Level Playing Field

[richiebee]

There are Blood Horse magazines all over my place, but can\'t find the one with the editorial by the guy who wanted to designate races at a particular race meet, or to have an entire race meet, where all the runners are medication free. The author was realistic enough to acknowledge that it might be difficult to find enough willing participants to fill these races.

My twisted mind came up with an alternative which may or may not have been proposed in the past... award extra purse money to \"clean\" participants. Establish a purse fund, kind of like the bonus money awarded to NY breds who win open races in NY.

Award an extra few thousand in purse monies to horses who win WITHOUT Lasix. Or allow runners not treated with Lasix a 3 or 5 pound weight advantage. (Of the 25 runners in the Graded Stakes on Travers day, 5 will be running without Lasix)

Award an extra few thousand in purse monies to horses who win with extremely low levels of NSAIDs in their system.

I wouldn\'t hold my breath waiting for expensive super labs conducting super tests. To me, an analogy can be drawn to the OJ trial. Right now the good guys who want to clean up racing have an under staffed and underfunded DAs office, while the cheaters will always have the Dream Team.

Don\'t know if TGJB read it, but apparently they tested a frozen sample of Lance Armstrong\'s blood from 1999 and found evidence of EPO. The EPO was detected with a test that was developed recently and was not available 6 years ago. This is why TGJB and others are hoping freezing blood from thoroughbreds will have a deterrent effect..

[davidrex]

     Richie,
When I saw the title of post, I thought ...another pipe dreamer from this board.
     
The idea of rewarding people for not introducing outside elements to their stock is a way to use purse money as a motivator to succeed.

We reward our children when good and thus we are rewarded with acceptable social behavior.
Reward always wins over punishment.


       PARTYpokerON!

[Thehoarsehorseplayer]

I\'ve been playing with the idea recently for rewarding horses through purse money for carrying more weight in handicap races.  Just for the hell of it, let\'s say you offer an extra fifty thousand dollar winner\'s bonus for every extra two pounds a horse is willing to carry in excess of the assigned weight.  Do we then get some horses willing to carry some real weight?  Do we then introduce some more sport into racing by challenging some connections to accept the \"dare\" of carrying more weight?
So your idea for rewarding horses for running clean caught my attention.  The problem though, as I see it, it\'s kind of like rewarding your kids for not taking their prescription medicine.  In theory, a horse is on Lasix because it needs lasix, it bleeds when it runs.  Do we then want to reward a trainer who jeopardizes the long term health of his horse to maybe squeeze a drug free bonus race out of their charge.  Or let\'s say the bonus is only for horses who have never run on any medication.  Do we want to create a reward system that works to prevent a trainer from giving his horse medication it actually needs?
Yet, we all know there is a lot of hanky panky going on masked by legal drugs.  Maybe over time, bonuses would result in trainers finding out their horses don\'t need as much medication as they thought.  Still, an approach frought with the peril of never knowing for sure whether we are rewarding good behavior or bad behavior.

[davidrex]

     New York was the last bastion to refuse lasix(dutrow to you).The reason for change was lack of fields...Let the cheaters camp out in MD and let the good racing roll at the major venues.

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