Sports cheating
Posted: Sun May 09, 2021 6:24 pm
I'm not a great horse racing guy but it's kind of mandatory here in Louisville. So I watched the Kentucky Derby (I even call it the DURR-bee and not the DAR-bee) last weekend and enjoyed Medina Spirit's win. Seemed like a brave horse that would not give up.
I see that he has failed a drugs test with 21 nanograms/L of betamethasone in his blood. That's not a lot but well above the detection limit of the test and certainly in the physiological effects range. Mistakes happen in testing labs (ask me how I know: I can talk about it for hours) so of course there will be a B sample, just as there is for Olympic athletes.
I didn't know - because I don't follow the sport closely - that trainer Bob Baffert's horses have failed drugs tests 29 times in the last 40 years.. He is clearly the Lance Armstrong of horse racing; and owners who deal with him in order to make a winning horse which will be worth $$$$$$$$$$ at stud are equally complicit.
Taking the Armstrong analogy: obviously, without the drugs, he was an amazing athlete and I'm sure he could have made a decent living as a team rider. But after the Oprah interview I wanted him impoverished and living on the streets. He had cheated all of us. In the same way I want to know why this perennial cheating trainer is allowed to live in luxury.
Horse racing has a long tradition or regulations that if the bookies pay out and then the winner is DQed, anyone who had the second horse gets nothing. I think it's the same in Europe. That's why, if there is an incident on the track where one horse appears to interfere with another, nothing is paid out until the stewards have had a chance to look at the tape and decide if it was substantive and the places should be changed. Obviously those who bet on the winner on the day are not going to hand that money back, and clearly the bookies should not have to pay out twice for the transgressions of the trainer. But I'd like to see a system here whereby the trainer has to pay out to all those with tickets for Mandaloun (second place on the day) from his pocket.
I think that bike racing has more or less recovered from the days when they were all doing it. (But there are still big clouds hanging over the Sky teams.) Baseball has (I think) come out of the MacGuire/Bonds steroid era. Or maybe they are just smarter. I hope that horse racing can come out of this. Obviously it is big business around here so it's economically important - industry sources say there are 60,000 jobs and $6.5 billion in annual impact locally.
I see that he has failed a drugs test with 21 nanograms/L of betamethasone in his blood. That's not a lot but well above the detection limit of the test and certainly in the physiological effects range. Mistakes happen in testing labs (ask me how I know: I can talk about it for hours) so of course there will be a B sample, just as there is for Olympic athletes.
I didn't know - because I don't follow the sport closely - that trainer Bob Baffert's horses have failed drugs tests 29 times in the last 40 years.. He is clearly the Lance Armstrong of horse racing; and owners who deal with him in order to make a winning horse which will be worth $$$$$$$$$$ at stud are equally complicit.
Taking the Armstrong analogy: obviously, without the drugs, he was an amazing athlete and I'm sure he could have made a decent living as a team rider. But after the Oprah interview I wanted him impoverished and living on the streets. He had cheated all of us. In the same way I want to know why this perennial cheating trainer is allowed to live in luxury.
Horse racing has a long tradition or regulations that if the bookies pay out and then the winner is DQed, anyone who had the second horse gets nothing. I think it's the same in Europe. That's why, if there is an incident on the track where one horse appears to interfere with another, nothing is paid out until the stewards have had a chance to look at the tape and decide if it was substantive and the places should be changed. Obviously those who bet on the winner on the day are not going to hand that money back, and clearly the bookies should not have to pay out twice for the transgressions of the trainer. But I'd like to see a system here whereby the trainer has to pay out to all those with tickets for Mandaloun (second place on the day) from his pocket.
I think that bike racing has more or less recovered from the days when they were all doing it. (But there are still big clouds hanging over the Sky teams.) Baseball has (I think) come out of the MacGuire/Bonds steroid era. Or maybe they are just smarter. I hope that horse racing can come out of this. Obviously it is big business around here so it's economically important - industry sources say there are 60,000 jobs and $6.5 billion in annual impact locally.