I’ll start with what I see as the difference between opinion and fact. Let me use the death penalty as an example. People who favor the death penalty may cite the need for the ultimate punishment for the ultimate crime. People who don’t favor the death penalty may make some moral argument or cite the cost of going through all the appeals. There are some facts involved – we can calculate what it costs a state to deal with the appeals – but whether that cost is too much or not problematic will rest on individual opinion. Facts are tangible – they lay before us. Opinions are not – they reside within us.

One of my readers sent me this and I thought I’d share it. It is from a Richard Feynman lecture on quantum electrodynamics.

“I’d like to talk a little bit about understanding. When we have a lecture, there are many reasons why you might not understand the speaker. One is, his language is bad – he doesn’t say what he means to say, or he says it upside down – and it’s hard to understand. Another possibility is, especially if the speaker is a physicist, is that he uses ordinary words in a funny way. Physicists often use ordinary words such as “work” or “action” or “energy” or even, as you shall see, “light” for some technical purpose. Thus, when I talk about “work” in physics I don’t mean the same thing as when I talk about “work” on the street. During the lecture I might use one of these words without noticing that it is being used in this unusual way. I’ll try my best to catch myself – that is my job – but it’s an easy error to make.

The next reason that you might think that you do not understand what I am telling you is, while I am describing to you how nature works, you won’t understand why nature works that way. But you see nobody understands that. I can’t explain why nature behaves in this peculiar way.

Finally, there is this possibility: after I tell you something you just can’t believe it. You can’t accept it. You don’t like it. A little screen comes down and you don’t listen anymore. I’m going to describe to you how nature is – and if you don’t like it, that’s going to get in the way of your understanding it. It’s a problem that physicists have learned to deal with: They’ve learned to realize that whether they like a theory or don’t like a theory is not the essential question. Rather, it is whether or not the theory gives predictions that agree with experiment. It is not a question of whether the theory is philosophically delightful, or easy to understand, or perfectly reasonable from a point of view of common sense. So I hope you can accept nature as she is – absurd.”

After the articles on Kellyn Gorder’s fine and suspension for meth use came out, there was a thread started on a site called Pace Advantage. Some of the intitial comments were predictable. Here are a few

• Accidental contamination? Yeah, that is what it was, I’m sure. Probably from those unmarked drugs.
• in addition to the meth the article said “Gorder also has been suspended another 60 days for illegal injectables and hypodermic syringes having been found in his barn.” I guess these were planted.
• dudes pic looks like he’s on meth

And this exchange:

• Player A – I dont see an explanation for that [the discovery of syringes and unmarked medication in the stable area] coming in the near future and if it does come, I do think one of the normal sabotage-esque excuses will be used.
• Player B – Wrong. Gorder gave an explanation the afternoon after this was first reported. It had to do with medicine prescribed a particular horse and he admits that it should’ve been long ago been thrown away instead of being found still sitting in his office.
• Player A –If thats the case I stand corrected and hadn’t seen that. That being the case, the explanation you mentioned was in response to injectable medications, syringes, needles and oral medications not properly labeled being found? All of these things had to do with one particular horse and they were just left in his office? You find this believable?

I’m not trying to pick on anyone, but these sort of posts make a couple of important points.

• horseplayers have achieved a cynicism that goes beyond simple concern.
• they can be unnecessarily mean. Was it really necessary or even humorous to suggest Gorder’s file photo looks like he is on meth, the implication being he was probably sharing it with his horses?
• It is common for the comments to start right after someone reads the headline, and less often the meat of the story.
• and looking at the last exchange, the presumption the trainer is guilty, with likely not a reasonable explanation or mitigation, weighs strongly in the minds of the people who post. The last guy even divined a connection between the syringes and unmarked medication that were found and the meth positive, even though the two things were unrelated.

Eventually someone referenced my posting on Gorder, which was different than the stories that appear in the Bloodhorse, DRF or Paulick because I interviewed Gorder at length, talked to officials, looked for feedback from the people who do the testing, and I made an effort to write a complete, factual story. The comments then started being posted on my story. This wasn’t necessarily typical, but it was one of my favorites

“this dudes credibility went right out the window when he stated only three scientists in the world believe global warming isn’t caused by humans. At that point he became just another ass clown.”

If you didn’t read my piece, I was making a point about how opinion has become the equivalent of fact, and I used the example that despite nearly universal agreement by scientists on the existence and cause of global climate change (climate change, not global warming, a passe term), it is somehow equivalent to say, nope that’s not the case. By the way, my attempt at humorous hyperbole was in fact over the top because the actual number of articles published between 1991 and 2012 that do not reject human caused global warming was 13,926, while the number that DO reject the idea of human caused climate change is 24. So the guy had a point, although it wasn’t that I am an ass clown. Sorry – it’s more than three scientists. I was wrong.

Now before anyone else wants to take off about climate change, there are plenty of things that could be argued. Are the models the scientists are using to predict change accurate? How much is actually related to human activity? The one thing that we cannot argue is what has been published. It is a documented, unequivocal fact that 99.9% of the articles that have been published supported the idea of human caused climate change. I don’t care if you buy climate change or not, the number of publications is what it is. Perhaps the 13,926 scientists (or more) responsible for those articles are also ass clowns, but it doesn’t change the fact that is what they published.

Once the bloodletting began, it was pretty unmerciful. I won’t go into all the detail, but in general somehow or another I was put in the category of favoring drug use (not the first time that has erroneously happened) and being some sort of paid lobbyist for horsemen or a horsemen’s group. Eventually the discussion got into my presentation of studies on milkshaking and cobalt which was:

• milkshakes may increase performance, but generally such improvements are seen in high quality male horses and aren’t going to be more than 2%. Studies have also found that some horses will run worse after milkshaking. Studies on cobalt show it does not have the same effect on horses that it had on humans and so far hasn’t been shown to be performance enhancing. HOWEVER, I FULLY SUPPORT STANDARDS FOR BOTH, AND ESPECIALLY COBALT, THAT ARE BASED ON FINDING LEVELS ABOVE THAT WHICH COULD BE DEEMED “NATURAL” IN A HORSE. In other words, performance enhancing or not, I don’t have the slightest issue with setting a standard and nailing the scofflaws. Given both things are so easy to detect, a trainer would have to be self-destructive to try it anyway. As proof I cited the RCI statistics that listed 14 TCO2 violations (most of which were not milkshaking) and 6 cobalt violations in 2014. Both these substances are likely to be distant memories in a short period of time.

I got stuff like this.

“So you talk to vets and phamacologists and we are suppose to believe all these vets and what they say just because you talked to them?”

“Let me tell you something straight up pal. Milkshakes and cobalt make horses run faster and longer. They are performance enhancing. You can slice and dice it anyway u want, but those 2 things help a horse immensely. Fact……”

“All im saying is milkshakes and cobalt are performance enhancers. You keep ur head in the sand and think they are not.”

The honest truth is that I’ve never given a horse cobalt or a milkshake, I haven’t talked with a  trainer who has, and I don’t have first hand evidence about the impacts of those treatments. All I know is what I read, and if that is revisionist crap, well I guess I’ve got my head in the sand. But, what does 6 cobalt violations say to you, because it says to me, we’ve got this one under control. If you are on Pace Advantage, look at the thread. It’s horrific.

Back to my original concern, that opinions trump facts. The posters say the studies are wrong, because they really know the truth – cobalt improves performance and its use on the backside is rampant. Pages of saying what I said above just fell on deaf ears.

The more disturbing part of the conversation goes something like this

• the alchemists are five or six steps ahead of the testers;
• of course we don’t know what these alchemists are using because we don’t know what to test for.

To be fair, at one time milkshaking and cobalt were the magic elixirs that trainers were using. We knew about them, but we didn’t know exactly how they worked biochemically on horses and whether they needed to be regulated. Testing was done, and the glacial wheels of regulation development turned, and eventually they were regulated. Now that they are regulated, the argument goes, the alchemists have found something else. And when the authorities get on to that, they’ll go to something else. We are expected to believe there is a bottomless well of undetectable, performance enhancing substances ready to find their way into race tracks everywhere, and if we don’t we are deniers, naive, or just idiots.

It reminds me of the folks peddling the acai berry. The pitch goes, for thousands of years it has cured everything from aneurysms to zoonotic hookworm, and now it is available to you. Being the head in the sand skeptic I am, I asked, if this juice actually did everything you said it did, don’t you think Big Pharma would have wrapped up the world supply of the berry? Still waiting on the answer.

My questions, which I think are relevant questions, are

• give me a sense of what these unknown substances could be chemically. Are they blood doping agents? Are they amphetamine-like agents? Are they steroidal-like agents? Do they affect heart and lung efficiency? I’ve been on the backside – secrets don’t last long in that little village.
• How come we, the bettors, know who these alchemists are, but the racing commissions either don’t know who they are or are just choosing to ignore them? Trainer A goes from unknown bum to super trainer, and the commissions ignore it?
• given the ability of modern mass-spectrometers to find picogram levels of over 1,800 substances, give me an idea how trainers are getting away with it?
• Given we haven’t busted any underground compounding labs making joy juice for horses, does that mean the racing jurisdictions are not looking for them or are just befuddled?

General answers are.

• We don’t know what the substances are, but when a trainer improves a horse by X points, that’s anecdotal evidence they exist. We can’t find them because we don’t know what to test for.
• Racing commissions can’t find the the bad-guy trainers because they don’t have enough money for enforcement (despite having the money to perform 324,000+ blood and urine tests post race).
• There were testing devices in the 90’s and trainers were beating them, so it makes sense they are beating the current crop.

I’ve acknowledged the existence of substances that can improve a horse’s performance, but the fact I am not willing to rest my case on anecdotal evidence that seems to cast me as an apologist or worse someone who favors drug use. Let me be clear on my position. ANY TRAINER WHO KNOWINGLY USES PERFORMANCE ENHANCING DRUGS IN AN ATTEMPT TO IMPROVE THE PERFORMANCE OF HIS HORSE SHOULD BE FOUND AND PUNISHED. If you remember nothing else from this article, remember that. I’d even go so far as to say, if they get caught using a poisonous substance at levels beyond the natural level in a horse, such as cobalt, regardless of whether or not it is performance enhancing, they should be punished.

I’m not sure how much more anti performance enhancing I can be. I do write about trainers that have been, in my opinion, treated far more like crooks than the evidence suggests, and I will continue to identify those situations. Frankly, I think my positions are perfectly consistent. Of course, that is just my opinion to which I am entitled.

The idea that there is a rush to judgement when the 200 word blurb appears in one of the racing sources, or that there is a wide perception that while there are some honest trainers (Graham Motion) there are a lot of cheating trainers on the backside, should be concerning to all of us. I for one would repudiate any argument that commissions are underfunded to do proper investigations. Say you are testing the first and second place finishers of every race on a ten-race card. Say in one race you decide to only test the winner and “save” the other test you might have done for your enforcement efforts. Zero extra cost. If you have enough money to do 324,000 tests a year, you have enough money to test horses from the suspected bad apples. I believe racing has a responsibility to respond to out of the ordinary statistics, like a trainer going from 15% to 30% winners, or consistently improving horses by 10 points. They need to tell the betting public, we’ve looked and here’s what we found.

You’re never going to convince all the people. But when you have the SUPPORTERS of the game convinced there is hanky-panky all over the backside, you have a real problem that has to be addressed NOW. When you have people who follow horses writing that they KNOW milkshakes or cobalt use are rampant, you have a responsibility to address that innuendo. When you have anyone asking legitimate questions getting pilloried, you’ve got a problem.

Whatever RCI or the states are doing, it isn’t having an impact on the public perception that cheating is an inherent part of the game. So I’m going to do my part to help.

IDENTIFY TO ME TRAINERS YOU BELIEVE ARE WINNING THROUGH CHEATING. I will pick one, investigate and report my findings here. No punches pulled.