Biancone gets Kentucky license reinstated

Patrick Biancone, the veteran trainer who served a one-year suspension after three vials of cobra venom were found in a tack room in his Keeneland barn in June 2007, was granted a conditional license to train in Kentucky during a Tuesday meeting of the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission in Lexington, Ky.

The license comes with the stipulation that if Biancone incurs certain medication violations or is found to have falsified his license application in Kentucky or any other jurisdiction, the license will be revoked, following due process.

Biancone said recently while in Florida that he hopes to run horses at the five-day Kentucky Downs meet that runs Sept. 2-14, and at the Keeneland fall meet (Oct. 6-28). His next starter in Kentucky will be his first since he ran Her Majesty in the Raven Run at Keeneland on Oct. 20, 2007, shortly before his suspension went into effect.

Biancone, 65, has been licensed in at least 10 other states since the Kentucky suspension expired, competing primarily in California and Florida since November 2008. He said Monday afternoon by text message from Saratoga that he was scheduled to travel overnight to Ireland and that he expected to receive word of the commission’s decision there. He added he would not have legal representation at the commission meeting.

Biancone’s business has suffered substantially since the cobra venom case. His statistics peaked in 2006, when he had 66 wins, including 15 in graded stakes, and stable earnings of $5.3 million. At Keeneland, he was the leading trainer at the 2006 fall meet with 11 wins and 2007 spring meet with 12. But he won just four races in 2014 and four in 2015, and he hasn’t won a graded stakes since 2011.

Phenomenally successful in Europe through the 1980s, Biancone, a native of Landes, France, first made news on this continent as the trainer of All Along when the French-bred filly was voted North American Horse of the Year in 1983. All Along, owned by Daniel Wildenstein, was voted into the National Racing Hall of Fame in 1990.

In 1999, the well-traveled Biancone was suspended by the Hong Kong Jockey Club for 10 months for undisclosed violations two years after more than 20 of his horses tested positive for prohibited substances there, according to Hong Kong news archives. He resumed training in California in 2000 after that suspension expired and has trained in the United States ever since, except for the Kentucky suspension.

Cobra venom is a powerful pain-blocking neurotoxin, and as such, the Biancone case became a cause celebre in racing circles. Biancone implied his innocence in a press release he issued shortly after agreeing to his suspension in Oct. 2007. An Australian veterinarian involved in the case, Rodney Stewart, received a five-year suspension for his role.