California Horse Racing Board accuses Metz of administering bisphosphonate to horse

The California Horse Racing Board has issued a complaint against trainer Jeff Metz for a finding of a bisphosphonate in the post-race urine sample of a horse that raced in September of last year, but the attorney for Metz said that the trainer “never” administered the substance to the horse and predicted that he will be exonerated.

The complaint states that Camino de Estrella, a gelding, tested positive for tiludronic acid, a bisphosphonate, after running sixth in the third race on Sept. 27 last year at Santa Anita. Because bisphosphonates are not yet explicitly classified by rule in California, the positive is being adjudicated under California’s “prohibited substances” rule, which carries a Class 1, Category A penalty, the harshest in the book.

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The complaint is believed to be the first to base an adjudication on a positive for bisphosphonates, a class of drugs that are used to stimulate the repair of bone material. Thoroughbred racing regulators began to focus on the drugs in 2019 after a rash of horses broke down at Santa Anita, based on rumors that the drugs were routinely given to horses to stimulate bone growth in their early years, particularly prior to going through the sales rings as yearlings to 2-year-olds.

Many organizations in the racing industry responded to the rumors by approving blanket prohibitions on the administration of the drugs to horses younger than 4 years old, because the drugs are approved by the FDA to be administered to horses older than that age if they are suffering from navicular disease. California’s pending rule uses that language and classifies bisphosphonates as a Class 3, Category A drug.

Darrell Vienna, Metz’s attorney, called the case complicated but he said that Metz did not deserve to be punished because of the positive. He said that the available science on bisphosphonates clearly demonstrates that the drug can be found more than 2 1/2 years after the drugs have been administered, due to their unique ability to lie dormant in bone but become “active” in the horse’s circulatory system when bone is in need of repair.

“There is a record of a veterinarian administering the drug when he was not in Mr. Metz’s care, in 2019,” said Vienna, citing an investigator’s report issued in the case. “I can say with certainty that Jeff never administered bisphosphonates to that horse. We’re confident that the truth will come out, because we think the CHRB already knows the truth.”

The CHRB did not respond to a request to review the investigator’s report.

A complication in the case is that Camino de Estrella is now 7 years old, which would have made the gelding 5 years old when the bisphosphonate was allegedly administered, per Vienna’s timeline. Even without the pending rule, or a house rule at Santa Anita banning the administration of the drugs, it would have been legal to administer the drug to the horse in order to treat a condition like navicular disease, but illegal to administer it without that diagnosis under the “prohibited substances” rule.

Camino de Estrella has been in the claiming ranks ever since winning a maiden special weight race in September of 2017 for trainer Tim Yakteen. He first appeared with Metz listed as his trainer in a race on Nov. 1, 2019, at Turf Paradise in Arizona, three months after being claimed out of a race by Mark Glatt on Aug. 7, 2019, at Del Mar. He was claimed by Steve Knapp at Santa Anita on May 25, 2020, and then claimed back by Metz on July 10 out of a race at Del Mar.

Camino de Estrella was subsequently claimed by trainer Bill Spawr from the Sept. 27 race in which he tested positive for the bisphosphonate.

A complaint is issued against a trainer in California prior to a stewards’ hearing, to give the trainer a chance to defend himself against the allegation in the complaint. The CHRB began publishing complaints on its website as a result of its adjudication of a scopolamine positive from the horse Justify in the 2018 Santa Anita Derby. The adjudication, which resulted in the case being initially thrown out due to an investigator’s conclusion that the positive was the result of accidental contamination, was criticized by a number of observers for lacking transparency.