A vision that needed revision
I was thinking of training horses. Thinking very seriously about it, enjoying the thought of devloping a racehorse and getting right in the middle of a moment of victory, but then I had a vision. And in this vision, I hit horse racing’s pharmaceutical trifecta. The payoff on that trifecta forced me to reconsider.
But I probably shouldn’t leap to the visionary end before explaining how I got there. In this vision, looking ahead to this new career I was contemplating, I pictured myself as the trainer a small stable of horses that I owned in partnership with friends. One of the horses, a filly named Therapy, we bought after she had run three horrible races. Although she was skinny, with a coat as dull as mud, I liked her conformation and her pedigree. In this vision, I was blessed with insight – and it helped that the price was cheap.
We gave her a few months off; more important, we gave her health. She was full of ulcers and worms when we got her. But the partners never complained about all the vet bills. How could they? They all loved Therapy, who was uncommonly intelligent. She responded to people; she invited affection. Some of the partners would come by the barn regularly to give her treats – apples, carrots and candy. One guy loved to take her for a long walk around the stable area: It was a stunning sight: A happy filly on one end of a shank and an attorney in a three-piece suit on the other.
When we put her back in training, she quickly showed herself to be different horse, a horse transformed. She enjoyed training, enjoyed achieving, and she quickly learned what was expected of her. She wanted to be a racehorse. And when she returned to the races, she won immediately, first time out, after a one-year layoff. Even in this imaginative vision, this was special: This was the essence, the pure extract, of all those months of care and training.
One of the partners, an accountant who had never bet more than $2 in his life, ran into the winner’s circle waving tickets and screaming, “I hit the trifecta, I hit the trifecta,” as though shocked by his good fortune. All the partners were there, and they all bet on her, more out of affection and loyalty than with any anticipation of actually winning. But I had told them that she was doing well and just might win. I had told everybody who asked, from the elevator operator to the stooper on the first floor of the grandstand.
And then I hit the trifecta, but not the same trifecta the accountant cashed. Her post-race urine sample tested positive for morphine, caffeine and theophylline.
I couldn’t understand it. I had given her nothing. I had instructed nobody to give her anything. Nobody could explain it. But the test results, even for the split sample, were irrefutably positive.
The stewards fined and suspended me. But that was only the start of the trouble. When the ruling became public, the media moved swiftly and made me their target, seeing me as a symbol for all that’s wrong in racing and just about everything else. A New York columnist had a long story, shockingly uninformed, about drugs in racing and how unscrupulous people rely on medication to enhance their horses’ performances, and it concluded that racing was being ruined by people like me. Next to the story was my photograph. Not a very good picture either. Pundits whose knowledge wouldn’t fill a teacup wrote columns arguing that horses shouldn’t race as 2-year-olds and jockeys shouldn’t carry whips. Another argued that all medication, all drugs, should be banned from racetracks because they only enabled heartless people to take advantage of sore, unsound horses.
All of this was somewhat baffling: Therapy wasn’t a 2-year-old; she won without ever feeling the whip; she was perfectly sound and was probably healthier and happier than she had ever been in her life. But none of that mattered. Nor did it matter that the she tested positive at trace levels that indicated the morphine, caffeine and theophylline couldn’t possibly have affected her performance.
Then came the story alleging that I had drugged Therapy as part of some betting coup. The evidence seemed so conclusive I even suspected myself: She hadn’t raced in a year, she had never finished better than seventh in any of her three previous races, she was bet down to 8-1 in her return, and after her victory one of the victorious owners was heard to boast that he had hit the trifecta. I was, this story said, the worst bandit since Jesse James. And then, after the broadcast of the Belmont Stakes, NBC was host to a panel discussion where three "experts" I had never heard of and had never seen at any racetrack debated whether racing can "survive Therapy."
Two days later, representatives from PETA, about a dozen of them, gathered outside my home. To anybody who walked by -- and an unusual number did -- they passed out literature soliciting memberships and donations. They waved their signs to motorists. A little girl in a pink sundress carried a sign with vivid red lettering: "Horses are people 2." A primly slender woman I recognized from my church was more brazen. She held a sign, always careful to raise it higher than the others, that read, "Animal abuse is a crime against God." One guy, obviously the leader, stood before a video camera and feigned outrage for a television interview.
Well, a few days later two of my partners came by my home – I was no longer allowed on the racetrack – to tell me they were getting out of horse racing. "Enough is enough," one of them said, as though philosophically, and then he stared at me with this expression that mingled pity and disgust. This was no surprise, of course. Four other partners already had done the same, told me they wanted to sell their shares in the horses. But, my visitors said, they had some good news. They had just been by the barn to take the horses some donuts and say goodbye, and they were all doing well, especially Therapy.
“We haven’t done that in a while,” one of the partners said, “not since that day Therapy raced.”
“I don’t remember that,” I said.
“Yeah,” said the other partner. “We didn’t get there until about 10 o’clock, and you had gone to the racing office or somewhere. We knew you wouldn't mind. Therapy really liked the donuts, especially when I dunked one in my coffee. She loved that.”
“No,” the first partner corrected. “She liked her donuts dunked in coffee, but what she really loved was my bagel.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “It was a poppy seed bagel.”
“Yeah, I think it was. How did you know?”
Before I could answer, I suddenly realized this vision needed revision. And so I’ve decided not to train horses after all.
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