Screening Levels, Transparency Among Key Topics Day 2 of HBPA Conference

Scientifically-based screening levels and transparency in how policy is made were among key items addressed in the Kent Stirling Memorial Medication Panel, held during Wednesday's second day of the National Horsemen's Benevolent & Protective Association conference at the Hotel Monteleone.

The National HBPA has long advocated for scientifically-developed screening and threshold levels used to determine if a positive finding is a legitimate rules violation, or if a negligible amount was inadvertently transferred to a horse or by contamination with no pharmacological impact on the animal's performance.

The topic comes to the fore with the Horseracing Integrity & Safety Authority (HISA) taking over control of equine-testing policy and enforcement as early as Mar. 27.

Bringing sensitivity into sharper focus, drug-testing and toxicology expert Dr. Steven Barker–now an Emeritus Professor at Louisiana State University after retiring following years as head of its state equine drug-testing lab–used an example of bufotenine, which can be detected in horses' post-race tests if (among other things) they ate hay with reed canary grass in it, and a flea.

Barker cited three horses in the Mid-Atlantic in whom bufotenine was detected at the extremely low levels of between 34.5 and 56.6 picograms per milliliter in blood and between 731.5 and 1,964.5 picograms/ml in urine. If those sound like big numbers, Barker said to consider that “the weight of a new-born female flea, prior to its first blood meal, is 450 micrograms. The blood volume of a horse is approximately 50,000 milliliters.

“So if a horse has 56 picograms per mil of bufotenine in a sample, the total amount of bufotenine in the entire horse is 2.8 micrograms–which would be 0.62 percent of a female flea,” Barker said. “So you imagine a 500- kilogram animal that has 0.62 of a female flea distributed throughout its entire body, what do you think the drug effect would be? Zero to nothing. And this is the case in a lot of the positives being called now.”

He continued, “…If HISA is going to do its job, these kinds of positives have to be given scientific consideration. Not 'Oh, we found it, we confirmed it, you're guilty.' I've seen that way too much. Are they going to worry about the integrity of the industry, worried about giving the industry a black eye for all these positives? When really the more important thing is the integrity and reputation of trainers, owners and the horses affected.”

Comparing U.S. Horseracing Testing Numbers and Human Sports

Dr. Clara Fenger, a Central Kentucky-based veterinarian and racehorse owner with additional degrees in internal medicine and equine exercise physiology, explained that in 2021, the World Anti Doping Agency reported 0.77% positive tests out of the 241,430 athletes tested worldwide, with 40% of the violations being for illegal anabolic steroids. A very small amount are from inadvertent environmental contamination.

In the United States in 2020, out of 243,627 racehorse tests, only 0.43% were declared post-race positives. Of those, 28 percent were for Class 1 substances, and most of those could reasonably be considered inadvertent environmental transfer, such as with methamphetamine and morphine, she said.

While violations in human sports were down 1.19% from 2013, U.S. horse racing rose to that 0.43% of positive findings from 0.34% in 2013, Fenger said. While that still reflects very few “true” attempts to cheat, in her words, she explained the bump in horse racing is explained by labs using their increased sensitivity to find irrelevant minuscule levels of substances that would not be called positives in human testing.

Fenger said labs that will enter into contracts to do testing for HISA must be able to detect substances down to a specified minimum level, known as Minimum Required Performance Levels (MRPL).

“For substances that reflect actual cheating, this is a great system,” Fenger said. “Because if one lab can find it really, really low, they can share their methods with other laboratories and they can all find it better…But for therapeutic medication, this represents a huge difference in regulations state to state, depending on the laboratory doing the testing.”

Underscoring the point of cross contamination, equine pharmacology and toxicology expert at the University of Kentucky's Gluck Equine Research Center Dr. Thomas Tobin offered examples of minute levels of substances transferring to a horse without direct administration.

One came amid a rash of positive findings for the seizure and shingles drug Gabapentin in Ohio, which has an “in-house” screening level of eight nanograms (parts per billion) per millimeter of plasma, Tobin said. The finding of 89.4 ng/ml in a horse's post-race test was traced to the groom, who had a prescription for Gabapentin and urinated in the horse's stall.

In another case, it was a dog urinating in the stall.

“It's now official in the published domain that you can dose a dog with Gabapentin and it can turn up in a racehorse,” Tobin said.

Alluding to Tobin and Barker noting their research benefits from data acquired through open-records requests, former active-duty judge advocate with the U.S. Marine Corps and El Paso attorney Daniel Marquez countered, “That's accountability, that's transparency. With the addition, the inclusion of private entities into the HISA rule-making and policy adoption, we threaten that accountability, that transparency.”

“With HISA and the reliance on individual labs, some of which are private, we lose part of that arm of accountability. Private labs are not subject to those (Freedom of Information Act) laws or state open-record laws.”

To view the full release from Wednesday's session, click here.

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HBPA Panel on Fixed Odds: Future of Wagering

HOT SPRINGS, Ark.–Dave Basler sees betting on table tennis in Asia and envisions it being replaced with horse racing in America's burgeoning sports books.

“We can fill that void a lot of times during the day so that they don't have to play table tennis from China or cricket from Australia–things that people have no idea about,” Basler, the executive director of the Ohio HBPA, said Thursday during a morning session of the National HBPA Conference at Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort. “That's not just attractive to sports books, that's attractive to horsemen and racetracks for the opportunity to increase our revenue.”

Eric Hamelback, CEO of the National Horsemen's Benevolent & Protective Association, at the 2018 conference cautioned horsemen that sports wagering was coming and the racing industry needed to be prepared. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Supreme Court struct down the ban on sports wagering. Thirty states now have passed such legislation, including Arkansas.

Now, he says the U.S. racing industry must turn its attention to implementing fixed odds. That's a divergence from the pari-mutuel industry that currently is the linchpin of American horse racing, while sports betting is based on fixed odds that allow players to lock into a price in advance of an event.

“It's here, it's on us,” Hamelback said. “Now we need to really move and pivot and focus on how to deal with it.”

The panel also included Louisiana HBPA executive director Ed Fenasci. Sports betting began in Louisiana last fall, with an online component starting in January. Basler's home state of Ohio is scheduled to start sports wagering Jan. 1, 2023 after passing the enabling legislation in December.

“Pari-mutuel wagering is not going to be in the sports books,” Basler said. “Fixed-odds wagering will be. So we need to take advantage of that ability to bring in customers and get our product in front of millions and millions of potential new fans.”

Fenasci said sports books have the ability to be more creative than pari-mutuel wagering, including with parlay bets.

“Who knows what is going to become the popular wager, right?” he said. “Two grays will win today at the Fair Grounds. This trainer is going to win a race and this jockey will win two races. You can marry a hockey game with the fifth race at the Fair Grounds and marry that to maybe a college football game betting on LSU.

“This is the future of horse-race wagering in the United States. Not this year, five years from now. This model of sports book wagering has competed very well with other forms of gaming. The parimutuel model has been eroding over the last 30 years. It's not standing the test of time when other forms of gaming come in and capture the attention of the customer base.”

Fenasci said the apps for betting online with sports books is “the type of interaction that is going to appeal to 20- and 30-year olds…We want shelf space on these new e-commerce sites. We want horse racing to be there prominently displayed for people who may not have had the opportunity in the past to consume that product.”

Basler said fixed odds could make “an unbettable race now a bettable race.”

“There's a graded-stakes race with six horses and a 3-5 shot in there,” he said. “There's a good chance the bookmaker will take the 3-5 shot out of the pool entirely and price everybody else as if that horse weren't in the race. There are a lot of things that we don't have the ability in parimutuel pools that fixed odds can offer and perhaps enhance our product.”

Former Ladbrokes executive Richard Ames is CEO of British-based Sports Information Services and president of its U.S. subsidiary SIS Content Services Inc., both of which provide content and production services to the betting industry. He said Australian racing went from being overwhelmingly parimutuel to a decade later seeing “probably 55, 60 percent” of wagering through fixed odds.

“We know consumers like the idea if they place a bet at 6-1, that's what they're going to get,” he said.

Panel moderator Michele Fischer, an industry consultant who spent years working for the tote-betting company Sportech Racing and now serves as vice president of SIS' American operation, said some horsemen are surprised to hear that U.S. races already are being distributed in overseas sports books. While the Stronach Group-owned GWS is the largest exporter of U.S. content, she said SIS is the world's largest horse-racing content distributor in the world. It is fairly new to the American market, however.

SIS currently distributes on a 24-hour cycle more than 30,000 horse races and 38,000 greyhound races a year at 118 tracks in 16 countries.

“The sports book wants to have a volume of content,” Ames said. “They want to have access to thousands of races.”

He said there are different models on how racetracks and horsemen are compensated for having their races in sports books, including a fixed fee, revenue-sharing or getting a percentage of betting proceeds.

“Why should we consider this?” Fischer asked rhetorically. “Horse racing had a fabulous year in terms of handle in 2021, the highest it had been since 2009. In some states, we have a false comfort. Purses are very high–you look at Kentucky with HHR (historical horse racing) booming there. It's doing well in Virginia. But when you look at the big picture across the United States, the simple answer is horse racing is not self-sufficient. We're using alternative gaming to support our purses.

“This is an opportunity to become more self-sufficient, because we're betting on horse racing–not betting on a VLT machine or HHR machine.”

   Rees is a horse-racing communications specialist in the horse-racing industry, including working for the National and Kentucky HBPA.

 

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