrio is at fault here. I think he followed Avila’s likely instructions to the letter – pull the horse back early, let him run on his own courage in the stretch, and don’t worry about winning the race.. Do we know that for sure? No, but given he had been working the horse in the mornings, Berrio had to know how much horse he had. Not following Avila’s instructions would have certainly cost him the ride on the horse later, and it seemed like the horse was pointed at bigger and better things.
This is also the point to remember back to Avila’s testimony. The horse would go fast early and flatten out late. It looks like Avila was providing an explanation for Masochistic’s bad run on March 15. And Avila may have sold the notion of a moody, late running sprinter had it not been for the horse’s next race.
After the Santa Anita race, Avila and Los Pollos Hermanos decided to ship the horse to Churchill to run on Kentucky Derby Day. Avila contended that the Churchill maiden fields were weak, but it I wondered if it was more likely the owners wanted to have a horse running that day so they had badges that gave them access to the nicer, or less crowded parts of the track. Of course, I don’t even know if they were there. There was speculation that Avila took the horse to Churchill because the betting pools would be larger and the Masochistic connections could more easily pull off a betting coup. After all, there was a Cal bred maiden he could have run in with a purse only $3,000 less than the Churchill purse on the same day. Why go through the cost of shipping all the way east and back when you could make the same money at home?
If the owners and Avila were in Kentucky, you could have convinced me everyone just wanted a trip to the Kentucky Derby and figured regardless of the cost the horse could earn enough money to pay for it. All that was needed was for someone to ask a few questions. That apparently didn’t happen, and so we’re left wondering if a betting coup occurred.
The proof of a betting coup is limited. Clearly, rating the horse off his last race could hardly have made him a 2-1 choice, but according to Avila, a known bettor, he only had $1,000 to win on the horse. The fact that the horse was only 2-1 was doubly suspicious because of the pool size on Derby Day. Masochistic was listed at 4-1 in the program, so it would have taken a fair amount of money to cut his odds in half.
What gave more credence to suspicions Masochistic was being darkened in his first race was that at Churchill Victor Espinoza shot the horse to the front on the rail and never looked back. There was a spill in the race, but the horses involved were all running at the back of the pack and had pretty much lost contact with the leading group. Anyone who tells you the accident helped Masochistic was looking at a different race than I was. If you’ve watched as many races as a lot of us have, there is at least an odor of something being fishy.
Remember, Avila said the “Lambert test” pointed his horse as being a closing sprinter, but after running a 44:3 half and drawing off by 14 lengths, Avila’s explanation that he gave Berrio instructions to give the horse the best chance of winning seemed a little leaky. Circumstantially, it seemed like Avila did not want the horse to win his first race, and Berrio was just doing what he was told.
California apparently didn’t question the Chicken Brothers, but you wouldn’t have to be much of a conspiracy theorist to wonder if they and some of their friends pumped some serious cash through the windows at Churchill. Still, CD investigated and found no evidence of unusual betting patterns. Nobody produced the smoking gun of betting coup evidence, although it doesn’t appear that anyone was digging particularly hard for it. As far as California was concerned Avila did something he regularly did – bet on his horse – and not in an amount that justified going cross country for a betting coup. All actually very legal. So take all that for whatever it is worth. If it figured in Avila’s penalty, it was indirect.
Despite the fact that race fixing is a serious offense, especially with the betting crowd, California was far more interested in the drug situation. They ordered testing on Masochistic after the March 15 race. Two weeks later a CHRB investigator made an unannounced inspection at Avila’s barn and found Avila kept his medications in an unlocked plastic container on a rolling cart. The investigator found Acepromazine, “Dantroline” (sic) – the drug is actually Dantrolene, a muscle relaxant – and what they referred to as “Bute” which is normally Butazoladin but is sometimes erroneously used to refer to phenylbutazone. The plastic bin also contained unlabelled medications – these were not identified in the CHRB report – and two months later a subsequent inspection revealed the bin was still unsecured and medications unlabelled. The report did make it sound as if it was chemistry run amok at the Avila barn, and apparently this gave weight to the final penalty. It was evidence that acepromazine was available in the Avila barn (which everyone agreed was available and used) and that Avila was sloppy when it came to the storage of drugs. It gave the CHRB ample reason to conclude Avila’s employees were applying medication without consultation with the trainer.
The California standard for residual acepromazine in a horse’s urine is 25 nanograms/milliliter, actually a little higher than the RMTC standard of 10 ng/ml. If a horse had been given a dose of acepromazine on Wednesday, by Saturday afternoon there should be almost nothing left in its urine. The sample taken from Masochistic showed 973 ng/ml an amount that frankly was impossible if the horse was last treated over 72 hours earlier. That amount would indicate the horse was dosed somewhere between four and ten hours prior to the race. Avila was dead in the water at that point.
Whether Masochistic was given acepromazine because Avila was simply hedging his bets (no pun intended) that Berrio could ensure the horse underperformed without it looking more obvious than it did, 973 ng/ml is damning evidence. There is no plausible reason the horse should have had a level that high, not based on Avila’s testimony or the testimony of his vet.
The one thing about the CHRB write up I would take issue with was the statement that Avila has “a long history of violations for prohibited drugs.” In the interest of accuracy, Avila’s long history of violations for prohibited drugs were mainly phenylbutazone and flunixin (Banamine) both of which are commonly used, legal drugs for race horses, but for which there are standards for post race urine testing. More accurately, he has a history of medication positives related to legal, therapeutic medications.
The report also references 29 violations since 1990, although as best as I could research, some of the violations were not drug related. I found 14 violations since 2005, 10 of which were for the aforementioned phenylbutazone and flunixin. If there were prior acepromazine violations, as noted by the conclusions in the CHRB report, they occurred more than ten years ago.The other four since 2005 were administrative in nature. I’m not suggesting 10 is an ok number – at best it’s sloppy administration of therapeutics and at worst it’s looking to gain a chemical edge, but I mean, you already have the guy dead to rights, no need to hyperbolize. Just cite the medication violations and leave the parking tickets out of the penalty phase.
The report concluded that there “does not appear to be a clear intent by Mr. Avila to gain an unfair advantage over his competitors. In fact, it is really questionable whether or not Mr. Avila had actual knowledge that the horse was led over to run with vast quantities of acepromazine in its system.”
I’d respond a couple of things. No, he didn’t get an advantage in the maiden race because if anything the acepromazine would have dulled Masochistic’s performance. The point was apparently to lose in anticipation of a betting opportunity at some future date. Second, the sloppy storage of the drugs – really, a plastic bin? – the fact that some drugs were not labelled, and the fact that we never heard testimony that the acepromazine found in the plastic bin was specifically prescribed for Masochistic bothers me a lot. You have grooms throwing tranquilizers without medical guidance at horses so they can trim their manes? That sounds like a pretty serious problem. I’ll say flat out that prescription medications should be administered by a veterinarian AFTER he has examined a horse.
Perhaps CHRB has looked into that, but the seriousness of their efforts is belied by the fact that Avila was still storing drugs in unmarked bottles and in an unlocked plastic bin two months after getting nabbed. This sounds as much like a CHRB problem as an Avila problem.
Two final things. What should happen to the groom? You’d be hard pressed to convince me the groom was acting on his own. Even if he was acting totally on Avila’s orders, what he did was illegal. He needs to be given days too. If the CHRB wants to stop the administration of medications by barn personnel, make them culpable. I get it – you say no to the boss and you’re on the street – but the system needs to let everyone know if they are complicit, there are consequences. Second, it would be also hard to convince me Los Pollos Hermanos didn’t know what was going on. The fact the other owners weren’t questioned also seems to me to be sloppy investigating by CHRB. They could have done what all cops do – put the culprits in separate rooms and say the first one to talk gets the deal. The whole story would have come out and we could have had a punishment that satisfied the betting crowd too. The way it came out, it looks like Avila and the Chicken Brothers got us and the punishment after the fact is hardly satisfying. Masochistic is running next week and it looks like Avila will still be listed as the trainer.
Ok, I surrender. Avila by all the available evidence seems to be a bad guy in this case. Avila seems to have fudged the truth about a number of things, and there is no contention by anyone that the level of acepromazine found in Masochistic’s urine could have been something other than a race day administration of the drug.
I’ve defended trainers I thought were screwed by the system in the past and I will continue to fight for them, but I’ll be as clear as I can be. If you are using drugs to fix outcomes, you’ll get no quarter from me.
