Trainer Lorenzo Ruiz suspended seven years for diisopropylamine use

Lorenzo Ruiz, a trainer based at Los Alamitos in Southern California, has been suspended a total of seven years and ordered to pay fines and costs of $95,000 for violations related to the finding of the banned vasodilator diisopropylamine in three of his horses last year, according to the Horseracing Integrity and Welfare Unit.

Ruiz was issued the penalties on the decision of an arbitrator after a hearing on March 19 in which both Ruiz and his attorney, Darrell Vienna, failed to appear after notifying the hearing officer that they would argue their case on their pre-hearing filings, according to a report prepared by the arbitrator. Those filings argued that Ruiz did not administer the substance to his horses and that the cause of the violations was due to accidental contamination.

Vienna said on Friday that he did not appear at the hearing after concluding that Ruiz “had no way of prevailing given HIWU’s rules and procedures.”

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“I viewed the hearing as a waste of his money,” Vienna said. “So why incur additional costs?”

According to the document prepared by the arbitrator, Ruiz was given two years for each of the three findings of diisopropylamine, which were found in horses that raced at Los Alamitos in June and July of 2023. HIWU took over drug-testing and enforcement in most major racing jurisdictions in mid-May of that year.

Ruiz was given an additional one-year penalty as an aggravating factor after investigators discovered that he had gotten a job as an outrider at Los Alamitos during training hours just after he was issued his first provisional suspension on July 13. Under the suspensions, Ruiz was prohibited from participating “in any capacity in any activity involving covered horses taking place at a racetrack or training facility.”

HIWU investigators also said that they had received information on its anonymous tipline that Ruiz was participating in the training activities of some of his former horses, which were transferred to a different trainer after he was provisionally suspended, according to the report.

The arbitrator, Hugh L. Fraser, rejected assertions from Ruiz’s pre-hearing filings that alleged the diisopropylamine came from hand sanitizer in the test barn, relying on testimony from test-barn employees at Los Alamitos about their protocols when handling post-race samples. He also rejected an argument that the diisopropylamine could have come from supplements that Ruiz acknowledged regularly administering to all his horses, writing that Ruiz did not have any of the supplements tested for the substance, leaving the arbitrator to rely on his words alone.

“Mr. Ruiz’s statement that he never knowingly administered diisopropylamine is woefully sufficient evidence to meet his standard of proof,” Fraser wrote.

Fraser also disallowed any arguments about the classification of diisopropylamine as a “banned substance,” rejecting contentions from his pre-hearing filings that argued the drug did not have performance-enhancing effects at the concentrations found in the horses.

Ruiz was fined $20,000 for each of the violations, including the violation of his provisional suspension, and was further ordered to pay $15,000 in costs related to his arbitration hearing.

The resolution of the case is the second in three weeks for diisopropylamine in horses based at Los Alamitos. In the other case, Milton Pineda was banned for 15 years, with seven two-year sentences for separate findings of the drug, and another year for violating the terms of his provisional suspension. Another Southern California trainer, Reed Saldana, was given a two-year suspension for the drug in December.

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