DIMMER VIEW: Kentucky Derby winner is not a junkie

For those of you who follow my blogs, thank you. You know that right now I'm rolling out a multiple part story about a horse. Not really so chess related but a horse that made such an impact on my life that I use his name as my user id on chess.com as well as my e-mail, tijuanaboomboom@yahoo.com.

The DIMMER VIEW I offer today isn't about him, but about the situation of present day horse racing, most recently illuminated by the drug testing scandal involving trainer Bob Baffert and the Kentucky Derby winner he trained, Medina's Spirit.

In my view, I hold both Baffert and the entire horse racing industry responsible for the situation that poor Medina's Spirit is in, including the fact that he was referred to as a junkie by President Trump.

As you may know, there has been an ongoing battle in the horse racing industry for as long as anybody can remember with trainers and owners and sometimes even other connections driven by the glory and financial gain of winning a horse race. The incentive to cheat is present and the incentive grows with the size of the purse, which can sometimes be a million dollars or more.

So when we think of cheating we think of chemistry. There are other ways to cheat, too, but my scope today is about the chemistry. Horsemen will use anything they can use legally to increase their chances of winning and many will use illegal substances too.

Lets talk Lasix, which I will discuss because it is legal in some states and illegal in others. Lasix, which I take myself in my personal battle against congestive heart failure, is a bit of a wonder drug and can help my cardiovascular system deliver the essential level of oxygen I need to survive. It also has another effect: It can control bleeding in the lungs of horses.

In order to use Lasix where it is legal, the horseman must first show that the horse needs it because he is a "bleeder". In order to meet the body's demand for oxtgen, we breathe harder when we are active. God built horses with a body that can go from resting to all out exertion for surprisingly long distances in order to escape from predators. The pulse rate increase for a horse is well over ten times his resting rate when he is sully exerting. A horse breathes so hard such big volumes of air that during a race he may dry out the lung tissue sufficiently to cause a bit of bleeding and for some horses enough bleeding to be life threatening.

So Lasix enables a horse to perform all out without bleeding. Yay! But wait, what else does Lasix do? It does the same for horses as it does for CHF patients, it makes the cardiovascular system more efficient, saving my life, but also enhancing a horse's ability to perform. Naturally, horsemen want that and the track vets cooperate with what horsemen want. They are, after all, the employees of the horsemen.

So I had a trotter, Select A Star, who raced without Lasix until one morning after a race, I found blood in her nostrils, a sure sign of bleeding from the lungs. I asked the track vet to "scope" her, which is what the vet does to be sure that it's bleeding from the lungs and not just from a hard bump to the nose. The vet told me that he'd put her on the Lasix list based on my word that she bled, no scope needed. Nice to be trusted but if the vet is trusting all the other horsemen, all the horses at the track are going to be on the performance enhancing drug, even the ones that don't need it. Apply this idea now to all kinds of other PED's, including betamethasone, and the racing industry has to come up with standards of how much to allow in a horse's system, if any, for countless PED's.

Baffert has been nailed before for this same PED. A horse metabolyzes drugs and horsemen try to give them enough so they will get a "clean" test after a race. But sometimes a horse's metabolic rate is too slow and he gets a "dirty" test.

Adding to the problem is the fact that technology has become so advanced that we can measure in parts per billion, not parts per million making it now possible to hang a dirty test on a horse for something that is sprayed on the alfalfa field months before a race, unknown to the horseman who bought hay from that source.

We need to overhaul this system to close up the loopholes but simultaneously protect the horsemen and horses from unreasonable dirty tests.

And we need to do this to save horse racing from the harm it's doing to itself. And maybe politicians could limit their name calling to other politicians without involving a species that human beings have failed to appreciate for so long.