Drug-testing delays holding up Monmouth Park purses

Officials of Monmouth Park in New Jersey and the state’s Thoroughbred horsemen’s group will petition the state racing commission to allow the track to distribute purse money to horsemen without first receiving the results of post-race drug tests, the track’s top official said Tuesday afternoon.

Dennis Drazin, president of the company that operates Monmouth Park under a lease from the state, said that the track and horsemen reached the decision on Tuesday afternoon following a meeting to discuss options to deal with $7 million in undistributed purses due to delays in receiving drug-test results from Truesdail Laboratory in California. The Asbury Park Press first reported details of the purse delays on Monday.

Under New Jersey regulations, purses cannot be paid out until negative tests results are returned from the drug-testing lab. The lab has not returned a test result since the first day of the meet, Drazin said.

Drazin said the request to the commission would require owners and trainers to sign releases that would require purses to be returned if a post-race test reveals a positive.

Judith Nason, executive director of the New Jersey Racing Commission, did not respond to phone calls Tuesday.

Drazin also said that the horsemen’s group voted to give him the authority to “pursue” legal action against Truesdail, but that the priority for Monmouth would be the petition to the racing commission.

According to Drazin, the state requires every winner to be tested, plus horses selected by the stewards and at random. The horses that earned purses but were not tested have been paid, Drazin said, for a total of $3 million out of the $10 million that the track owes to horsemen.

Truesdail, which is located in Tustin, Calif., conducts Thoroughbred and Standardbred testing for tracks in Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey, but the lab is not currently accredited by the Racing Medication and Testing Consortium due to some deficiencies in its protocols identified last year. The lab is currently going through an accreditation review by the RMTC, according to the organization’s executive director, Dr. Mary Scollay, and the RMTC is currently looking into reports of the delays, which could impact the organization’s final assessment, Scollay said.

According to Drazin, the impacts of coronavirus are the likely culprits for the delay in returning the test results. California has put in place some of the most stringent protocols in the United States in an attempt to contain the virus, which has erupted in multiple outbreaks in areas of the state.

“It’s my understanding that they are behind and that they are trying to catch up,” Drazin said. “But this is having a big impact on our horsemen. These people need to get paid.”