Letter To the Editor: How The International Community Deals With Contamination

I read with interest the TDN article about Jorge Duarte, which is the latest in a pattern of stories about trainers (George Weaver, Rusty Arnold, etc.) with positive tests that have seemingly come from contamination.

Glen Hill Farm has been racing and breeding horses since 1967. We are an American-based operation but have been building in Europe and Australia for the last decade.

Having served on many industry boards, I always understood the goal for medication reform was for American racing to first have uniformity between states and then hopefully to come in line with international standards. To sum up 40-plus years of infighting in one sentence, the Lasix debate prevented real progress or consensus for decades, and HISA was ultimately advocated for and pushed through. I am a supporter of HISA as it's a better system to advocate for change from one organization making policy instead of many. However, from my experience, the European and Australian rules and governing organizations are simpler and way more practical than ours.

Referenced here is a race we participated in at Le Mans, a small racetrack in France, on April 29. Our horse, Bet Me, finished third in the race. The second-place finisher was owned by Godolphin and trained by Andre Fabre, and was disqualified for having a positive test. It was for a banned substance. Google Translate is a wonderful tool, and I learned that France-Galop investigated and found the positive test came from contamination, as none of banned substance was found in the yard. So the horse was disqualified, but the trainer had no suspension, which to me is the correct course of action in a case like this.

–Craig Bernick is the president of Glen Hill Farm.