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Originally Posted by Linny
ELA, I read your post often and usually agree with your points but here I disagree. You, as the owner hire the trainer and you are thus the ultimate insurer. I understand the costs involved and how hard it is to make money. (We had a recent discussion here on the topic and I took the position that the chances for profit should be greater.) Yet, at the same time when there appear to be trainers using illegal substances and owners continue to patronize them, at some point those owners should face some sort of consequence. IMO, it's the only way to get "juicers" out of the game. If they have no owners, they have no business.
I hear so many people on BBs complining about "juicers" and yet new people keep entering the game and hiring the same guys who's names come to mind when we use the term. The numbers some of these guys put up make it very temping, especially if you have been pouring money into moderate success with an honest trainer.
ELA, I have no idea who you are or who your trainer is but I assume that w/20 years in the game, he's probably pretty clean. Good for you. I also understand that acidental contamination happens and that certain circumstances occur that prevent the "clearing" of meds from the system fully before race day. These are NOT the circumstances that I have issue with.
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The rules are broken. They need to be fixed before they are misapplied to a whole new group of people.
Racing needs to have consistent, nationwide rules; needs to institute realistic thresholds for legal therapeutic medication as well as for substances that are more likely to show up in trace amounts due to contamination; and do what it can, given the inherent experimental difficulty in doing so, reliable information to horsemen about cutoffs for legal medication.
So often I see in forums like this people bashing away at trainers who are not in trouble for giving illegal medication with performance-enhancing potential in a time frame where it might actually affect the outcome of the race, but rather trivial overages of permitted medication, oftentimes such vanishingly small amounts that they wouldn't even be positives in states with thresholds.
Racing - everyone from the regulators to the racing fans - needs to quit grandstanding about triviality and get tough with real abuses.