Friday, December 20, 2013

Gerard Butler drugs case a much darker story than racing imagined The abuse of horses in trainer's care has stunned the sport and the often unshockable town of Newmarket

The final chapter in the 10-month Sungate story was expected to be about an illegal drug, a vet who should have known better, one trainer – Gerard Butler – who pushed it too far and nine more trainers, eight of whom melted back into the Newmarket establishment with their anonymity and reputations intact.
It turned out to be the start of another, much darker story, in the time it took to read through the 4,000-word findings of the BHA's disciplinary panel and discover just how low Butler was prepared to sink.
We knew in February, by the trainer's own admission, that his horses had received Sungate, which contains the banned anabolic steroid stanozolol, on the advice of his vet. We knew too that Butler had, he said, bought and injected Sungate into several horses himself. This was not only reckless, due to the risk of infection or injury, but also an apparently criminal act, yet even this, it turns out, was scarcely the half of it.
continue to read here

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