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EARLY one morning at trackwork at a provincial Victorian racecourse last season, a small-time galloping trainer boasted to his buddies: “I found a new one.”
He wasn’t talking about a new horse in the string he was preparing to campaign interstate. He was talking about cobalt chloride, latest in the line of illicit performance-enhancing drugs that have crept into Australian racing from the United States, where drug cheating is rife in a game undermined by reputed mobster connections.
But it’s not just gangsters who cheat, and not only in America. Everyone wants “the edge” in any sport where money and prestige are up for grabs. Among those prepared to bend the rules, cobalt is all the rage.
Or it was until three of Australia’s best-known thoroughbred trainers were named this week as having horses that tested positive for it.
Peter Moody of Black Caviar fame, Melbourne Cup-winning Mark Kavanagh and Cox Plate trainer Danny O’Brien are all entitled to the benefit of the doubt. So are father-and-son team Lee and Shannon Hope, who also face the threat of suspension.
But the fact is there has been a buzz about cobalt in Victorian racing for almost two years, and before that about the blood-doping agent EPO and its synthetic cousin, DPO.
The Sunday Herald Sun published a wide-ranging expose of EPO doping during the 2012 spring carnival.
The story sparked controversy in both horse racing codes, as it suggested trainers exploited the same drugs Lance Armstrong used to win a barely credible number of Tours de France and other big bike races. It named harness racing “legends” Bob and Vinnie Knight as pioneers of EPO cheating in Australia.
Cobalt chloride is another variation on the EPO family of drugs, which create extra red blood cells, which in turn allow the blood to carry more oxygen — an automatic boost to stamina.
Such drugs can’t make slow horses fast, but the right amount can make them “braver”: they run harder for longer in the home stretch and “hit the line” hard instead of fading.
As such, EPO and cobalt are more suitable for harness horses and stayers than for sprinters — a fact that already has cynics scanning the results of big staying races of recent years, trying to pick the equine Lance Armstrongs from the “cleanskins”.
Extra cobalt mimics the effect of EPO by spawning extra red blood cells. Too many red blood cells can be deadly, as the cycling fraternity discovered tragically in the 1980s when several European cyclists died because their overloaded blood turned to “sludge” and stopped their hearts.
It’s said in racing that drugs from the US, often sourced at the Meadowlands racing and harness centre in New Jersey, find their way into Australian racing.
The scandal-plagued NSW Harness Racing authorities moved quickly to ban elevated levels of cobalt in December 2013, a move followed by Racing Victoria last April — but not by Harness Racing Victoria. No Australian racing body owns the scientific equipment to test for cobalt, meaning the recent batch of Victorian tests were done at a Perth commercial laboratory, with check tests done in Hong Kong.
The death of a successful pacer called Talk To The Hand at a Bendigo race meeting in August 2013 threw up rumours it had been overdosed with an illicit drug.
The horse was withdrawn just before its race. It was so distressed it was euthanised on course by the club veterinary steward, who was later suspended for a year in a strange decision that saw the trainer and owner suspended for only six months for lying that the horse had died of unknown causes the next morning.
Intriguingly, the horse’s body was swiftly removed, taken to a farm more than 200km away, and buried with asbestos pipes. Despite the asbestos, stewards eventually exhumed the animal’s decaying body and later stated that tests revealed no sign of a chloride overdose or any other illicit substance.
But the smell lingers. Now it has spread to the galloping fraternity. As the story unfolds, it could provide at least one shocking result.
He wasn’t talking about a new horse in the string he was preparing to campaign interstate. He was talking about cobalt chloride, latest in the line of illicit performance-enhancing drugs that have crept into Australian racing from the United States, where drug cheating is rife in a game undermined by reputed mobster connections.
But it’s not just gangsters who cheat, and not only in America. Everyone wants “the edge” in any sport where money and prestige are up for grabs. Among those prepared to bend the rules, cobalt is all the rage.
Or it was until three of Australia’s best-known thoroughbred trainers were named this week as having horses that tested positive for it.
Peter Moody of Black Caviar fame, Melbourne Cup-winning Mark Kavanagh and Cox Plate trainer Danny O’Brien are all entitled to the benefit of the doubt. So are father-and-son team Lee and Shannon Hope, who also face the threat of suspension.
But the fact is there has been a buzz about cobalt in Victorian racing for almost two years, and before that about the blood-doping agent EPO and its synthetic cousin, DPO.
The Sunday Herald Sun published a wide-ranging expose of EPO doping during the 2012 spring carnival.
The story sparked controversy in both horse racing codes, as it suggested trainers exploited the same drugs Lance Armstrong used to win a barely credible number of Tours de France and other big bike races. It named harness racing “legends” Bob and Vinnie Knight as pioneers of EPO cheating in Australia.
Cobalt chloride is another variation on the EPO family of drugs, which create extra red blood cells, which in turn allow the blood to carry more oxygen — an automatic boost to stamina.
Such drugs can’t make slow horses fast, but the right amount can make them “braver”: they run harder for longer in the home stretch and “hit the line” hard instead of fading.
As such, EPO and cobalt are more suitable for harness horses and stayers than for sprinters — a fact that already has cynics scanning the results of big staying races of recent years, trying to pick the equine Lance Armstrongs from the “cleanskins”.
Extra cobalt mimics the effect of EPO by spawning extra red blood cells. Too many red blood cells can be deadly, as the cycling fraternity discovered tragically in the 1980s when several European cyclists died because their overloaded blood turned to “sludge” and stopped their hearts.
It’s said in racing that drugs from the US, often sourced at the Meadowlands racing and harness centre in New Jersey, find their way into Australian racing.
The scandal-plagued NSW Harness Racing authorities moved quickly to ban elevated levels of cobalt in December 2013, a move followed by Racing Victoria last April — but not by Harness Racing Victoria. No Australian racing body owns the scientific equipment to test for cobalt, meaning the recent batch of Victorian tests were done at a Perth commercial laboratory, with check tests done in Hong Kong.
The death of a successful pacer called Talk To The Hand at a Bendigo race meeting in August 2013 threw up rumours it had been overdosed with an illicit drug.
The horse was withdrawn just before its race. It was so distressed it was euthanised on course by the club veterinary steward, who was later suspended for a year in a strange decision that saw the trainer and owner suspended for only six months for lying that the horse had died of unknown causes the next morning.
Intriguingly, the horse’s body was swiftly removed, taken to a farm more than 200km away, and buried with asbestos pipes. Despite the asbestos, stewards eventually exhumed the animal’s decaying body and later stated that tests revealed no sign of a chloride overdose or any other illicit substance.
But the smell lingers. Now it has spread to the galloping fraternity. As the story unfolds, it could provide at least one shocking result.
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