Penn lab clears trainers of EPO positives

Tom Miller, attorney for Jan Johnson, Bob McIntosh, Jim Arledge and Joe Seekman, announced late Thursday that the Pennsylvania Equine Toxicology and Research Laboratory had found blood samples taken from horses the trainers had entered to race at The Red Mile this fall to be negative for recombinant human erythropoietin (rhEPO) and/or Darbepoetin/alfa (DPO).

None of the trainers indicated they will take any further action. They simply wanted to clear their names and restore their reputations.

The Pennsylvania lab tested the samples using Liquid Chromatography/Mass Spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). The lab report stated all samples arrived in good condition and there were no visible signs of tampering with the sample and/or container. In some cases the lab reports noted specific differences between the findings of the Elisa test and Penn’s test results.

Four horses trained by Johnson, McIntosh, Arledge and Seekman tested positive for blood doping—or EPO/DPO—under The Red Mile’s out-of-competition testing policy, which was first used during this year’s fall Grand Circuit meet. All four trainers immediately denied that their horses could have tested positive for a blood-doping agent or anything else and retained Miller, a Lexington attorney who handles equine cases in the Bluegrass.

Miller and the trainers requested that the split samples on their horses be sent to the Pennsylvania lab, and the trainers agreed to pay the $1,500 charge per test.

The four horses which tested positive were Find A Happy Place (trained by Arledge), Annieswesterncard (trained by Seekman and scratched from the $89,320 International Stallion Stakes because of the initial positive), Tresbien Volo (trained by Johnson), and North Country Fair (trained by McIntosh).

The initial positive tests were the result of an Elisa test, which is commonly used for screening for many different types of drugs in equine testing. Dr. Scot Waterman, executive director of the Racing Medication and Testing Consortium (RMTC), said that because an Elisa test is a screening test, “and by definition is not 100 percent accurate because it is a screen, there are going to be false positives….”

In August 2006, the Pennsylvania Equine Toxicology and Research Lab, which is affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania’s famed New Bolton Equine Center, announced it had become the first lab to use a definitive test for EPO and DPO. Today the Pennsylvania test is still considered the gold standard in blood-doping testing.

Miller compared basic portable breathalyzer tests to someone using the Elisa as a definitive test. “A portable breathalyzer is not accurate enough to be used in a court of law. To convict someone, you have to use a recognized machine that’s been determined to be 100 percent valid. What we’ve got here is a situation where they used a screening device. There should be further testing,” he said.

Since the out-of-competition testing policy was enacted by The Red Mile, not the Kentucky Racing Commission, the penalty for the initial positives was simply that the horses were scratched. However, since a Kentucky Racing Commission veterinarian pulled the blood on the horses and had custody of the samples until they were turned over to ATI Lab of Lexington--a lab the commission does not use for its own testing--Miller found fault with the commission’s role in the case.

“They won’t admit they had a role in this,” he said, “but a Kentucky Horse Racing Authority (now the Kentucky Racing Commission) vet took the blood and then took the samples to the lab.”

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