Salinas suspended after arbiter rejects claims of innocence

Jose Salinas, one of a dozen trainers based at Penn National to be charged with running horses within a required stand-down period after injections of painkillers, has been suspended 60 days after an arbiter rejected testimony that he was not at fault.

Anne G. Mitchell, a member of the Horseracing Integrity and Welfare Unit’s Internal Arbitration Panel, issued the suspension and a $5,000 fine after concluding that Salinas ran a horse, Zoomster, three days after the gelding was injected in multiple joints by veterinarian Allen Bonnell, whose practice at Penn National has been blamed for hundreds of violations of rules on corticosteroids.

Salinas, who has a career record of 53 wins from 997 starts, was the first of the trainers implicated in the Bonnell investigation to challenge the charges. According to the arbiter’s ruling, Salinas argued that he did not instruct Bonnell to inject the horse and that there were no witnesses to the injections.

Bonnell’s vet records, however, indicated that he injected “one knee and both hocks” of Zoomster on June 6, 2023. The horse ran three days later.

Salinas also claimed that Bonnell was “too old, frail, and possibly addled” to have injected the horse without instruction, a claim the arbiter called a “rebuttable presumption and clear speculation of evidence.”

Most of the trainers involved in the investigation have accepted 30-day suspensions for violating the corticosteroid stand-down rules. Bonnell was summarily suspended by the Pennsylvania State Horse Racing Commission in November 2024 after investigators launched a probe into his practice.

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