When professional baseball players were accused of taking performance-enhancing drugs, it was a national scandal. When steroids are used in horse racing, it’s business as usual.
As The New York Times wrote in an editorial today:
Where humans are concerned, steroids are banned by all major sporting bodies because they alter performance and pose a serious health risk. A human athlete who illegally takes steroids chooses to accept that risk. A racehorse obviously has no say in the matter.
Anabolic steroids promote rapid muscle growth, in people or animals. On a young horse, that unnatural mass can be too much weight for skeletal bones that have not yet matured. The drugs can also keep horses racing when they are injured or in pain.
U.S. Congressman Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.) and other lawmakers are calling on the horse racing industry to ban drug use. It appears the industry may comply, for fear that Congress may change the Interstate Horse Racing Act and interfere with profitable simulcasts and off-track betting. The House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection plans to hold a hearing on issues surrounding the welfare of horses in the racing industry.
Nine states have banned drug use in horse racing, but the remaining states—including the three Triple Crown states of Kentucky, Maryland, and New York—haven’t. One of the problems is that there is no national commission or league overseeing the sport, as there is in football or baseball, and regulation is left to the states.
Since horses travel in interstate commerce and compete nationwide, the patchwork of state rules on racing just doesn’t make sense. It’s like the use of steroids being banned at Fenway Park but not at Yankee Stadium.
We need a National Racing Commission that would set industry-wide standards on such issues as track surfaces and overbreeding, and would ban drug use and the racing of two-year-old and three-year-old horses when their bones are developing and still fragile. The nation watched in horror when Barbaro and Eight Belles shattered the champagne-glass bones in their legs, and it’s time for reform. Contact your members of Congress today and ask them to protect horses in the racing industry.
If Big Brown wins the Triple Crown this weekend at the Belmont Stakes, his victory will be clouded by drug use. Perhaps there will be calls for an asterisk in the record books, like there have been for Barry Bonds’ home run record. Congress needs to take action not only for the well-being of horses, but also to get this industry back on track.
