Why “the doping”:
We launched The Doping to expose the widespread, illegal drugging of racehorses – and to make the public information impossible to ignore.
What’s in it:
– Overview: A brief history of the federal investigation and the indictments that followed.
– News archive: curated coverage of the recent national doping scandal, including dozens of alleged and convicted individuals and companies that participated.
– Primary Documents: A vast repository of federal wiretaps, trial transcripts, court filings, sentencing memos, forfeiture proceedings, and more.
Why this is important:
Besides the obvious, doping racehorses with performance-enhancing drugs and other dangerous concoctions is prohibited by racing regulations and, in many states, by criminal law. Yet enforcement remains grossly inadequate: only a fraction of these criminals are caught, and even then the penalties are essentially a joke.
What the federal cases revealed:
When the first indictments were unveiled in the Southern District of New York in 2020, few were prepared for the magnitude of the indictments against prominent industry figures. For anyone with a conscience, the scandal meant one thing above all: animal abuse.
As the federal filings put it, these cases exposed “a widespread, corrupt scheme by racehorse trainers, veterinarians, PEDs.” [performance-enhancing drugs] distributors and others to manufacture, distribute, and receive counterfeit and misbranded PEDs and secretly administer those PEDs to racehorses under the control of program participants.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Sarah Mortazavi summarized the stakes:
“For nearly two decades, including two years after his arrest in this case, Seth Fishman cowardly pumped hundreds of thousands of illegal PEDs into the market with no one to stop him from complying with the law. The defendant made millions of dollars. He did this on the backs of racehorses doped by corrupt trainers.”
What’s next:
Even as the prosecutions and convictions continue to resonate, the regulators’ response remains anemic. That’s why we collected the data so that the extent of the damage, and the names and mechanisms behind it, are clear to everyone. Explore the document library in The Doping and share it widely. The horses cannot speak for themselves, but these documents can. The mainstream media has largely ignored one of the largest criminal “sports scandals” in all of American history; Mistakes in horse racing won’t do that.
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