Another National Pastime Ruined
Here we go again.
Salute the Count, an eight-year-old gelding, tested positive for Clenbuterol, a drug that increases lung capacity. Any of this sound familiar? An athlete beyond his prime doping in order to prolong his career? These guys are all the same.
And don’t try to play the liberal blame game, accusing everyone who’s so much as watched a horse race of complicity. “Oh,” you’ll whine, “Rick Dutrow, the trainer of Salute the Count as well as recent Triple Crown hopeful Big Brown, has been caught giving steroids to horses every year since 2000!”
Or maybe you’ll say, “IEAH Stables, co-owner of Big Brown, just recently publicly stated its horses would stop taking steroids, an announcement that conveniently occurred right before Big Brown’s trainer got suspended, thereby implicitly acknowledging that their hands are dirty, too!”
Or else you crybabies will whimper, “There’s so much money in horse racing, particularly because of its marriage to gambling, that it should be surprising if horses WEREN’T found with all sorts of insane stuff in their systems!”
Whatever. Let’s lay accountability where it ought to be.
Who has more to lose? Some crappy trainer? Or a horse who has access to the finest medical care and nutrition America has to offer, gets to bask in the cheers of drunks and gambling addicts, and gets to walk around victoriously with a bunch of flowers draped over his overheated, frothing body?
So let’s air out this whole business and send the ones mucking up this beloved sport to the glue factory. We almost lost baseball. Let’s not lose horse-racing, too.
