Racing galore, some of it drug-free

Big weekend of racing coming up.  The Breeders' Cup Friday and Saturday.  VRC Derby Day on Saturday.  The Vertem Futurity at Newcastle (AW) on Friday night.  Down Royal Friday and Saturday.  Big races in Sydney on Saturday.  Newmarket's last meeting of the year, Friday and Saturday.  The Bet365 Charlie Hall Chase at Wetherby on Saturday afternoon.  And Chelmsford on Saturday night, where The Simple Truth (second in this picture, taken yesterday) will have his third start by running in a seven-furlong two-year-olds' novices' race and Ethics Boy (leading in this picture) will make his debut by contesting a three-, four-, five- and six-year-olds' seller over 10 furlongs.  The form book suggests it would be hard to fancy The Simple Truth, but I hope that he'll take a step in the right direction.  The fact that Ethics Boy is starting out in selling company suggests that his home-work hasn't been special, but I hope that we might see some promise.

Neither horse will be running on either Bute or Lasix.  Nor will the horses racing at Santa Anita trained by Roger Varian, Richard Fahey, Karl Burke, Jessica Harrington or Carlos Laffon-Parias, nor the horses trained in Japan and Korea.  The others will, though. I wouldn't knock the European trainers who run horses there on these drugs; rather, I would give particular plaudits to those who don't. The thing is that it's a very tough decision, particularly as regards Lasix: do you do the right thing, or do you arguably give your horse a better chance by giving him a powerful diuretic which acts as a performance-enhancer by reducing the horse's bodyweight, even though you know that it's the wrong, albeit legal, thing to do?

What would you do if faced with that dilemma?  What would I do?  I don't know.  Obviously the ultimate responsibility lies with the horse's owner because (one hopes) no trainer would run a horse on Lasix if the owner did not want to use it or run without it if the owner wanted it.  But if the decision was yours, what would you do?  It's a tough one, isn't it, when there is such big money at stake?  Basically, I think that it's unfair on European trainers to be put in this situation: the decision should be out of their (our) hands.  If you train on a British or Irish license, you should not have the option of running horses on Lasix or Bute, irrespective of where the race is taking place.

We're meant to be a drug-free jurisdiction. There's no excuse for the BHA or IHA abdicating the responsibility of the lead which they could and should be taking on this one.  It would be easy to do, to make it a condition of being granted a license by one or other of these authorities that you race your horses drug-free, wherever you race them. British / Irish racing would be the winner as we would be seen as actually meaning the drug-free mantra which we spout, rather than just pretending to take it seriously.  And British and Irish trainers would be the particular winners, or the ones with horses good enough to run in the USA anyway, as they would be spared the horrible moral dilemma which those running horses at Santa Anita this weekend have had to face.