Ron Burke: “We have 1950s rules with 2023 testing”

The following is the latest “Keeping Pace” weekly column at the Paulick Report by harness racing owner and breeder Andrew Cohen.

Leading Standardbred trainer Ron Burke, who has 5,000 starts per year, is frustrated with ticky-tack contamination positives meted out by state racing commissions and hopes HISA can do better.

On any given summer’s day, members of what the harness industry calls the “Burke Brigade” fan out to tracks from Kentucky to Ontario, Massachusetts to Indiana.

Aided by waves of assistant trainers, caretakers and other employees, Ron Burke is legally responsible for all of it, especially if one of his horses tests positive. Burke has had his share of positives; he’s fought his share of fights against regulators and administrative judges. He’s under suspension now in Pennsylvania for a Glycopyrrolate positive, in fact, and it would be easy to dismiss him for these reasons. That would be a mistake. Burke’s voice is worth listening to in the debate over racing integrity and I for one am glad he has become more outspoken within the harness industry.

Why? Burke races overnights, claimers, and stakes races. He buys expensive yearlings and cheaper ones. Many drivers steer his horses. His experiences are a powerful argument against the way state racing commissions have long governed integrity issues.

Whether trainers are guilty or innocent, whether they run big operations or one-horse stables, challenges to drug positives are expensive and shrouded in bureaucratic secrecy. They are subject to endless delays or inexplicable logic. In New Jersey, for example, state regulators recently changed drug withdrawal times, failed to notify trainers, and then punished some for violating the new rule. When asked to provide proof of their notice, regulators failed to do so. It’s unacceptable.

Like many U.S. trainers, Burke struggles to understand how (and why) a picogram positive – that’s one trillionth of a gram, which is itself 1/30th of an ounce – for a therapeutic drug can result in punishment for a trainer. “I have a positive with five picograms,” he told me last week. “It’s ridiculous.” Some Thoroughbred trainers echo Burke’s concerns about contamination positives.

Some, like him, would like to see HISA continue to tweak regulations pertaining to potential contamination cases to distinguish the new federal regime from the old state racing commission rule, under which Standardbreds still (for now) operate. Some contaminations portend intentional doping. Others don’t. Figuring out which is which is the challenge. Here’s Burke:

On state racing commissions: “Sometimes you can get them to use judgment, yes, but you have to have money to do that. You have to go to the commission level, to the administrative law judge level. You have to keep moving on because no one wants to make the call to where they look like they worked out a deal or something. It’s a tough, tough situation for them. I get it. They are trying to protect their product. I get it. But there has to be a change, especially in states where there is ‘absolute liability/responsibility’ for trainers.”

To read the rest of the article, click here.

by Andrew Cohen, republished from the Paulick Report