from Team Valor

Lexington, KY — In identifying and quantifying negative impacts that a trainer’s drug violations can have on other horsemen, Frank Angst of the Blood-Horse focused recently on the fallout from trainer Kirk Ziadie’s 18 clenbuterol positives in Florida in 2012 and ’13. Team Valor International has nominated his analysis for its $25,000 Stan Bergstein Writing Award.

Angst notes the potential loss of purse money for trainers who opposed Ziadie in those 18 races, mostly in vain as he racked up 11 wins, while the other seven runners all finished in the top three. Several horses involved in the offenses were claimed by other trainers, and Angst spoke with at least two of them, but they offered little criticism of Ziadie.

Travis Tygart of the United States Anti-Doping Agency and former Indiana regulator Joe Gorajec both cited a common reluctance of horsemen and officials to report wrongdoing, sometimes out of a fear of reprisal.

“People are reluctant to go to the people that control it and say bad things about their competitors because they don’t know when that’s going to come back to hurt them,” Tygart said, noting that commissioners may be active participants in the state that’s being regulated. “So you have to remove those influences from the investigative aspect.”

The full story is here.

Angst wrote two stories that were nominated for the 2015 Stan Bergstein Writing Award, one on the need for additional scrutiny of drug testing laboratories and the other on a horse who failed drug tests in consecutive starts.

So far in 2016, Team Valor has also nominated a piece by Natalie Voss of the Paulick Report for a story on varying enforcement of veterinarian’s lists in jurisdictions around the U.S.

Team Valor nominates stories throughout the year and assigns a panel of judges to select an award winner. This year’s judges are racetrack announcer Trevor Denman, Hall of Fame jockey Chris McCarron and veteran turf writers Neil Milbert, Maryjean Wall and Michael Veitch.

Barry Irwin and Team Valor will present the fifth annual Stan Bergstein Writing Award in the fall.