October
FebruaryNo other course
It’s hard not to have sympathy for the trainers whose careers have been damaged by the cobalt saga, but what was the industry’s alternative course of action?
Much as we can accept that James Hird did not intend his players to be injected with thymosin beta-4, it is reasonable to conclude that these trainers did not deliberately set out to have their horses race with high levels of cobalt in their systems.
However, Hird must bear the stigma of the Court of Arbitration for Sport’s findings because he presided over a supplements regime that went off the rails and did not do enough to prevent it happening.
Similarly, it seems trainers may have taken vets and/or staff on trust when it came to the substances they were administering.
Admittedly the Essendon scandal might be viewed as more serious in several ways.
For one thing, there was the deliberate circumvention of the club doctor and agreements to talk about amino acids rather than peptides.
I haven’t seen evidence of this type of tactic in material brought up by the cobalt investigation.
More importantly, the “pharmacologically experimental environment” at Essendon applied to young men as opposed to thoroughbreds, however valuable and noble the latter may be.
Even so, the rules regarding cobalt were in place when the positive tests were returned, and these rules had been publicised.
It would set a dangerous precedent if individual circumstances were to result in the rules of racing not being applied uniformly.
Whether those rules are fair and reasonable is another question, and one that I assume will be answered in time by a higher authority, outside the sport.
And as the AFL discovered, that sort of process doesn’t always go according to plan.
Castlemaine (Vic)