This is part of a new series we are piloting looking back at what was going on this week during a past year in horse racing history. Find our previous editions here and here and here.
It behooves horse racing regulators to pay attention to what's going on in other sports, even if the participants have two legs instead of four. On this week 20 years ago, a short news item toward the front of the Nov. 29, 2003 edition of The Blood-Horse served as a reminder that if you want to stay on top of doping, it's best to keep an ear to the ground.
In late 2003, the broader sports world was reeling from the fallout of the BALCO case. The Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO) was investigated by federal law enforcement as well as the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, which discovered the facility was distributing EPO, human growth hormone, and anabolic steroids to professional and Olympic athletes. Athletes who names were linked to the BALCO investigation included Major League Baseball's all-time home run king Barry Bonds, track and field stars Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery, and the National Football League's all-pro linebacker Bill Romanowski, among others.
Leading the USADA investigation was Jeff Novitzky, who would go on to investigate Lance Armstrong and was later part of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority's Anti-Doping and Medication Control Standing Committee. He has since resigned from that committee.
USADA investigators were given a syringe with trace amounts of what would turn out to be a steroid called tetrahydrogestrinone, or THG. Don Catlin, renowned chemist at the University of California-Los Angeles, helped identify and create a test for THG, raising questions in the horse racing world about whether the industry needed to worry about the drug.
Probably not, officials told Blood-Horse writer Victor Ryan.
Dr. Scot Waterman, then executive director of the Racing Medication and Testing Consortium, and Lonny Powell, then president of the Association of Racing Commissioners International, told Ryan they hadn't heard any anecdotal accounts of people using THG on racehorses.
“Frankly, I would be surprised if it was that prevalent on backstretches because it's an anabolic steroid and there's lots of evidence that what they are used for in human athletes do not transfer to horses,” Waterman said. “But that doesn't mean you don't keep an eye on these things.”
Part of the reason people in horse racing were concerned was that THG was known by the nickname of “The Clear” for its ability to evade human anti-doping testing. As is true now, chemists must have a known sample of a substance in order to develop a test for it. These days, that's because modern testing methods rely on knowing the chemical structure of a molecule of the substance they're looking for. Testing technology was somewhat different in the horse racing world in 2003, but chemists still required a sample of a drug – called a “reference standard” – to develop an effective test.
I asked Dr. Rick Sams, former executive director of HFL Sport Science Lab, about whether that initial belief, that THG was no threat to horse racing, was likely correct.
“We were concerned about it in horse racing because we didn't have any of it to administer it to horses to determine whether it was excreted in the urine as an identifiable substance and we couldn't develop tests to detect it in blood or urine,” Sams said. “By the time reference standards became available, BALCO had been shut down and [BALCO founder Victor] Conte had been convicted. We did not know anything about the origins of THG and therefore didn't know whether it was widely available or restricted to clients of BALCO. Since it proved to be the latter, I suspect that it was never available for use in horse racing and doubt that any horse was treated with it to affect its performance.”
Sams said that once a reference standard was available for THG, it was added to his lab's rotation of drug tests. The lab never detected the drug in test samples.
We now know, however, that while the androgen receptor in horses that interacts with testosterone and anabolic steroids is slightly different from humans, anabolics have the same impact on muscle-building through this receptor. So while THG didn't turn out to be a doping concern, other substances that mime anabolics can be.
The problem of reference standards is what continues to stump regulators charged with catching doping in the human and equine sports worlds. In 2017, we reported on Sams' concern that designer drugs – of which THG was one – are making chemists' jobs more complicated. A simple change to a drug's molecular architecture can help it evade even rigorous tests, and the broadening of the internet black market makes it easier for people to get ahold of doping substances shipped to their door labeled as “research chemicals.”
Sams' suggestion – then and now – is something chemists have known for some time, and it's something that was on display in the BALCO case: that drug testing is not going to be what stops cheaters in sport. Investigative resources, like those used by USADA, and those promised by the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority, are the only way to get ahead of the problem.
Netflix recently aired a documentary on the BALCO scandal UNTOLD: Hall of Shame. Here is the trailer.
The post This Week In History: The Doping Threat That (Probably) Wasn’t appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.
