Question of the Day December 1, 2013 Should there be global anti-doping rules that apply to the horse racing industry?

BBC Inside track on doping scandal - key questions for racing

Rumours and whispers whirl around horse racing like few other sports, and perhaps never more so than now, as it deals with the racehorse doping scandal.

Within the past fortnight, Mahmood Al Zarooni has been banned for eight years after admitting giving anabolic steroids to 15 horses, while fellow Newmarket trainer Gerard Butler faces a separate British Horseracing Authority (BHA) inquiry after nine of his stable tested positive.
continue to read here

NPR Story Sheds A lot of Light--Routine On U.S. Racetracks, Horse Doping Is Banned In Europe

 

 by Eleanor Beardsley

April 23, 2013

 

At the famous Hippodrome de Longchamp just outside of Paris this month, crowds came to cheer and bet on the sleek thoroughbreds that opened horse racing season by galloping down the verdant turf course.
Horse racing in Europe is different from the sport in the U.S., from the shape and surface of the track to race distances and the season itself. Another big difference is doping.
Drugs are not allowed in European horse races. But in America, they aren't just legal, they're widely used — particularly furosemide, better known as Lasix. The drug helps prevent horses' lungs from bleeding during races.

Enlarge imagei

Gina Rarick, an American horse trainer who works in France, says U.S. horse racing is out of step with the rest of the world.

                    

 

Gina Rarick, an American horse trainer in France, is grooming a horse at her stables in Maison Lafitte, lush horse country west of Paris. Rarick feels the practice of administering Lasix is ruining the sport in America.
"Every horse in America starts his day with a shot or two in the neck. I'm sorry, but it's wrong. It's just wrong." she says. "The Americans ... have these horror stories about, 'Oh, if we don't use Lasix they're gonna bleed to death and drop in front of people.' ... It's ridiculous. We don't use Lasix in the rest of the world."
Last month, the American horse Animal Kingdom, winner of the 2011 Kentucky Derby, had a two-length win at the Dubai World Cup. That victory, Rarick says, shows that a horse can run without Lasix.

listen to and read story here

Frog Juice: Horse Racing’s New Doping Scandal--dermorphin found in Louisiana, Oklahoma, and New Mexicio race horses

By Eliana Dockterman June 21, 2012

More than 30 horses have now tested positive for an illegal performance-enhancing substance that makes even the grossest doping scandal of human athletes pale in comparison. Apparently, horse owners have been paying chemists to squeeze frogs in South America and send the slime that drips off the amphibians’ backs to trainers in the United States. According to a report in the New York Times Tuesday, traffic in dermomorphin, a drug obtained from the skin of the Phyllomedusa sauvagei, commonly known as the waxy monkey tree frog, has racing officials across four states concerned.
Dermorphin has the twofold benefit of both numbing the pain a horse might feel from an injury and simultaneously rendering the animal hyperactive. “For a racehorse, it would be beneficial,” Craig W. Stevens, a professor of pharmacology at Oklahoma State University, told the Times. “The animal wouldn’t feel pain, and it would have feelings of excitation and euphoria.” The effects of this painkiller are even more powerful than morphine.
(MORE: Murder on the Backside: The Unseen World of the Kentucky Derby)
Dermorphin is only one of many doping methods that have plagued racetracks over the years, though it’s definitely the most exotic — narrowly beating out cobra venom, which has been used as a pain suppressant. But doping in horse racing is a century-old tradition, going at least as far back as a case in England in the nineteenth century in which a man was executed for drugging a racehorse with arsenic. But in a sport in which fans are becoming increasingly concerned over animals’ welfare and the methods used to train them — not excluding this year’s triple crown favorite, I’ll Have Another, recently scratched from the Belmont Stakes — its a blow racing officials aren’t eager to take. “It couldn’t have come at a worse time,” said the executive director of the Louisiana Racing Commission, Charles A. Gardiner III. “We’re fighting back federal intervention. We’re under attack and losing our fan base.”
Labs have found dermorphin in Louisiana, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, and regulators suspect its use in Texas. Though frog juice rumors had been circulating for a long time, officials had been unable to identify the substance until a lab in Denver recently found the correct testing procedure. No trainers have been formally charged yet, though racing regulators say we can expect a crackdown soon.
However, don’t expect a crackdown to deter cheating. Edward J. Martin, president of Racing Commissioners International, bemoaned the fact that as soon as you crackdown on one drug, trainers move on to using another.


Read more: Frog Juice: Horse Racing’s New Doping Scandal | TIME.com http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/06/21/frog-juice-horse-racings-new-doping-scandal/#ixzz2mFrEUGxk