HOT SPRINGS, Ark. — Three
perspectives on how to achieve North American uniformity of thoroughbred racing
regulations were presented on Thursday’s second day of the Association of
Racing Commissioners International’s 84th annual conference on Equine Welfare
and Racing Integrity.
James Gagliano, president of The
Jockey Club, batted leadoff and pushed for a proposed federal bill that would
put control of drug testing in the hands of the United States Anti-Doping
Agency — a move widely opposed by the major horsemen’s associations, most
racing regulators and privately by many racetracks.
Alan Foreman, chairman and CEO of
the Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association, countered that the Interstate Compact
on Anti-Doping and Drug-Testing Standards spearheaded by Mid-Atlantic states is
a template for achieving the uniformity that counts without adding a costly and
unnecessary bureaucratic layer.
The New Jersey Racing Commission,
which is part of the Mid-Atlantic alliance, adopted a third approach by
changing its laws to where the ARCI model rules automatically go into effect in
the Garden State — a method known as “by reference.” The model rules are
created and approved by the ARCI board to provide the blueprint for individual
jurisdictions in the regulation of the sport.
Gagliano painted a picture of an
American industry that needs H.R. 2651, titled the Horseracing Integrity Act,
to stay viable internationally by establishing a single authority to create and
implement a national uniform medication program while putting medication
oversight in the hands of USADA, which does not do actual testing but contracts
with existing labs.
“Until and unless states agree to adopt
the ARCI model rules by reference, all effective on the same date and so long
as the National Uniform Medication Program remains a living document, we most
assuredly will never achieve uniformity in our current regulatory system,” he
said.
Foreman said there is uniformity
where it matters.
“We drug test, we identify
prohibited substances and don’t permit prohibited substances,” he said, adding
that “the enforcement might be different … But ladies and gentlemen, we are
uniform. What we’ve tried to do over the years — and some people beat us up for
this — is we try to do it better.”
Foreman said that 97 percent of
betting on horse racing in America comes on states that have adopted the
ARCI/RMTC Controlled Therapeutic Substances list.
“So when they tell you that
we’re not uniform, put it in perspective as to who is not doing this, and does
it really matter?” he said.
Foreman said the Mid-Atlantic
states represent 40 percent on the national handle on a daily basis as the
nation’s largest concentration of racing, including at times when 12
thoroughbred tracks within 200 miles might run at the same time. As such, the
Mid-Atlantic has led the charge toward uniformity, with its regional regulatory
group mushrooming and creating what has become a potentially national compact
in the Interstate Compact on Anti-Doping and Drug-Testing Standards, he
said.
“Everyone who has skin in the game
at this segment of our business, and they’re not there to bring their agendas,”
he said of the current working group. “They are there to help collectively to
move us forward to see if we’re complying with the national program. Are there
next steps to take? What are the problems we need to address?”
Foreman noted a 23-percent
reduction in positive findings among post-race drug tests in 2017 from 2016 in
the region and a 27-percent decrease in equine fatalities from 2013 to 2017. He
said that four years ago only a handful of racing laboratories had national
accreditation, but that today only one state’s lab is not accredited.
“You hear all this stuff in the
media about chaos and confusion and lack of uniformity,” he said. “… Is that
chaos? Is that confusion? That’s compliance with a program.
“A compact is a streamlined way of
getting us all collectively to adopt a rule and implement it at one time. It
requires legislation in every state that wants to join. Maryland became the
first state last week to unanimously adopt the compact… I expect by end of the
year we’ll have Delaware, New Jersey, New York; and West Virginia will be next
year because we’re beyond their (legislative) deadline…. The compact is not
being created to become this new rule-making body.”
Compacts don’t have “opt-out”
provisions, but the Mid-Atlantic’s compact — open to any state to join —
requires that 80 percent of member jurisdictions vote in favor for a compact
rule to pass.
“It’s a protection device to
insure there is at least the ability to discuss and send back for further
consideration a proposed rule,” Foreman said. “… It is designed as the next
logical step, and that is: If you have a consensus and want to make a change,
we can do it one time and do it quickly. Our horsemen want it, our regulators
want it. It’s in everybody’s best interest, and it’s totally non-threatening.
“The Mid-Atlantic has agreed to do
this. And if nobody else does, that’s fine. This is not one of these ‘OK, we’ve
got a national thing here and because Nevada and Wyoming didn’t join you don’t
have a national compact and we’ve got to run to the federal government because
they’re the only ones who are going to get it done.’ We’re going to do it for
the people for whom it’s important.”
Ed Martin, ARCI’s chief executive
officer, cited states, including those outside the Mid-Atlantic, that have
approved various forms of enabling legislations to join a compact.
“There are more states looking at
it for next year, and you are seeing some concrete advancement on this
concept,” he said. “It’s not a theoretical.”
Judy Nason, deputy director of the
New Jersey Racing Commission, said her state looks forward to being in the
compact. In pursuit of uniformity in 2014, New Jersey opted to adopt ARCI’s
model rules by reference.
“When ARCI updates the rules and
amends them, New Jersey automatically incorporates those amendments and
supplementations by reference,” she said. “It keeps us current with the work of
this body.”
Eric Hamelback, CEO of the
National Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association that
fiercely opposes
the federal bill, asked Gagliano from the audience about his repeated
references to international racing and Grade 1 stakes.
“Are you talking about a class
separation in integrity and a variation in testing?” Hamelback said. “Because
you distinctly left out what I would consider 95 percent of racing…. We all
agree essentially that North American racing is the leader in the world. So why
does the international comparison continue to be utilized?”
Foreman added that in the
Mid-Atlantic, every lab tests to the level of graded-stakes protocols.
Martin said everyone agrees “on
most aspects of where we need to be.
“There is a lot of money being
spent on people to argue from both sides of this issue. I sit on the board of
the RMTC, and I look at the amount of money committed to research. I look at
the number of strains of EPO (Erythropoietin, used in blood doping) that nobody
in the world — in horse racing lab or human — can detect. And where our
challenge is with emerging threats, the amount of money we’re spending
disagreeing over what route we should take (to uniformity), if that money was
given to the RMTC to do research, we might be better off.
“This is a tough sport to police,
whether you’re in California, New York, Washington, France, Great Britain. We
need to collectively figure a way to pool certain resources and focus in on
real threats we have to the integrity of this sport as well as the health and
welfare of our horses. There might be some times when we just have to agree to
disagree. But in the scheme of things, they are relatively minor.”
Roundtable: Emerging drug
threats include “research chemicals” bought online
One of the daunting challenges for
racing’s testing detectives trying to ferret out illegal substances in horses
is the ability of people with a credit card and mailing address to purchase
from unscrupulous websites medications and drugs that have the potential to
affect performance in a race, said Dr. Rick Sams, laboratory director of the
LGC Science Inc. that does Kentucky horse racing’s testing.
Sams said that the some substances
showing up in post-race samples are listed as research chemicals “sold with
disclaimer that they are for research purposes only and not to be administered
to humans or animals. … Some have never been tested in animals or humans for
any purpose. They are sold on the internet and can end up in people or horses
that are entered to race.
“… We have to know the identity of
these substances in order to enter them into our databases so that we can make
identifications when we encounter them,” Sams said as part of a roundtable
discussion on drug testing. “Methods to identify some of these substances will
require innovative methods, and that will require considerable research
funding.
“Delays in our ability to find
these substances are risk factors for integrity of racing and also potentially
damaging to the health and welfare of the horse and human participants in
racing.”
Other areas of concern for the
testing labs: selective androgen receptor modulators (known as SARMs) that
appear to build muscle and burn fat but none of which are approved for use in
medicine; designer drugs that include synthetic opioids; drugs resurfacing in
racing samples after being discontinued because of side affects or addiction
liability, and peptides, some of which are designed to have an anabolic-steroid
effect.
“There are qualitative issues in
regard to these substances,” Sams said of such online purchases. “In some
instances they are impure. In some instances they don’t contain what they are
labeled to contain, or they contain too much or too little based on label
claim.”
Dr. Dionne Benson, executive
director of the RMTC, said the consortium no longer focuses on therapeutic
medication with precious research dollars. “We’re focusing on things that
should never be in a horse, and eliminate those threats,” she said.
She said that the RMTC also is
starting “double blind testing” of the country’s racing testing labs, sending
out doctored samples along with legitimate post-race regulatory samples to see
if the lab detects what her staff put in it. RMTC currently is doing single
blind testing, where the lab is told to test urine and blood samples that it
knows were prepared by the RMTC.
“We know the labs are going to do
their best work on it,” she said. “But what we need to find out is if your
samples that you send in as a commission are treated the same way…. This is the
only program like this in the world. We are learning a lot about the
laboratories and their capabilities this way. The laboratories are doing fairly
well. In some cases we’re finding that we administer drugs and none of the
laboratories can find them, which doesn’t necessarily mean that’s a failure of
laboratories. It means we need to do more work on that specific medication or
substance because no one can find them.
