Kerry jockey Oisin Murphy made his first visit to Listowel races a winning one.© Photo Healy Racing
The Luke Comer steroid case is set to rumble on for a while longer following news last week that the trainer has lodged an appeal against the withdrawal of his licence for three years and at the same time the IHRB has lodged a separate appeal against the leniency of his sanctions.
Irrespective of the merits of either appeal, I find it amazing that he holds a licence at all considering he has admitted to only spending three months out of every twelve in Ireland. It is a farce that both sides are squabbling over the period of time that he will be unable to train his horses when in reality he has probably never actually been training them and still won’t if his licence is restored.
This big issue to have emerged from this case is how it has highlighted a serious flaw in the anti-doping strategy for the sport. The vast majority of race day testing of horses is done by either taking urine or blood samples, but it appears that neither of these tests are suitable for detecting anabolic steroids.
Both urine and blood samples are only really useful in the detection of recently administered prescription medicines that have not fully cleared from the horse’s system. These would include antibiotics and pain relief treatments that are not permitted to be administered within a certain number of days of a horse racing as they can aid performance, but beyond a predetermined withdrawal period have no effect on performance.
Anabolic steroids, on the other hand, can be given months, if not years, before a horse races and any trace of them will have long disappeared from the horse’s urine and blood by the time it appears in a race.
You don’t inject a horse with anabolic steroids by accident. It is done exclusively to artificially improve a horse’s performance, so those that engage in this illegal practice are highly unlikely to get caught out by a urine or blood sample taken on race day.
In order to detect traces of performance enhancing anabolic steroids in horses it requires hair samples to be analysed. These hair samples can contain traces of substances such as anabolic steroids if they were ever administered to the horse. It was hair samples of Comer’s horse, He Knows No Fear, that started the whole ball rolling in this case and it was also hair tests that revealed a further eleven positive results for anabolic steroids at his yard.
If the standard urine sample (or blood) had been taken from He Knows No Fear the day he ran at Leopardstown there would have been no positive result for anabolic steroids, no follow up inspection of Luke Comer’s yard and no further eleven horses testing positive.
So, why is the IHRB reducing the number of hair tests it carries out on race days? In the last four six-monthly reports issued by the IHRB on their anti-doping endeavours, the number of hair samples taken at the races has been in sharp decline, 243 (2021 Release two) - 170 (2022 Release one) - 106 (2022 Release two) and just 56 (2023 Release one) in the first six months of 2023.
Between horse racing and point-to-points a total of 1,592 horses ran in the first six months of 2023, but just 56 of them had hair samples taken.
It is very difficult to have faith in the sport’s anti-doping strategy if the majority of tests being carried out cannot actually detect the most high-profile type of performance enhancing drugs.
Horse racing appears to have a silver bullet when it comes to the detections of Anabolic steroids, but for some reason it is not using it.
The Comer case needs to act as a watershed for horse racing. If hair testing is the way to detect anabolic steroids, the sport needs to concentrate on this method of testing if it is to ever categorically prove that anabolic steroids are not rife within the sport.
Changing the subject, I’m fully in favour of charity races being run on race days. They add a real buzz to a day at the races with hundreds of family and friends turning up to support the riders and they raise large sums for worthy causes, but the industry must be cognisant that these contests are also betting mediums.
This wasn’t always the case. Years ago there was no betting on these races, but nowadays all the online bookmakers price up Charity Races and the likes of Sunday’s Corinthian Challenge had quite a buoyant betting market.
Considering these Charity Races take place in front of a paying audience and are broadcast live on TV with punters betting on them, they either need to be run under the full rules of racing or at the very least carry a disclaimer explaining that they are not.
Sunday’s Corinthian Challenge saw the rider of the favourite ease down his mount when in a clear lead inside the final furlong and end up getting beaten. Obviously, all the riders taking part in this series are extremely inexperienced, but from a punter’s point of view it must be infuriating that no stewards’ enquiry was announced and no action was taken against the rider.
