Jockey Club report renews call for medication reform

The Jockey Club has released a report outlining its support for changes in racing regulations and medication practices, saying that the changes will help the industry avoid spates of deaths like those at Santa Anita this year that have drawn widespread negative attention to the sport.

The Jockey Club in the past has advocated for many of the changes contained in the report released Thursday, and the organization also said that many of the proposals in the report would be addressed if a federal bill granting national authority over medication rules to a private, non-profit company were to be passed. The bill was recently reintroduced to the House of Representatives, and Jockey Club officials have been lobbying legislators for a hearing on the legislation.

“We believe that horse racing needs to aggressively pursue a series of changes to how it is regulated,” the paper states. “Without these reforms, the future of the sport will continue to wane.”

Among the changes included in the report are a ban on the race-day use of furosemide, the diuretic that is used to treat bleeding in the lungs that is legal to administer on race day in North America but banned for race-day use in most other major racing countries. The report also called for longer withdrawal times for regulated painkillers such as phenylbutazone and banamine, saying the expansions would put U.S. racing more in line with international rules.

The report also calls for the sport to conduct a greater number of out-of-competition tests, calling the sport’s current efforts “inadequate.” Out-of-competition testing is allowed for in nearly all major racing states, but the tests have returned few positives for drugs that are rumored to be in use in racing, such as blood-doping substances, generating divided opinions on whether the tests are not catching illicit drug use or whether rumors of rampant drug use are overblown.

Several of the report’s recommendations, such as calling for the disclosure of all veterinary treatments in a centralized database, and the requirement that all racetracks and training centers disclose all injuries to the Equine Injury Database, were cited in a list of recommendations from the organization’s Thoroughbred Safety Committee that was released on Wednesday.

Several other of the report’s recommendations mirror those that were announced two weeks ago by Santa Anita, including limiting use of the whip to “safety purposes” and implementing notification procedures prior to horses being allowed to work out. The Santa Anita announcement also called for an immediate race-day ban on furosemide, but that ban was later pared to a phase-in of a race-day prohibition beginning with the crop of 2018.