We’d like to call your attention to a new page on our site: Yes, They Dope Racehorses (under “The Doping” on homepage). To introduce the page, I invited our colleague John Scheib to write a brief primer. John has been instrumental in assembling the information.
Why “The Doping”:
We’ve launched The Doping to expose the pervasive, illegal drugging of racehorses – and to make the public record impossible to ignore.
What’s Inside:
– Overview: A concise history of the federal investigation and the indictments that followed.
– News Archive: Curated reporting on the recent nationwide doping scandal, including dozens of the alleged and convicted individuals and companies who participated.
– Primary Documents: A large repository of federal wiretaps, trial transcripts, court filings, sentencing memos, forfeiture proceedings, and more.
Why This Matters:
Besides the obvious, doping racehorses with performance-enhancing drugs and other dangerous concoctions is banned by racing rules and in many states by criminal law. Yet enforcement remains wholly inadequate – only a fraction of these criminals are caught, and even then the penalties are essentially a joke.
What the Federal Cases Revealed:
When the first indictments were unsealed in 2020 in the Southern District of New York, few were prepared for the breadth of the charges against prominent industry figures. To anyone with a conscience, the scandal meant one thing above all else: animal cruelty.
As the federal filings put it, these cases exposed “a widespread, corrupt scheme by racehorse trainers, veterinarians, PED [performance-enhancing drugs] distributors, and others to manufacture, distribute, and receive adulterated and misbranded PEDs and to secretly administer those PEDs to racehorses under scheme participants’ control.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Sarah Mortazavi summarized the stakes:
“For almost two decades, including two years after his arrest in this matter, Seth Fishman cravenly pumped hundreds of thousands of illegal PEDs into the marketplace, and was dissuaded by no one – not state racing commissions, racetracks, the FDA, Customs and Border Protection, state drug regulators, the FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the SDNY, nor this Court – to comply with the law. The defendant earned millions of dollars. He did so on the backs of racehorses that were doped by corrupt trainers.”
What’s Next:
Even as prosecutions and sentencings continue to reverberate, the regulatory response remains anemic. That’s why we’ve assembled the record – so the scope of the harm, and the names and mechanisms behind it, are plain for anyone to see. Explore the document library in The Doping and share it widely. The horses cannot speak for themselves – but these documents can. Mainstream media has predominantly ignored one of the largest criminal “sports” scandals in all of U.S. history; Horseracing Wrongs will not.
Bravo! I hope this information can help individuals who think horseracing could ever be what they refer to as a “level playing field” wise up. I hope these individuals could understand that there is nothing “level” about forcing 18-month-old colts and fillies to gallop at top speed while carrying a saddle and whip-wielding rider and, in so doing, develop DEGENERATIVE JOINT DISEASE! The list of afflictions that horses are forced to endure goes on and on.
I also hope that you will be able to ferret out and expose the offenders who are banned from racetracks under the rules of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority and then go to Louisiana racetracks to continue to race and dope horses under the license of “Pari-Mutuel” gambling.
Thank you for doing this!!
Agree 100% Rick Bowman!
We hope you can document illegal vet procedures as well. We know of 1 particular mare who was raced in 2004 that had shock wave therapy used on both her front legs EVERYDAY for 2 weeks up to & including the day she broke both racing! Completely against, even then, the rules of racing. That trainer had his own machine & to this day still races horses here in Oregon at the bull ring tracks that are all that`s left. We know as we saw the SWT machine & its use on the mare. Shortly after that is when we left racing after > 22 years.
Thank you, Patrick, for doing this. This will make the public more aware of the actual scope of this problem. Most of us here look at this from a humane perspective. This is a cruel and inhumane practice. However, to end horseracing, I believe that it’s imperative that the bettors become more informed. They need to realize that horseracing is like a rigged poker game. There is no way to know what you need to know about the heath of your horse s or what substances he may be racing under. Also, at state subsidized tracks, you can’t even be sure if your horse is capable of winning or just entered to hopefully make it around the track so the connections can pick up a check. By making bettors more aware of this, hopefully they will realize that the Racing Form doesn’t even begin to tell the story. By making bettors more aware, hopefullthe cash flow will be diminished and this “sport” will become just an awful memory. If we attack it from both the humane and betting perspectives, then.maybe,just maybe, that wonderful day will happen.