Chuck wouldn't be caught dead in that liberal cesspool.

I agree

Yeah good idea, but realistically would any horses just be transfered to an assistant trainers name?

Anybody ever wonder why Lava Man ran so poorly outside of California?

I don't.

I would like to apologize for constructing the worst sentence ever in my previous post.

Not if you ban the horse entirely, no?

Do you think that's fair to the owners, who might not necessarily know what's going on inside the barn?
Granted you would think that it would hurt some trainers, who might lose some buisness from owners not wanting to roll the dice. But I really think that it's more of a punishment for an owner/investors of the sport who spend a lot of money on a stable only to be banned from one of the biggest race days of the year.

Maybe they will stop buying horses and investing in the game as well. I'm not saying all of them are innocent when it comes to these issues. But it's very tough to punish the people who make the sport go round.

It's a tough question. Are you really penalizing owners if they hire a schyster as their trainer? When you hire a guy like O'Neill or Dutrow, don't you kind of know what you're getting yourself into as an owner?

Fair question, but you would think that owners know what kind of trainer they were hiring. Also it seems that any time a trainer starts running good, people start whispering (usually unfairly) about the possible juice.

How do you feel about a guy like Pletcher?

Tough one. Obviously, the Wait a While case was a high profile one, but how many other obvious infractions has he had?

The owners do suffer consequences in that the purse money must be returned on a positive test .

Not sure, but obviously he's one of the first names that comes up when the whispers begin. I just brought him up in reference to you calling the two other guys schysters.
I'm really not a big Dutrow fan and as far as O'Neill goes, I just don't follow the circuit close enough to have an opinion. Regurdless, I'm in no position to accuse or spread rumors of anybody cheating. I do believe that if I did own a horse, I would have no issue with it being in the Pletcher barn.

They kind of go hand in hand. But it already seems like the betting intrests of the sport gets the short end of the stick on a consistent basis and the majority of them continue to come back. Not sure that would happen if it was the owners who were consistently getting penalized especially for things that they might not even know about. I think that they would just take their ball and go home.

Yeah, I agree that if I were an owner, I'd love to have a horse in the Pletcher barn. The problem is that aside from like Mandella and one or two others, who is really clean out there anymore in terms of zero drug infractions? Anybody? Sheppard maybe?

See, it's a bit different out here. One of the reasons they play paddy cake with them (out here) is the lack of horses. O'neil knows that. His brother knows that. This eats away at the power of the authorities out here.

Maybe I'm naive, but I want to believe that the majority of trainers are playing by the rules.
But as crazy as it sounds, it's something that I really don't give much thought to. It's out of my control, so I just play the races accordingly. It's just another handicapping angle that you have to factor in.

Oh, believe you, me, it doesn't effect how I play a race in slightest. It just seems to me that every major trainer out there has had some sort of reprimand in their careers, even guys like Mott. I was literally trying to think of some very high profile trainers who've never been fined and/or suspended for some sort of infraction of this sort.