HORSE RACING : Selecting the Lab for Drug Testing No Exact Science

More than 50 years ago, at a dusty Texas race track called Alamo Downs, they had a slick way of deciding just which horses would be tested for illegal drugs.

A racing official put three small wooden balls in a leather bottle, two of them marked no and the other labeled yes. Before every race, each trainer running a horse stepped up and shook out one of the balls. Yes meant your horse got a saliva test--they were mostly looking for caffeine and heroin in those days. No meant no test, whether your horse won the race or not. Anyone inclined to hop a horse had a 2-1 chance of getting away with it.

Fortunately, the Alamo Downs way of doing things did not catch on. Even so, California’s racing public currently is being protected by a variation of the same strange practice.

Current policy calls for as many as 30 different horses to be tested out of a nine-race program. At Hollywood Park, for instance, samples are taken from all winners, all beaten favorites, all second-place finishers in exacta races, and at least seven horses chosen at random.

Previously, each of those samples was processed by Truesdail Laboratories of Tustin, the official state testing facility. But requests for additional testing by the California Horse Racing Board nearly have exhausted Truesdail’s budget.

As a result, Truesdail will be cutting back on the number of samples that it will be testing, a situation that will continue until next June 30, the end of the fiscal year.

Stepping into the breach will be Iowa State University, which has been awarded a $200,000 contract for complementary drug testing of California samples. Actually, the original budget for the complementary testing was $500,000. It was slashed when extra funds were needed for San Francisco earthquake relief.

So, not only has the money been reduced drastically, the original concept of a supplementary test lab has been altered as well. As recommended by a select industry panel last spring and adopted by the racing board, the idea was for a second lab to use advanced screening techniques to examine samples going through more traditional procedures at Truesdail.

Now, however, a test will go to either one lab or the other, based on random selection. The wooden balls, as it were, will be marked Cal and Iowa.

Dr. Dennis Meagher, California’s equine medical director, resists the idea that there will be cracks in the system because the two labs will be testing at different levels of technology.

“There will be no change in the number of samples tested,” he said. “With the Iowa State facility on line with their more specialized testing procedures . . . we will be subjecting all the samples to thorough testing for the most common drugs of abuse.”

What is it about fast white horses that stirs a race track crowd?

Flippable, a 5-year-old gelding owned by Louisiana businessman David Beard, is technically a roan, but he’s every inch as white as 1978 Santa Anita Handicap hero Vigors and someday he could be just as popular. His stretch-running win in Sunday’s ninth race at Hollywood Park was his third victory in just four California appearances for trainer Ron McAnally.

Even though Flippable has been running in high-priced claiming races, he has considerably more than a touch of class. Just last March he finished second to Blushing John at Oaklawn Park, the same Blushing John who later won the Hollywood Gold Cup and was beaten by barely a length by Sunday Silence in the Breeders’ Cup Classic.

Flippable gets his complexion from both sides of the family. His sire, Flip Sal, was a gray son of the gray stallion Drone, and his great-great grandsire on his mother’s side was the most famous gray stallion of them all, the French legend Mahmoud.

“Everybody knows this horse by now,” said Eduardo Inda, McAnally’s assistant trainer. “When we brought him over to school in the paddock last Saturday I heard people saying, ‘Hey, there’s Flippable!’ ”

When Flippable arrived at McAnally’s barn last summer, Inda immediately noticed the name of the horse’s grandsire, Fouquier.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Inda said. “Back in 1958 or ‘59, when I worked for my uncle Jorge in Chile, he had that same horse in his barn. And here, 30 years later the grandson shows up in front of me.”

Maryland-based jockey Kent Desormeaux has hit a mini-slump and has been buffeted by foul eastern weather as he bears down on Chris McCarron’s record of 546 victories in a single season.

Desormeaux, whose total stands at 537, won two races at Laurel in Baltimore Race Course last Saturday but has been blanked at Churchill Downs in Kentucky and the Meadowlands in New Jersey since then.

Desormeaux was shut out again Tuesday at Laurel when 35-40-m.p.h. winds forced the track to cancel its program.

This is what happens when two tracks located barely 10 miles apart operate simultaneously in the same major metropolitan area.

Last Saturday in Miami, venerable Hialeah Park opened in direct competition with Calder Race Course, as the worst-case scenario of Florida’s ongoing dates war unfolded.

Hialeah drew 4,114 fans for its opener, compared to Calder’s 10,286. At Hialeah, they bet $368,372, while the Calder crowd bet $1,370,151. A week earlier, Calder’s figures were 10,255 and $1,551,598.

On Sunday, Hialeah drew a crowd of 3,505 who bet $263,641. Calder’s gate was 9,363 and the handle was $1,164,732. On Monday, without competition from Calder, Hialeah’s numbers were 2,626 and $319,005.

By way of comparison, the 50-day Hialeah meeting last spring averaged 7,575 in attendance and $1,220,936 in daily handle.

“We knew it would be tough,” a Hialeah spokeswoman said. “But we didn’t think it would be this bad.”

Horse Racing Notes

Eddie Delahoussaye and Russell Baze have resumed their 1-2 Oak Tree duel at Hollywood Park. Delahoussaye begins the second week of the meet one winner up, 8-7, but Baze figures to lose ground this week when he journeys to Tokyo to ride Hawkster in the Japan Cup. . . . Chris McCarron also will be on the other side of the globe riding defending champ Pay the Butler in the Japan Cup if Kent Desormeaux breaks his record.