Stephen Mahon© Photo Healy Racing
I’ve known Stephen Mahon on and off for over twenty years and, despite the public perception of him, I find him an honest and sincere individual. In the aftermath of his four years suspension by the IHRB for the abuse of animals in his care last year I had a number of long telephone conversations with him.
I had initially been contacted by one of his owners who felt he had got a raw deal. Having read the transcripts of the initial hearing and heard Mahon’s side of the matter I tended to agree. The IHRB had built their case around the fact that a horse called Geoffrey’s Girl had been left untreated for a considerable length of time after sustaining a serious injury but it seemed unlikely from all the evidence that this had been the case.
Mahon subsequently lodged an appeal at which it was confirmed that this horse had not been mistreated by Mahon and all charges in relation to Geoffrey’s Girl were dropped. The remaining charges were all of a lesser nature but surprisingly the initial four years suspension was only reduced by six months and Mahon had his trainer’s licence taken away for three years and six months.
It was after this Appeal decision that Mahon began to talk about how he was in fact a whistleblower that had contacted the IHRB with specific information relating to the doping of horses by a prominent trainer and that in his opinion his subsequent disqualification from training horses was in someway linked to that.
Mahon turns whistleblower and then a matter of weeks later someone whistleblows on him.
The problem with talking to Stephen Mahon is that while he comes across as being sincere and truthful he has a very hazy memory of the facts. So hazy that the facts change slightly from conversation to conversation.
As Paul Kimmage wrote in his latest Sunday Independent expose on racing: “Stephen Mahon is hopelessly imprecise when it comes to times and dates.”
Kimmage’s double page spread is just a teaser for what is to come next week when we can only presume he is going to blow the lid wide open on doping within racing and a massive conspiracy to cover it up.
This week’s Kimmage article tees us up with Mahon’s back story and how he first came to be associated with trainer Jim Bolger. I’ve heard a slightly different version of this from Mahon before.
Kimmage also tells us about an informant ‘John Doe’ who passed on information to Mahon about a prominent trainer ‘X’ that was doping his horses with a cocktail of drugs. In the Kimmage version John Doe tells Mahon: “He had a winner last week ... He didn’t want to run him, he was on the powder and hadn’t come down, but he was under pressure from the owner and didn’t think he’d win ... he pissed in!”
I too was told this story, but in my version Stephen Mahon knew about this event before it happened and went to Lynn Hillyer of the IHRB in advance of the race with the name of the horse and the drugs it would test positive for.
Both versions end with the horse passing the mandatory drug test after it won the race. Something that shouldn’t have happened if, as we were told, the horse still had the drugs in its system. Obviously there is a significant difference in the two versions as to when the head of anti-doping became aware of the incident but ultimately even a standard urine test on the day of the race should have detected a banned substance if it was still in the horse’s system and apparently nothing showed up.
When Stephen Mahon told me this story he couldn’t remember one vital component, the name of the horse. I repeatedly asked him to get me the name but it was never forthcoming and despite my best efforts I couldn’t find the race he said the horse was supposed to have won.
During this period of conversations with Mahon he had transferred his horses to trainer Pat Kelly and was effectively continuing to look after them from there. When he travelled to the races at Tipperary with one of these horses he had another run-in with the IHRB. He refused to let their veterinary staff take a urine sample from the horse after it had finished third. All winners of races are routinely tested in this way, but very few other runners are and Mahon felt that this was another example of a conspiracy against him. Mahon was beginning to become paranoid about the whole situation and even insisted that the tumbler used to take the urine sample be turned upside down to prove that nothing had been placed in it before his horse’s sample was taken.
Mahon is convinced that performance enhancing drugs are rife within racing but has never shown me any hard evidence to back up these claims. So far it’s all hearsay and supposition.
Stephen Mahon by his own admission is no saint but neither is he the ogre that has been portrayed in the media. The old proverb “give a dog a bad name ...” comes to mind.
I fear that Paul Kimmage is merely using Mahon to further advance his own agenda and, while I’m sure Mahon is a willing participant, this is not necessarily what he best needs right now.
Perhaps next Sunday I will be proven completely wrong and Kimmage, Mahon or even Bolger will produce a silver bullet that will blow the whole industry apart but at this stage I remain sceptical that any such hard evidence exists.
