Witnesses at Hearing Urge Congress to Enlist Antidoping Agency and Save Horse Racing By JOE DRAPE as published in the New York Times “I was stunned by the lengths some trainers will go to win races,”

WASHINGTON — The United States Anti-Doping Agency is the last and best hope to return safety and integrity to the troubled sport of thoroughbred racing, members of the industry told Congress at a hearing Thursday.

The hearing, the fourth of its kind since 2008, focused on how the use of performance-enhancing drugs has eroded the sport’s popularity — and its bottom line.

“I was stunned by the lengths some trainers will go to win races,” Jesse M. Overton, a former racing commissioner in Minnesota, told a House Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade. “There is no drug or compound that has not been tried in horses, from EPO and anabolic steroids to frog juice and cobra venom. And I promise there are chemists right now working up new, illegal, undetectable substances to give a trainer who wants a performance advantage, especially if he doesn’t have the fastest horse.”

The Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act would give the antidoping agency, known as Usada, the authority to develop rules for permitted and prohibited substances, and it would also create testing and stiffer penalty programs for horse racing nationally, replacing the patchwork state-by-state system now in place.

“Unless drug testing is conducted uniformly and in state-of-the-art laboratories, unscrupulous horsemen will continue to cheat the system, the horses and the fans,” Overton said.

Usada, a nongovernmental organization, is the official antidoping agency for the United States Olympics team and has worked with Major League Baseball and other professional leagues to eliminate performance-enhancing drugs. It was a key player in the investigation of Lance Armstrong, who admitted that he had systematically used drugs during his racing career.

Its chief executive, Travis Tygart, compared horse racing now to the Olympic Games of the 1990s, when shoddy drug testing and loose standards cast suspicion over athletes and eroded public confidence in international sports. That crisis led to the creation of the World Anti-Doping Agency in 1999 and a commitment from governments around the globe to follow a uniform standard.

“Make no mistake, the win-at-all-costs culture is alive and well and will flourish in every sport including horse racing, if we do not take decisive action to stop the take-no-prisoners competition from running wild,” Tygart said.

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