on horse racing Indictments charging 27 people, including some of the sport’s biggest winners, were just as startling in what they revealed about others in the trade. Jorge Navarro was the Juice Man — or at least that is what gamblers on the rail and his rival horse trainers whispered about him. He had a knack (or potion) for making slow horses fast. In August 2017, before he became a target of federal prosecutors, Navarro embraced his nickname.
He was caught on an infamous video posted online celebrating a victory giddily and profanely with one of the owners whose horses he trained. “Adios, amigos. Adios, amigos,” said the owner, Randal Gindi. “The Juice Man!
” “Is that a Navarro? Is that a Navarro? ” the trainer responded. “Is that a Navarro at 2-1?
That’s the way we do it. ” “That’s the juice,” Gindi said. Only Gindi knows if he was being literal that day, but prosecutors now contend Navarro was indeed up to no good. On Monday, they rounded up Navarro and 26 other trainers, veterinarians and drug distributors and charged them, in a series of indictments, with doping racehorses and cheating the public.
The schemes revealed in those four indictments were startling, and showed just how deeply a drug culture had taken hold in a sport whose participants claim to love their horses, how complicit horse owners were in pursuit of big purses, and how cowed the trainers were even as they groused about their crooked competitors but were afraid to hold them accountable. The indictments also revealed how indifferent regulators and racetrack operators like Churchill Downs were to the stars of the show: the thoroughbreds. Drug rules and strict punishments were in place; they just were not enforced. Navarro and Jason Servis — who trained Maximum Security, the winner of the Kentucky Derby for 22 minutes until he was disqualified for interference — are caught on wire taps talking about joint blockers called “red acid” and blood builders named “monkey.
” When one unindicted and unidentified owner worried about the fourth consecutive poor performance by his horse, he was heard asking, “Is this horse jacked out? ” “Everything,” Navarro assured him. “He gets everything. ” Navarro’s horses have earned more than $37 million since 2008.
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Servis finished in the top 10 in earnings last year and, last month, Maximum Security won $10 million at the Saudi Cup in Riyadh, the world’s richest horse race. He did so with the help of a drug regimen, according to the authorities. The world of horse racing, of course, declared itself shocked at the news. “Jason Servis, a trainer we have used for 5 years, was indicted on multiple charges regarding using an illegal substance in horses,” the owner of Maximum Security, Gary West, said in a statement Monday.
“This news is extremely disturbing and disappointing. ” While Servis fights the charges, West, who tried to get his colt’s Derby victory restored through the courts, will move Maximum Security to the barn of Bob Baffert. Baffert is not a part of this indictment but last year, The New York Times reported that Justify, the 2018 Triple Crown winner that he trained, failed a drug test shortly before the Kentucky Derby.
“The rule on the books at the time required that Justify be disqualified, forfeiting both the prize money he had won and his entry into the Derby, the first Triple Crown race.”
California racing officials spent four months investigating the failed test, long enough for Justify to not only compete in the Derby, but also win it, along with the Preakness and Belmont Stakes. In August, after Justify’s breeding rights had been sold for $60 million, the California board — whose chairman at the time, Chuck Winner, had employed Baffert as his trainer — disposed of the inquiry altogether during a rare closed-door session. They ruled that Justify’s positive test for the illegal drug scopolamine was the result of “environmental contamination,” not intentional doping. Baffert has denied any wrongdoing but the quantity of the drug found in Justify suggested that it was not the result of feed or bedding contamination but intended to enhance performance, according to Dr.
Rick Sams, who ran the drug lab for the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission from 2011 to 2018. California regulators concede that no other horse at Santa Anita tested for a level of scopolamine as high as Justify’s. In fact, no other horse came up positive. They said a handful had showed trace amounts, but not enough to even notify their trainers.
On Tuesday, that same group released a 77-page report on 23 horses that died at Santa Anita Park last year, in a spike that has brought California racing to its knees. After losing more than 400 horses to racetracks in Arkansas and New York, Santa Anita now runs only three days a week. It has small fields and diminished betting. How did those horses die?
Twenty-one had “pre-existing pathology at the site of their fatal injury,” the report noted, and 11 had received injections of corticosteroids to the joints. Unseasonably cold and wet weather contributed to the deaths of nearly 40 percent of the horses, the report said. No illegal medications were found in any of them. Surprising?
Not really, if you believe federal prosecutors. As Maximum Security won eight of 10 races and nearly $12 million in purses while passing drug test after drug test, they said, veterinarians falsified records and backstretch pushers promised and delivered cutting-edge chemistry. One woman prosecutors described as a supplier, Sarah Izhaki, sold something called Devil’s Breath to an undercover agent. “The Devil was something very new,” she promised.
“You put it in a horse, you can use coke: it will come back negative. ” It was a tempting sales pitch. In horse racing, big purses are matched by big egos, a dynamic that sometimes encourages situational ethics. It is something one of the defendants, the veterinarian Seth Fishman, reminded a prospective customer on a recorded phone call.
“But it isn’t doping, yeah? ” the customer asked about Fishman’s drugs. “Don’t kid yourself,” Fishman said. “If you are giving something to a horse to make it better, that’s doping.
Whether or not that’s testable, that’s a different story.
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