By T.D. Thornton
Barely two weeks into 2015, horse racing already has a candidate for scandal of the year: cobalt.
Although the bluish metallic element whose name is derived from the German word for a demonic goblin has been linked to equine blood doping for at least two years, cobalt has rocketed to the top of the headlines in recent days.
In Australia, this week’s allegations that three prominent trainers had Thoroughbreds test positive for high levels of cobalt have blindsided the sport.
That news came on the heels of last week’s news out of the United States, where Meadowlands owner Jeffrey Gural barred a Standardbred trainer whose two Breeders Crown championship horses allegedly came back positive for cobalt at five times the threshold limit in an out-of-competition test (one horse won, the other was ninth).
The Meadowlands case is unique because no state penalties exist for cobalt abuse in New Jersey. For the past year Gural has been paying for his own in-house drug testing on horses that compete at his three New Jersey and New York tracks, and he routinely kicks out horsemen he deems detrimental to the sport, citing his rights as a private property owner to do so.
Gural’s maverick efforts have sparked widespread debate about why racing commissions seem slow in reacting to and penalizing trainers who administer dangerous and/or illicit substances to horses. Anyone even passingly familiar with doping has heard the age-old mantra that the cheaters will always be one step ahead of the regulators.
What are the challenges for U.S. veterinarians and regulators when a seemingly innocuous trace element like cobalt rapidly emerges as the elixir du jour for cheaters?
“Honestly, we will never be ahead of people who want to put different substances into horses,” said Dr. Dionne Benson, executive director and chief operating officer for the Racing Medication and Testing Consortium, the industry-backed organization that develops uniform rules, policies and testing standards. “I can’t even dream up these things that people put into horses.
Dr. Benson continued, “In some cases we realize that when we start to regulate one area we will start to see problems in another. But ultimately, in order to properly regulate based on science, we have to go through the process, and it takes time and it takes money. We’ve probably spent $50,000 on cobalt so far and we don’t have a regulation yet.”
According to the vets surveyed for this article, this is the consensus on cobalt: Equines–even those in the wild that aren’t fed the balanced diet racehorses get–are never deficient in it. Supplementing it in anything other than minute amounts can produce appalling side effects. Cobalt’s reputation as a performance enhancer is likely over-exaggerated and is not supported by evidence. And–this one may come as a bit of a surprise to those calling for immediate and stringent enforcement–draconian penalties might not be necessary to eradicate its abuse.
“It’s easy to test for. It’s easy to regulate. It doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do
But trainers are using it. Why?
For decades, cobalt has been known to be effective in humans for fighting anemia by stimulating the production of red blood cells (erythropoiesis). Prior to the development of synthetic “EPO” in the 1970s, Benson said cobalt was what a person in kidney failure might be prescribed.
Increased red blood cell production leads to better oxygenation of the blood and, consequently, better endurance and decreased muscle fatigue. So sometime in the mid-twentieth century, humans began experimenting with the ingestion of cobalt chloride (powdered cobalt “salts”) to improve athletic performance.
But according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, “although cobalt is an essential trace element, toxic effects of excessive administration have been described in humans and animals, including organ damage, impaired thyroid activity and goiter formation.”
Presumably, those frightening side effects were why human athletes gravitated to synthetic EPO abuse around 1990. Horse racing too, eventually had its share of EPO dopers and began testing for it. But word got around that jurisdictions didn’t test for cobalt, which could either be fed or injected into horses.
Fast-forward to 2013. Cobalt abuse was becoming an open, dirty secret on America’s backstretches. Researchers in California, including a team that included Arthur, began a study to determine what baseline levels of cobalt existed in horses, how the administration of cobalt affected their systems, and how long the effects lasted.
Eventually, Arthur came to a determination that 25 parts per billion (ppb) per milliliter of tested serum was the acceptable threshold level for cobalt in a horse’s blood.
Around the same time, Benson said the RMTC obtained about 600 post-race specimen samples from jurisdictions around the country to re-test for them cobalt.
“We collected values from East Coast to West Coast and everything in between,” Benson said. “In every jurisdiction we looked at there were horses above 50 and 60 [ppb]. There were even some results in the hundreds. It wasn’t limited to one jurisdiction. And it certainly wasn’t limited to Thoroughbreds or Stadardbreds or Quarter Horses. It was in all breeds.”
According to Arthur, “you can only get to those levels by giving a horse a very high dose of cobalt.”
In Kentucky, Dr. Mary Scollay, equine medical director for the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission, started testing a herd of research horses. She said the California studies were based on horses receiving a 200mg dose of cobalt. But her intelligence told her trainers were administering cobalt in far higher doses, so she tested at higher levels. Scollay said one assumption that she–and would-be dopers–held was that since cobalt induced erythropoiesis in humans, it would do the same in horses. Both were mammals, right? “Why wouldn’t it?” she figured.
“But we have not seen that,” Scollay said.
Although Scollay cautioned that no research has been done to quantify other physiological effects of cobalt on horses with regard to cardiac output and muscle function, knowing that cobalt does not stimulate red blood cell production would seem to negate the main reason for giving it as a performance enhancer.
In fact, instead of noting physical changes that would help a horse run faster, Scollay observed just the opposite: Profuse sweating, muscle trembling, restless circling, horses dropping to their knees, and brief periods of collapse.
“I’ve seen some cobalt administration at the doses that our intelligence tells us were being used, and it was pretty darn hard to watch,” Scollay said. “It was dramatic.”
Scollay noticed something else too: When she collected samples, she could see that the cobalt-dosed blood was not clotting properly. “What was in the test tubes almost looked like lava lamps, with these globs of stuff kind of floating around,” she said.
Scollay said that while cobalt in and of itself does not cause exercise induced pulmonary hemorrhaging, it could have an effect on how long and hard a horse bleeds.
“Once that bleeding starts, if the clotting mechanism is impaired or doesn’t function, that bleed is going to last longer and as a result be more severe,” Scollay said. “You have to ask yourself if any performance- enhancement that might result from the cobalt in some other system is going to be negated by the fact that the horse is bleeding into his lungs in a fairly uncontrolled manner.”
In March 2014, Arthur forewarned California horsemen that the state would begin testing for cobalt, albeit without published penalties or an RMTC-backed threshold level.
In September, Indiana adopted an emergency racing commission rule banning cobalt levels above 25 ppb in Thoroughbreds under penalty of up to a one-year suspension. New York instituted a 10-year ban for cobalt dopers, but the penalty pertained to harness racing only, with no published threshold level.
Some horsemen questioned the validity of the 25 ppb threshold and expressed fears that supplementation could trigger a false positive. On Sept. 30, the United States Trotting Association released the results of a study it funded, claiming that the appropriate threshold level should be 70 ppb.
The RMTC’s Scientific Advisory Committee failed to reach a threshold consensus at an October meeting.
“The balancing is we don’t necessarily want to control or prohibit giving a vitamin jug to a horse, or giving a product like Red Cell to a horse, which contains 2 mg of cobalt per sampling,” said Benson. “But we do want to stop someone from giving something that contains 100 mg of cobalt. You want to allow them to give Vitamin B shots. But you don’t want to allow them to give cobalt chloride.”
Benson said it was possible, but “not smart and it’s probably not appropriate” to get a horse to trigger 25ppb by giving it multiple vitamin shots over a series of consecutive days.
But to register past a 70 ppb threshold for cobalt?
“To me that shows an intent [to blood dope],” Benson said. “You don’t get there using normal supplements.”
Scollay said that in tests she has done, Kentucky racehorses came back with a “normal range” between 1 and 7 ppb, even assuming the administration of trace-level supplementation.
Arthur said last autumn his team did blood tests on 204 California Thoroughbreds. The average cobalt level was 1.8 ppb and the maximum was 8.2 ppb.
Scollay said she can’t fathom setting the threshold level at 70 ppb, which would be 10 times what she sees as the baseline cobalt level in the Kentucky horse population.
“I think the fears about people providing legitimate care to their animals, then being entrapped with this cobalt test, are not founded,” Scollay said.
Arthur said that if states set a limit of 70 ppb, they run the risk of allowing cheaters to try and administer cobalt doses that are dangerously high but under the legal limit.
Currently, the California rule for Standardbreds testing higher than 25 ppb calls for the horse to be put on the vet’s list until the animal clears its system of cobalt. Because the half-life of cobalt in the equine bloodstream is one week, a horse might not be able to race for up to two months.
“All we did was put a house rule in similar to what Gural did at the Meadowlands, except we just put the horse on the vet’s list and solved the problem,” Arthur said. “If you have a Standardbred and can’t run him for four to eight weeks, it’s a pretty severe punishment.”
Arthur said he expects to recommend a similar penalty for Thoroughbreds. But he hasn’t advocated for the rule to go into effect sooner because there haven’t been any Thoroughbred overages since California announced that horses would be tested for cobalt
Benson said she believes a two-tier penalty system might be appropriate: Lesser penalties for triggering the 25 ppb threshold, and more severe bans for going over something like a 50 or 70 ppb limit.
“You take the concentration of the substance into consideration,” Scollay agreed. “Believe me, if I show the video to my stewards of a horse who has been treated with cobalt, they’re going to consider [a more severe penalty for higher dosing].”
But Scollay said Kentucky is holding off on announcing penalties while awaiting an RMTC justification for threshold levels. Benson said, “I’m very hopeful that we’ll have a board meeting in March, and that by that time we’ll have a recommendation for the industry.”
Lee Park, a spokesman for the New York State Gaming Commission, wrote in an email that his commission “expects to introduce a Thoroughbred cobalt rule similar to the existing harness rule in the very near future.”
Scollay said she can understand why some within the racing industry view the process as slow.
“The reality is, I guess it is ‘whack a mole.’ Some days it’s very frustrating,” Scollay said. “Other days it’s really challenging and it poses interesting questions. Who would have thought that I would be contemplating how anemia was treated in humans in the 1970s? And yet here I am thinking about it and learning about it. It’s not a futile exercise. It opens your mind to other avenues that [cheaters] might contemplate.”
