Action of Board Hurts Trainers, Wolfson Says : Veteran Owner, Breeder Is Upset With California’s Handling of Cocaine Tests

Last Friday at Golden Gate Fields, trainer Bryan Webb was about to throw a saddle on Majesty’s Road for the 64th race of the 6-year-old gray gelding’s career.

Minutes before Majesty’s Road reached the paddock, however, the three stewards at Golden Gate ordered that the horse be scratched. They had just received a letter from the California Horse Racing Board in Sacramento, which said that a horse Webb had run at the California State Fair in Sacramento five months before had tested positive for cocaine.

Of the six trainers who have been cited by the racing board after their horses turned up positive for cocaine, the 62-year-old Webb is the smallest. A good year for Webb is when the horses in his barn earn $200,000. Wayne Lukas and Laz Barrera, two of the other trainers under investigation, have horses capable of winning that much in one race.

Webb was to have started four other horses at Golden Gate last weekend, but the stewards scratched all of them. By Sunday morning, the message to Webb had become clear and he worked a horse that was scheduled to run that afternoon, because he knew the stewards weren’t going to allow the horse to race.

Since then, Webb’s training privileges have been reinstated, and Lukas, Barrera and another implicated trainer, Anthony Hemmerick, have also been told that they can continue to run horses while the investigation continues.

But the trainers, as well as some of the horse owners they work for, feel that the damage has already been done.

“The racing board out there jumped the gun on all this,” Louis Wolfson said Thursday from his home in Miami. “A man should have the right to defend himself before he’s subjected to what Laz and Wayne have gone through.”

In 1978, Barrera trained Affirmed, the last winner of the Triple Crown and a horse Wolfson had bred. Another Wolfson’s horse, Endow, a 2-year-old making his first start, tested positive for cocaine after Barrera ran him at Del Mar last August. The positive came from a re-test of a frozen urine sample and wasn’t announced until last week.

Lukas also trains horses for Wolfson.

“There are a lot of trainers who aren’t capable of doing something like this, and Laz and Wayne are two of them,” Wolfson said. “Men like Charlie Whittingham, Woody Stephens and Ron McAnally are in the same category.

“If a trainer is guilty, he should be banned for life. But I don’t care if Laz was broke, he wouldn’t resort to drugging a horse to win a race. The purses are too high, and their reputations are too valuable, for trainers like this to be fooling around with cocaine.”

Last Friday, Barrera called Wolfson to tell him the bad news about Endow’s test.

“Right away, I said to Laz, ‘You don’t have to explain,’ ” Wolfson said. “But he was sick over it.”

Ron Volkman is a partner in about 20 horses that Webb trains. One of them was favored to win a $25,000 race at Golden Gate Fields last weekend, but wasn’t allowed to run. Volkman also was one of the owners of Wild Again, who won the Breeders’ Cup Classic--racing’s first $3-million race--at Hollywood Park in 1984.

“I was told that the stewards weren’t unanimous in their decision to scratch Bryan’s horses, but they decided that that was the best thing to do,” Volkman said. “The stewards at Golden Gate are good guys, but they weren’t given any help from the racing board. None of them is an attorney, a chemist or a veterinarian, yet they had this thing dropped in their lap.”

Early this week, as Webb began to reorganize his stable and planned to run in some races again, three of his owners took away 10 horses and assigned them to other trainers. As Louis Wolfson said to Laz Barrera, there was no need to explain, but what came after that for Webb was the opposite of the vote of confidence that Barrera got from Wolfson.

Webb ran afoul of racing commissions on the East Coast years ago, but Volkman believes he didn’t give a horse cocaine and said that the trainer has offered to take a lie-detector test.

“The impact of what’s going on in California goes beyond Laz Barrera and Wayne Lukas,” Wolfson said. “The way this has been handled has been very damaging to racing. The part of the public that already thought that our sport was a collection of mobsters and crooks now has more ammunition. There should be an emergency meeting of all the groups that make up the industry, while we still have an industry left.”