I was thinking about the whole Belmont deal last night and I couldn’t help but wonder...why would you go to the effort and expense to have an “isolation barn” at Belmont where you can monitor the contact with the horses 24 hours a day a few days before the race...if you were fully confident in your medical/veterinary tesing procedures? You wouldn’t.
Also - and I’m sure this is a question that NBC Execs are asking this morning - why would you have your strictest scrutiny of the horses in the last race of the triple crown? Why not have the same procedures at the Derby and the Preakness? This is an issue that horse racing has to fix.
They pulled all kinds of needless BS on the horsemen this year. They should be taken to task for it. All they did was upset the horses and make racing look bad. They were even trying to ban the horses from having cooked oats. Ridiculous.
They pulled all kinds of needless BS on the horsemen this year. They should be taken to task for it. All they did was upset the horses and make racing look bad. They were even trying to ban the horses from having cooked oats. Ridiculous.
They pulled all kinds of needless BS on the horsemen this year. They should be taken to task for it. All they did was upset the horses and make racing look bad. They were even trying to ban the horses from having cooked oats. Ridiculous.
Drug testing always lags behind the “chemists” who come up with new “medicines” to use. There has to be a specific test for a specific drug before any horse can be said to be drugged. Unknown substances may be found in a horses blood or urine samples, but unless and until a drug lab can identify and quantify it, that horse’s trainer and owner can’t be penalized. Isolation barns are also for security, as rival’s for the race can drug a horse intentionally to force a “positive” test. Every state’s racing board sets it’s own standards as to the amount of scrutiny horses receive before a race. Bill Heller touched on this subject in a book some years ago. I forget the title, unfortunately.