What measures are in place to ensure that horses are not given perfomance enhancing drugs?

Question

What measures are in place to ensure that horses are not given perfomance enhancing drugs?

Answer 1

Besides drug testing, severe fines and penalties.

Answer 2

After every race a horse is given a drug test-many tainers have been suspended for trying to drug horses

Answer 3

Not nearly enough is done.

After every race, the winning horse, plus at least one (sometimes two) others chosen at random are tested.  

Some problems:

1) Some trainers have vets who are ahead of the curve on drugs.  Meaning they are using drugs that the testing labs either don't know exist or haven't developed a test to detect.  Last year, they developed a test for a drug called EPO.  I know one trainer who used EPO on a regular basis SIX years ago!  So for five years, he never had a horse test positive because they didn't even know how to look for what he was giving them!

2) Penalties are ridiculously light and are applied inconsistently.  Last year, Todd Pletcher was suspended for a drug positive at Saratoga.  If you believe the ONE positive which was reported was his ONLY one, I have some oceanfront property in Kansas you might be interested in buying.  There are also some trainers who are "needed" by tracks.  They enter horses and make races happen.  Think these tracks want to suspend these trainers?  Last year, the perennial leading trainer at Philadelphia Park was suspended four times--in other states.  New York and Delaware didn't mind throwing the book at him (because he doesn't have "favorite son" status there), but the folks at Philly would never come down hard on him.

3) Does post-race testing really solve the bigger problem?  If you bet $1,000 on a horse and he loses, you lose your money.  Two months later, it's determined that the horse who beat your horse was racing on drugs, and the horse you bet on is actually declared the winner of the race after the drugged horse is disqualified.  Good luck getting your money back.

Answer 4

I wish the answer to this question was more assured than it really is.  

For a fair amount of time now, it seems like Thoroughbred racing has been fighting battles with a certain segment of the owners and trainers who seem to operate hand in hand with pharmaceutical chemists.  If you go to any place where people who work on the backside of the racetrack congregate, you'll find it isn't hard to start conversations that lead to talk about who is using what to stay one step ahead of the testing people.

It's true that racing does use dope testing to try to assure that things are on the up-and-up.  But the problem is that the tests are very specific:  while they have a sensitivity that can catch some substances in the parts per million level, well below the threshhold for pharmaceutical effect, there are other substances they won't catch at all.

The people who are responsible for policing racing know this, and they do things like freeze post-race samples in the hope that when a drug test for a banned substance is developed, they can go back and find who has been cheating.  Even if they can't prosecute, they can let violators know that they're being watched.  

Some policies that have been instituted, such as pre-race holding barns to put horses that are entered in races under tight security, are a necessary evil.  (A lot of trainers don't like to put their horses in a pre-race holding barn because it can upset the horse, and that can lose races.  Trainers who are honest and don't cheat with drugs feel that they are being punished along with the cheaters.)

I don't know what the answer is.  When I was younger, I wanted to believe that racing ran a clean show;  now, several hundred newspaper reports and magazine stories later, detailing all the cheats that have gone on, I'm a lot more disillusioned.  It seems like when the cheats do get caught, they hire lawyers who can get penalties against them reduced to the point where it doesn't hurt;  and even if you chase them entirely out of the sport, there are new sharpies ready to come in, who have learned from the failures of other people and are ready to try a new, improved way of cheating.

The majority of people in racing want to run a clean show.  But there is an element that tries to get an extra edge with the help of the pharmaceuticals, and there always has been.  Maybe there always will be.