Always back the horse named self-interest, son. It'll be the only one trying
Former Group 1 winning trainer Ben Smith has died. Smith, who has had well documented battles with substance abuse, is believed to have suffered a drug overdose. The trainer had a roller coaster ride in the sport, shooting to prominence through the deeds of his mare In Her Time before falling back to earth when […]
We have written extensively about the relaxed attitude to cobalt positive swabs recently adopted by the QLD integrity authorities. Whereas once the QRIC would throw innocent, upstanding men like Neale Scott and Darrel Graham out of the game for long periods and blacken their names after their horses returned positives to the stuff that were […]
Trainer David Moran cost Captain Hammerhead’s connections a Shepparton Cup and a $28 500 winners cheque after he was found to have hocked the horse to victory and it was disqualified from the race. Moran quickly made it up to the connections and saved Harness Racing NSW a half million dollar bonus cheque when two […]
Early last year Harness Racing NSW issued this author with a legal letter in response to an article we wrote about what we perceived at the time to be vulnerabilities in the integrity of it’s swabbing procedures. In the legal letter HRNSW’s CEO Peter Buckman laid out details of how the integrity officials of the […]
Call me old fashioned, but I – like most Stewards around the world – believe that a rigorous pre-race swabbing regime is the bedrock of drug free racing. This reality may be unpalatable to the idealists, but if they know you are not going to take samples that would detect spiked TCO2 levels then some […]
We wrote earlier about Cran Dalgety’s star filly Beside Me returning a positive swab to Meloxicam after winning a race at Wyndham earlier in the year. Well it appears as usual that we were right, for although there is no published record of either Dalgety having been charged with an offence by Stewards, or of […]
The B sample of the star filly Beside Me’s swab has come back positive to Meloxicam like the first, and now all we are waiting on is the RIB Stewards to charge trainer Cran Dalgety for presenting his girl to race with the prohibited substance in her system. It’s bad news for Dalgety, because if […]
Leading Queensland greyhound trainer Tony Zammit (pictured above) has been disqualified for 12 months after his star dog Valpolicella returned a positive swab to the permanently banned steroid Methandienone when finishing 5th in the 2023 edition of the Group 1 Top Gun Stayers at the Meadows. Nine of the twelve months disqualification has been suspended, […]
Queensland harness trainer Murray Thomas has received 2 x 6 month disqualifications to be served cumulatively (one on top of the other) after his pair of pacers Ellis Street and Lady Allegra both returned positive swabs to testosterone in two races that each competed in during the middle of last year. The testosterone in the […]
We have written at length over recent months about the huge disparity between the sentences being issued by the different states to trainers whose horses return positive swabs to cobalt. On the eastern seaboard its almost become a State of Origin style battle between Queensland to offer the lowest sentences on one hand, and NSW […]
