Bob Baffert | Horse Racing Free Tips

About That Connection Between SGF-1000 And Dexamethasone

When news broke last weekend that Medina Spirit had tested positive for the corticosteroid betamethasone, Paulick Report staff received several questions from readers asking about a phone conversation intercepted by federal agents. Court documents from the federal indictments of March 2020 recalled a conversation between trainer Jason Servis and veterinarian Dr. Kristian Rhein in which they were discussing a substance called SGF-1000, which prosecutors say was one of the misbranded or adulterated drugs at the heart of the case. Rhein told Servis that the substance could sometimes create a false positive for “dex,” widely believed to refer to dexamethasone, and Servis asked Rhein to alter his veterinary records to make it appear as though horses had been treated with dexamethasone in case of a positive test.

Read more about SGF-1000 in this Paulick Report feature.

Since both dexamethasone and betamethasone are corticosteroids, some readers wondered whether a positive test for betamethasone could actually be a guise for something more sinister.

According to Dr. Mary Scollay, executive director for the Racing Medication and Testing Consortium, the answer is no.

Scollay explained that the testing and confirmation process used in mass spectronomy makes it virtually impossible for one drug to be misidentified as another. She doesn't believe betamethasone is a false positive result, nor that SGF-1000 could actually have shown up as dexamethasone in post-race tests. (No one ever said the indicted individuals were always accurate in their intercepted conversations.)

Mass spectronomy works by identifying foreign molecules inside blood or urine and weighing them as part of a process called screening analysis. Those molecular weights are then checked against the lab's drug catalogue. The catalogue contains the molecular weights of known substances and is developed through rigorous testing of known drugs. If a molecular weight matches something in the catalogue, that's an initial finding.

Before the lab can actually call the test a positive for the substance though, it goes through a second process called confirmatory analysis. It's possible two substances could have the same weight but be made up of different components, so the lab must find out if their compositions are the same. In this process, the molecules of the substance are bombarded with energy until they split apart, and the ratios of the resulting pieces are measured against the catalogued substance.

“Each specific molecule has its own way of fragmenting,” said Scollay. “It's like a Hershey bar – it's scored in a certain way, it's going to break the same way every time if you apply force at certain points. When you go to identify the molecule, you look at the candidate ions, the ions that result from fragmenting it, and also the ratio of those ions to each other. They should be present in very specific proportions. If they're not, or if the candidate ions are not present, or even one of them is missing, you have not identified the substance.

“I would argue that if you identify the candidate ions in the right ratio, you've identified betamethasone.”

By the time a lab calls a positive using this testing method, it's justifiably confident that the substance at play has been correctly identified.

So what of the SGF-1000/dex connection?

“Maybe dexamethasone was in the SGF-1000, and that's why they said it would show as dexamethasone, but if a molecule has the same exact molecular weight as dexamethasone and you apply energy to it and it fragments, and the fragmented parts are the ions you would get from dexamethasone in the relative concentrations, I'm going to say you've identified dexamethasone,” she said.

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Commentary: ‘Neither Ignorance Nor Carelessness Make For Much Of An Excuse’

“First, Bob Baffert said it didn't happen. Now, he says it doesn't matter. He is wrong on both counts.”

So writes Tim Sullivan of the Louisville, Ky.-based Courier-Journal, who was one of a handful of reporters attending a Sunday morning press conference at which Baffert announced the finding of 21 picograms of betamethasone in the post-race sample of his Kentucky Derby winner, Medina Spirit.

Baffert's claim that morning was the the horse had never been treated with betamethasone, and he and his team had no idea how the medication could have been found in Medina Spirit's system.

Two days later, the story has changed. On Tuesday morning, Baffert released a statement (through his attorney Craig Robinson) indicating that Medina Spirit has been treated with a topical medication containing betamethasone for over 3 1/2 weeks. Otomax, the ointment indicated in that statement, was prescribed to help with a skin condition called dermatitis.

“Horse racing must address its regulatory problem when it comes to substances which can innocuously find their way into a horse's system at the picogram (which is a trillionth of a gram) level,” Baffert's statement said. “Medina Spirit earned his Kentucky Derby win and my pharmacologists have told me that 21 picograms of betamethasone would have no effect on the outcome of the race.”

As Sullivan wrote in his commentary Tuesday afternoon, the positive test DID happen, and it DOES matter, despite the claims of the Hall of Fame trainer and his attorney.

Neither the amount of the medication nor the intent with which it was used matter when it comes to disqualification of the horse: if a split sample test confirms the presence of any amount of betamethasone, Kentucky regulations call for both disqualification and loss of purse money.

Sullivan summarized: “Should Medina Spirit's split sample confirm the findings of the first test — as nearly all split samples do — Baffert's best strategy might be to claim mitigating circumstances. Neither ignorance nor carelessness make for much of an excuse, but they sure beat denying what turns out to be true.”

Medina Spirit Draws Post Three, Installed As 9-5 Favorite For Preakness Stakes

The first place-finisher in the Kentucky Derby, Medina Spirit has been installed as the 9-5 favorite for Saturday's running of the Grade 1 Preakness Stakes at Pimlico Race Course. Conditioned by Bob Baffert, the 3-year-old son of Protonico will leave the starting gate from post position three under jockey John Velazquez.

The Preakness post position draw was originally scheduled for Monday, May 10, but officials pushed the draw back to Tuesday at 4:00 p.m. after trainer Bob Baffert announced Sunday that Medina Spirit's post-race sample from the Kentucky Derby returned a positive result for betamethasone. Baffert initially claimed the colt had never been treated with betamethasone, but on Tuesday morning announced that he had been treated with a topical ointment containing the medication.

An agreement was reached Tuesday afternoon between Baffert's attorney and the Maryland Jockey Club to allow Baffert's horses, both Medina Spirit and Concert Tour, to run in the Preakness. For more details about that agreement, click here.

The full field for the Preakness Stakes is as follows:

Ram – D. Wayne Lukas – 30/1
Keepmeinmind – Robertino Diodoro – 15/1
Medina Spirit – Bob Baffert – 9/5
Crowded Trade – Chad Brown – 10/1
Midnight Bourbon – Steve Asmussen – 5/1
Rombauer – Michael McCarthy – 12/1
France Go De Ina – Hideyuki Mori – 20/1
Unbridled Honor – Todd Pletcher – 6/1
Risk Taking – Chad Brown – 15/1
Concert Tour – Bob Baffert – 5/2

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Hair Testing – What It’s Good For, What It’s Not Good For

After last weekend's revelation that Kentucky Derby winner Medina Spirit had tested positive for betamethasone post-race, trainer Bob Baffert outlined a few different methods for figuring out how the drug got into the horse's system, including hair testing the horse to look for the presence of the drug. On Tuesday, it seemed the need for investigative work was through, since Baffert admitted the horse had indeed been treated with a topical prescription that contained betamethasone.

Still, his suggestion raised questions about how hair testing can help in cases like that of Medina Spirit. Many have hoped hair testing would be the next great advance in racing's drug testing program, able to detect what blood tests cannot.

Hold your horses, experts say.

Using hair to detect the presence of drugs works because a stand of hair contains melanin, which gives it color and which carries a slight negative ionic charge. That means that when drugs go through a horse's system, those with a slightly positive ionic charge bind to the melanin of the hair at the base where it's growing out from the horse's skin. Laboratories can find the resulting band of the drug in question sitting crossways inside the hair shaft if they have a sample of the hair. Horses with black hair will bind drugs easily; those with less melanin in their hair, like grays and roans, do not retain drug remnants in that hair as readily.

Only the drugs with a slightly positive charge are going to bind to hair well enough to be detected. Dr. Rick Sams, equine drug testing expert and former lab director for HFL Sport Science, said this works well for certain types of drugs.

“Clenbuterol has a negative charge on it, it binds to melanin and it can be detected at a very low level because a lot of it binds to the hair,” said Sams. “Negatively-charged substances like flunixin, like phenylbutazone, are repelled by the negative charge on melanin and do not readily bind to the hair sample even though the blood concentration may be substantially higher than the concentration of substances like clenbuterol.”

Steroids – both anabolics and corticosteroids – are neutral, so they're not attracted to hair. Anabolic steroids are excreted through skin glands and may appear on the outside, rather than the inside, of the hair shaft, but that makes it difficult to say whether a horse was exposed to the steroid externally or internally.

A hair test would probably not detect a corticosteroid like betamethasone in a horse, because it wouldn't bind well to the melanin. If hair testing had been done on Medina Spirit, it wouldn't show the drug but that would be because it couldn't, not because it had never been given.

Then there's the question of gathering that hair sample.

“There are lots of challenges with hair testing that would need to be addressed and standardized,” said Scollay. “For example, I'm terrible at pulling manes, just terrible. I have a hard time with one pull or even two pulls getting a sufficient sample. I'm pulling and pulling and pulling and I finally get what I need. There are some people who just use scissors. If you look at those samples, they're not necessarily even cuts. If you're at the laboratory, you don't know how much hair remained on the neck between the site of the cut and the hair follicle itself.”

Without the root of the hair, Scollay pointed out there's also no way to conduct DNA testing on a sample, should there ever be a question about whether the sample came from the horse in question – and of course, with the majority of Thoroughbreds being bays, the color of the hair isn't going to be much help.

Hair testing also doesn't provide particularly specific information about drug administration, and that's why it's most commonly used to find prohibited substances that are never supposed to be given to horses. Finding a little band of drug in a hair shaft tells the tester that the drug was administered, but not how much was given, how it was given, or exactly when. A three- to four-inch length of hair represents about six months of growth. Most often, laboratories could give a range of time when the drug exposure might have happened but it's usually a range of days or weeks, not hours. Some drugs, like clenbuterol, require multiple exposures of a drug before it will show up in hair. Labs can cut the hair into sections to try to narrow the timeframe a drug was given, but that method isn't always a good one.

“The problem is hair sometimes stops growing before it falls out,” said Sams. “The hair shafts grow at basically the same rate but some of them stop growing, so if you do a sample even in sections, you're going to see a distribution of the drug probably through multiple sections just due to the fact some of those hairs stopped growing. It's an imprecise science.”

A hair test is only useful if enough time has elapsed since the administration of the drug for the hair to grow long enough that it can be taken in a sample. Sams said that in research settings, hair has been sampled using a set of clippers and revealed drug administrations from one or two days before – but that in the field, there's no standardized way to take a sample, and it's unlikely a test barn will be able to successfully cut that close to the skin. Scollay said she wouldn't use a hair sample as a basis to confirm a drug administration more recently than two weeks to a month after administration.

Clenbuterol was recently banned in racing Quarter Horses, and as a result, the American Quarter Horse Association conducts hair testing on horses ahead of major stakes races. There have been cases where a hair test has been negative for clenbuterol but a post-race sample has been positive, resulting in sanctions. Ironically, some of those cases were overturned by courts on appeal because trainers successfully argued that the post-race positive must be a mistake due to the negative pre-race hair test. In reality, Scollay said, it's possible two different labs could use different methodologies on the same horse's hair and come up with different results, neither of which should invalidate a post-race test on blood or urine.

Because of these inconsistencies, both experts agree it will be some time before hair testing becomes the go-to in the United States – if it ever does.

“You have to decide what your purpose is with hair testing; it's not going to replace blood and urine testing. It's not going to do it,” she said. “It's a regulatory tool. It's part of your arsenal, but relying on it solely – unless you're dealing with a prohibited substance – you're going to have a challenging time.”

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