Welfare, Doping Conference Kicks Off in Florida

by T.D. Thornton 

On Tuesday, joint gatherings of the Racing Commissioners International (RCI) and the Association of Official Racing Chemists Association (AORC) will convene in Tampa for the three-day Conference on Equine Welfare and Anti-Doping Policy. 

Regulators, scientists and veterinarians will wade through overlapping agendas to address issues like harmonization between jurisdictions, model rules, and emerging technologies. Cobalt, the equine drug of abuse that is far and away the headline leader for 2015, has its own special section on the schedule. In March the RCI sent out a press release indicating regulators were poised to set a uniform approach on it, and last week RCI president Ed Martin told TDN, “You’re going to see us tackle cobalt,” at the conference. 

But as with any profession or industry, sometimes the most pertinent issues at symposiums or conferences aren’t the ones that percolate to the top of the agenda or get written up in press releases. Chief among them this week in Tampa will be the undercurrent that even as North America’s drug woes are mounting, the industry is becoming increasingly factional over how to best solve its problems. 

In a wide-ranging interview to preview the conference, Martin detailed numerous examples of behind-the-scenes work to strengthen the relationships between racing commissions and other government agencies. He also spoke passionately about the “serious, serious talent” of the industry’s lab directors whose work often goes unrecognized. 

But Martin did acknowledge frustration at how trying to banish drug cheats can be akin to attempting to “legislate morality.” He also spoke bluntly about how conflicting ideologies among well-intended stakeholders are keeping proactive policies from being broadly implemented. 

“There’s a desire for some to tear the house down, and I don’t understand how that’s a productive strategy to get improvement,” said Martin. “Our attitude is, if you’ve got a contribution to make, then come sit at the table with the people who are your counterparts, and let’s all make it. Let’s try to help each other.” 

Dr. Mary Scollay, DVM, the equine medical director for the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission, said racing’s lack of unity on key issues “looms pretty large” and is “a bad direction to go” if the sport wants to get serious about medication reform. 

“It feels like in the last 12 months or so, the industry has become more fragmented and is headed off in more directions,” Scollay said. “I felt for awhile that we were really making some progress towards uniformity. But I do feel now that has shifted a bit, and it’s concerning that we can’t have a uniform perspective. Because until we have that, any hope for uniformity in terms of regulations is pretty hard to expect.” 

Dr. Dionne Benson, DVM, the executive director and chief operating officer for the Racing Medication and Testing Consortium, said “it’s easy for us to recognize issues. Where the differences come in is how they should be dealt with. The difficulty in enacting [uniform] policies in different states is definitely a source of frustration for me personally. You always hope to be further [along] than you are.” 

Martin detailed three areas of emphasis where, in his opinion, improved cohesion within the industry could lead to better regulation: 

1) The curtailment of performance-enhancing drug abuse and the reduction of catastrophic injuries can’t be treated as separate problems. Rather, an over-arching whole-horse “equine welfare” mentality needs to encompass both. 

2) Horse racing should be careful about wanting to emulate human athlete drug testing protocols. The two approaches are so fundamentally different that adopting guidelines suggested by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) or the United States Anti-Doping agency (USADA) could be detrimental, rather than beneficial, to horses. 

3) U.S. racing needs to put to rest the myth that a national racing commissioner or federal oversight will be a panacea for the industry’s regulatory woes. 

Martin said continual advances in science are the driving force behind his primary point about making whole-horse health the focus. 

“We’ve made significant improvement in the last five years on the accreditation and capabilities of our labs,” Martin said. “Our lab testing is so sensitive now, when you turn off the filters on the instrumentation screen, you can see almost everything that’s going on with that horse. We can see from a post-race exam [irregularities] that may not have tripped any regulatory screening levels that would bring an enforcement action. We can see residual traces of things that were done to that horse that would raise questions in the mind of a talented equine medical director to say, ‘Hey there maybe something going on with that horse.’” 

Martin then outlined a chain of events that might happen once such a horse gets red-flagged through this type of veterinary audit. 

“Then you start tracking and following,” Martin said. “Maybe you go in do an out-of-competition (OOC) test. You review the vet records. You have a conversation with the owner, the trainer, and the practicing vet to say, ‘What’s going on with this horse?’ And if we can do that, and do that more aggressively, we can do a better job collectively as an industry to identify at-risk horses and keep them running from races that they shouldn’t be running in.” 

But right now vet audits and OOC testing aren’t the norm in many jurisdictions. And even where they are, manpower and money limit the extent of such programs. 

Scollay said she is comfortable with the “broad scope” that Kentucky has adopted for OOC testing: Horses that are trained or owned by Kentucky licensees; have started in the state within the last 12 months, or are nominated to a Kentucky stakes race or the in-state breeding development program are all fair game to be regulated. 

But Martin said in order for such OOC programs to flourish nationwide, the sport must push further to “expand the jurisdiction of racing commissions over horses in training in ways that are not now part of the regulatory scheme.” 
The type of whole-horse testing that Martin advocates would not only look for performance- enhancing drug abuse, but “the misuse and potential overuse” of therapeutic drugs in training. 

“We believe the way to aggressively attack the concerns that we have about the breakdown rate in flat racing in North America is directly tied to an expansion of our jurisdiction over horses in training,” Martin said. “We believe through OOC testing and veterinary record audits and expanded use of the vet’s lists, we may be able to more aggressively police areas of concern.” 

Martin acknowledged that the industry has no shortage of proponents who would like to see the WADA or USADA protocols applied to OOC testing in horse racing. But he cautioned that it would be a mistake to try to impose a human testing framework upon horses. 

“There’s a group of people that are enamored with what’s done in human sport and it’s very different than what we do in equine sport,” Martin said. “[WADA and USADA] have a workaround that I think a lot of people who are enamored with that regulatory scheme would like to ignore, but it is very real.” 

The workaround Martin refers to is the therapeutic exemption rule. He explained that this allows human athletes to compete with banned substances in their systems as long as a doctor certifies those substances are medically necessary. What, he asked rhetorically, would stop an unscrupulous vet from deeming a performance-enhancer as “medically necessary” for a horse? 

“I think that the therapeutic exemptions would be a concern,” Benson agreed. “For example, arguably every horse could therapeutically ‘need’ corticosteroid injections, which is what we’re trying to move away from. So we could end up going backwards.” 

Martin said he was recently perusing the lists of banned substances on the WADA and USADA websites. “All of those substances are not allowed in racing, and I’m talking about Class 1 and Class 2 substances,” he said. 
Yet, Martin elaborated, “They are actually telling people you can compete with this if you get a therapeutic use exemption. We don’t even allow that in horses, and everybody says that what [human athlete testing programs] are doing is better than what we’re doing. 

“I’m not trying to be critical of what [WADA and USADA] are doing,” Martin continued. “But if you were to take that approach and apply it to horse racing, it would actually increase the use of performance- enhancing drugs on raceday. We don’t allow our athletes to compete secretly under the forms of these substances, and they do. That is a huge philosophical difference.” 

Still, Martin said he respects the science behind what WADA and USADA are accomplishing and how it could relate to testing and regulation in racing: “We’re both chasing the same substances. We’re both chasing the people that are trying to manipulate molecules and beat the labs,” he said. 

But a meeting of the two methodologies won’t happen in Tampa. “We did invite USADA to participate formally in this meeting,” Martin said. “They chose not to.” 

As he tries to bridge the gaps between scientists, policy-makers and regulators, Martin is well aware of the ongoing debate within the U.S. over whether there should be a national commissioner or even some form of intervention by the federal government to oversee racing. 

But, Martin explained, the energy that gets put into arguing this issue would be better used if it were instead applied to bringing together all the disparate groups and individuals within the industry who say they want to promote the health of individual horses and the sport as a whole. 

“There’s so much debate and discussion that has gone on for years, and it has produced nothing,” Martin said. “You hear a lot about the issue of the lack of uniformity [between states], and people use that as an example that the system is not working. That is balderdash.” 

Martin said to look at the difference in regulation between the U.S. and Canada as an example of how little federally mandated oversight matters when it comes to eradicating the industry’s woes. 

The RCI, he explained, is composed of governmental regulators of horse and greyhound racing in both the U.S. and Canada. In the U.S., individual states set and enforce racing’s drug rules. In Canada, a federal agency has that responsibility. 

“And the results of the drug testing and the challenges [the two countries] are facing today are no different regardless of how [regulation] is structured,” Martin said. “It’s the same thing.” 

So the real issue is not the fragmentation of governmental agencies, Martin said, but the lack of unity among the various industry coalitions that talk a good game about drug reform but remain on the fence when it comes to committing to realistic solutions. 

“I don’t think I have one member of the Water, Hay, Oats Alliance that has bothered to come and attend this conference. Not one,” said Martin. “And this is an opportunity to sit and learn and talk to the people who are doing it. We have lab directors from around the world at this conference, and it is shocking. It’s almost like people want to pontificate on running a war, but don’t want to talk to the troops in the field about what they need.” 

Benson said it can be a challenge to juggle the wants and needs of the industry’s varied stakeholders, but those differences shouldn’t be allowed to stand in the way of progress. 

“I look at my 26-member board, there are certainly different opinions on issues,” Benson said. “But as a whole, the RMTC wants to move forward on horse health. And I think you’ve got horsemen, regulators and industry groups all on the same page when it comes to that.” 

Benson said the best way for owners and breeders to demonstrate their commitment to reform is through their on-track actions. 

“If [a cleaner sport] is what they truly want, then that’s how they should race,” Benson said.