Breeders' Cup drug tests all come back clean

All pre-race and post-race drug tests performed on horses that competed in last weekend’s Breeders’ Cup event at Santa Anita have come back negative for any illegal substances, the California Horse Racing Board announced on Tuesday.

All 162 horses that competed in the event’s 15 races were tested prior to their races for illegal levels of total carbon dioxide, and the top four finishers in each race were tested for hundreds of medications at the CHRB’s testing laboratory, the Kenneth L. Maddy Equine Chemical Laboratory at the University of California Davis, the CHRB said. None of those tests were positive for any illegal levels of medications, according to the CHRB.

The CHRB also randomly selected 25 horses for its out-of-competition testing program and subjected blood and urine samples from the horses for drug tests. Those samples were also negative.

Participants in the Breeders’ Cup races and all of the Grade 1 races run in the U.S. are subjected to so-called supertests, in which testing laboratories use all available means to detect illegal drugs.

Only one horse, Wait a While, has tested positive in the 29-year history of the Breeders’ Cup. Trained by Todd Pletcher, Wait a While tested positive for procaine, which is a component of penicillin shots, after finishing third in the 2008 Breeders’ Cup Filly and Mare Turf, also at Santa Anita. Pletcher, who acknowledged administering penicillin to the filly one month prior to the event, was suspended 10 days and fined $25,000 for the violation.