National HBPA Out of Competition and Hair Testing Panel

LAS VEGAS–Out-of-competition and hair testing can be important tools in detecting rules violators in horse racing. But they also have some pitfalls and potential unintended consequences depending on procedures implemented.

Those were the takeaways from Friday's national medication forum that concluded the full assembly of the National HBPA Convention at the South Point Hotel & Casino. The board meets Saturday.

Dr. Andy Roberts, a racetrack veterinarian who is on the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission's Equine Drug Research Council, titled his talk “Out of Competition Testing: The Promise, the Pitfalls from a Veterinary Perspective.”

“Out of competition testing is basically anything that is not a post-race test,” he said, emphasizing that he was speaking only for himself. “… It's a legitimate area of interest to protect every single person in this room. There are drugs with very short half-lives, so it's very difficult to detect them but their actions might hang around for a long period of time. So we have an interest in wanting to make sure that every horse loaded in the gate is competing on a level playing surface.”

However, a new model rule approved by the Association of Racing Commissioners International could result in “looking for crimes that don't exist,” he said.

Roberts said he thought the ARCI model rule adopted in 2007 was a perfectly fine rule, one adopted by about half of ARCI's member commissions. He said that rule was intended for blood-doping agents, designer anabolic steroids and gene-doping. Model rules are those drafted and approved by ARCI with the goal of being implemented in individual jurisdictions across the country.

However, the new model rule expands the 2007 proposal “far beyond what I would consider to be the legitimate boundaries,” Roberts said. “For starters, this rule includes a number of therapeutic medications that many of us use on a daily basis.”

He also used the painkiller lidocaine as an example of a drug that theoretically could be the target of out-of-competition testing because it is not specifically approved for use in horses, “although anybody who is sewing fillies up in Lexington has a bottle of lidocaine on their truck” to use on horses who are not racing for some weeks, he said.

While Roberts said he doesn't think the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission is going to bust a veterinarian for that, “the law is the law. I think we need to make the law reflect reality.”

Roberts said he's also troubled by a provision that “other biological official test samples” could be required.

“What if they determine they'd like a muscle biopsy on this horse, which is rather invasive,” he said. “… Can they take hoof trimmings off your horse? Let's say you've got a 3-year-old colt and someone says, 'We think we can determine if you had this horse on one of these designer anabolics, but the only way we could test was to jump a mare with him (to get semen)?' How many people think that would be a good idea for a 3-year-old colt you're trying to race? But there's nothing in the rule to prevent it.

“I am pro good regulation… I have no problem with horses in training being tested. But we need to determine what training means…. The rule for the most part is pretty close to acceptable, and the old rule, in my opinion, was perfectly acceptable. But the devil is always in the details with these things.”

Dr. Thomas Tobin, the veterinarian and University of Kentucky equine pharmacologist and toxicologist, gave a crash course on hair makeup and how testing works. Among his points: the process is considerably more time-consuming than testing urine or blood, it requires a washing step and protocols for testing procedures for horses are lacking. Also: white hair will show much less of many drugs than dark hair.

Because the process can reveal the presence of some drugs for more than a year, mane and tail hair are preferred over the short body hair. An advantage in hair testing is that the sample doesn't require refrigeration and can be retained indefinitely when stored in a dark and dry area at room temperature.

Tobin said caveats include that a single dose of a drug with a short half-life might not be sufficient for hair detection. It also requires a relatively long hair segment and that some medications spread out in growing hair more than others, making it difficult to approximate when a substance was given.

“This suggests that it's prudent to determine the hair-binding characteristics of a substance before drawing time or concentration conclusions from hair data,” he said.