Trainer Repeats Dope Allegation : Horse racing: Evans, who was fired by Cerin, says that he was asked to go to Canada to purchase clenbuterol, a banned substance.

Tom Evans, a peripheral figure in the California horse-drugging scandal that led to the recent firing of the state racing board’s executive secretary, has said for at least the third time that he was asked by a trainer to travel to Canada to obtain quantities of clenbuterol, a medication that is illegal in the United States.

Evans has said that he was fired by the trainer when he refused to make the trip.

Interviewed by The Times at Turf Paradise here, where he is training three horses, Evans said that while he was working for Vladimir Cerin in 1991, he was asked to travel to Canada to bring the clenbuterol back to California.

Evans publicly linked Cerin with clenbuterol last August, during an informational meeting attended by dozens of trainers and California Horse Racing Board officials in Del Mar. Evans said that he repeated his statements when interviewed later by racing board investigators.

Cerin characterized Evans as a disgruntled former employee and a frustrated trainer.

“What he’s spreading are vicious rumors,” Cerin said. “I’d like to put all this behind me. The bad part about this is that I can’t do anything about what Tom Evans keeps saying. I can’t threaten him. I can’t sue him for slander, because he doesn’t have any money. It’s a position I shouldn’t be in.

“He hated (trainer) Wayne Lukas, because he couldn’t be that successful (as Lukas). He couldn’t handle working in this game and not being another Wayne Lukas, or even another Vladimir Cerin.”

Cerin, 38, was born in the former Yugoslavia and grew up in Canada. He is a former UCLA soccer player who has been training for seven years. He has seven winners this season at Santa Anita, where he saddled 17 winners a year ago. His stakes winners include Exploding Prospect, Hollywood Reporter and Yes I’m Blue.

Cerin ran a favorite that finished fourth in a claiming race with an $11,000 purse lastApril at Santa Anita. The filly tested positive for clenbuterol, a powerful breathing aid andpossible performance enhancer that is banned by the Food and Drug Administration for use in the U.S.

Dennis Hutcheson, then executive secretary of the racing board, dismissed the case a month after the positive test, before Cerin’s request for a split urine sample could be sent to anindependent laboratory, and before Hutcheson learned from the state’s backup lab that the test was again positive.

In similar fashion, Hutcheson dismissed two cases involving other trainers and clenbuterol positives, saying that he lacked confidence in the primary laboratory.

On Feb. 26, the racing board fired Hutcheson, saying that he had acted improperly in thosecases.

Hutcheson has denied accusations by Rosemary Ferraro, a racing board member, that he dismissed the Cerin case because he was a friend of the trainer. In an interview with California Department of Justice agents in November, Hutcheson said: “Commissioner Ferraro made a slanderous comment. . . . I did not know Mr. Cerin.”

Hutcheson told the investigators that in April he was invited to a trainers’ poker game. “I turned them down in that I thought it would be a conflict of interest,” Hutcheson said.

Ferraro, who attended the horsemen’s meeting at Del Mar in August, told California Department of Justice investigator that Evans spoke at the time about Cerin asking him to leave California to pick up the clenbuterol. The testimony from Hutcheson and Ferraro is included in a lengthy report that the Justice Department prepared after the racing board requested an investigation of the clenbuterol affair.

After reviewing that report, the Sacramento County District Attorney’s office declined to file criminal charges against Hutcheson.

Despite the release of the report, Harvey Furgatch, a horse owner and racing board member in the 1970s, is continuing his freedom-of-information suit against the racing board.

“There are a lot of things left out of that report,” Furgatch said. “I wonder, for example, why the interview with Tom Evans wasn’t included.”

Hal Diaz, the chief investigator for the racing board, said that he couldn’t comment about Evans’ accusations. Diaz also declined to comment about whether an investigation is continuing. The racing board, pursuing the possibility of disqualifying horses that tested positive for clenbuterol, plans to get an opinion from an administrative law judge.

Evans said that racing board investigators, when they interviewed him, lost interest when he couldn’t recall the name of his clenbuterol contact in Canada.

“I was very disappointed with the way they went about it,” Evans said.

“By the time I left, they had made me feel like I was the guilty party.”

Evans, 40, said that he began working around racetracks in 1966 in Utah. He said that he came to California in 1976 and worked as an assistant for Cerin from August until Novemberof 1991.

“If you talk to Vladimir, he will give you different reasons why he fired me,” Evans said.

Evans said that one of Cerin’s reasons would be that he didn’t approve of Evans hiring two Anglo-Americans for stable help.

“There are more (reasons for Evans’ firing) than this, but these are the two I’ll give you,” Cerin said. “He didn’t want to hire Hispanics, and that’s against my policy, because this is an equal-opportunity barn. And he verbally abused a female assistant trainer.”

Evans said that he had been reluctant to talk about the clenbuterol matter because there was a danger of retaliation.

“It would be pretty easy for somebody to drop something into the feed tub of one of my horses, and then I’d be in trouble,” Evans said.

According to information supplied by the Assn. of Racing Commissioners International in Lexington, Ky., the only rulings against Evans were made in recent years, when he was suspended twice because of financial problems. Evans is licensed to train in Arizona.

“I have a new owner who wants to take some horses to California, but I’d just as soon stay here,” Evans said.

“When I started out in this business, I thought that the higher you went, the better it would be. But after being in California, I found out that there was a lot of cheating with drugs there, too.”

At the start of this week, Evans showed no winners in 15 starts at Turf Paradise.

“I’ve only got three horses, and it’s a meet where everything’s gone wrong,” he said. “But maybe my luck’s turning around. The other day I started a horse who usually can’t stand up in the mud, and he still finished second.”