Racing should follow cycling's cue (Andy Beyer)

[somerfrost]

Originally Posted by eurobounce

I disagree with one thing Somer--I think drug problem in racing is on the same level as cycling, if not worse. I agree 100% on national, well defined, clear rules and punishments. What I think should happen is this:

If a horse tests positive for an illegal drug
1) Ban the trainer for 3 years.
2) Ban the vet who administered the drug for 3 years

If a trainers horse tests positive a 2nd time
1) Ban the trainer for ife
2) Ban the vet for life
3) Ban the owner for 1 year.

I say you ban the owner because the owner is where the buck falls. They pay the bills, and all parties should be held accountable.

Well...I would focus more on stopping the administration of drugs than on punishment (no problem banning the guilty as I said before). I think we should first severely limit the number of drugs allowed to be administered to any horse in training...bute, pain meds for aches and pains, lasix for bleeders are necessary evils but many others could be eliminated imo. Then, accurate records must be maintained listing every drug utilized on every horse. These would be presented to racing authorities prior to every race...in a perfect world, we'd have the technology to test at that point to insure that the drugs in question don't exceed specified limits...if they do, the horse would be scratched. This would eliminate the advantage of cheating using said drugs. I would consider slight overages to be mistakes rather than attempts to cheat unless a pattern of same is detected. After the race, testing would be for all drugs and any positive for any drug not on the trainer's list of meds being used would mean big trouble! Still, investigation would be needed to insure a stable hand didn't adminster the wrong med by mistake or a rival didn't spike a horse's food or water etc...with that in place, aggressive penalties would be fair!