EPO scandal would be crushing blow

Rizzi’s Twist blew past Under Serviced and Jovanna and won the fifth race at Belmont Park on Saturday. Bruce Levine keeps rolling along and it has been a long roll through the Aqueduct winter, the spring at Belmont and summer on both side of the Hudson. Along the way, he has raised both eyebrows and suspicions.

Events on the other side of the river and down the Garden State Parkway, at Monmouth Park, where Levine has been next to unbeatable – 28 wins from his first 58 starters at the meeting – have many people anxiously awaiting the results of blood tests taken last week from 41 horses he has stabled in Jersey. The tests were ordered by the New Jersey Racing Commission for the purpose of determining the presence of EPO, a blood-doping agent that stimulates the production of red-blood cells resulting in hyper oxygenation. As a performance enhancing substance, EPO is highly effective and is not detected in post-race urine tests. EPO must be detected before a race is run and the practice of pre-race testing has long ago been abandoned because protecting the bettors in not a priority racing associations and regulators and is quite expensive.

Given the attention focused by Congress on racing’s current medication problems and use of anabolic steroids, a more sinister drug scandal – and the detection of EPO will, rest assured, be a scandal of overwhelming proportion – might be a body blow from which the sport may never right itself.

Detecting the presence of EPO is virtually impossible in most states but an “out of competition” testing rule established in New Jersey in advance of the Breeders’ Cup last year for the purpose of random pre-event testing for the drug, which revealed no positives, allows the racing commission to order the testing of horses not entered to race.

Bruce Levine, if indeed his horses have been racing on EPO, awaits word from New Jersey in dread even while continuing to win races. He is not alone in hope that the tests will come back clean.

Others with perhaps more than Levine to lose share the dread. A scandal of major proportion in the wake of other recent high-profile mediation-related suspensions or Rick Dutrow and Steve Asmussen, the deaths of Barbaro, George Washington and Eight Belles and the trainwreck that was the Belmont Stakes presented by Winstrol, will set the greatest game played outdoors on a straight path to oblivion.