06.06.08 5:00 AM CDT
• Sports
• Playboy Staff
Dave Golokhov, host of Hardcore Sports Radio (Sirius 186), doesn’t think Big Brown is passing the smell test:History has a tendency of repeating itself, but sports fans don't have a history of learning from it.
Another steroid-rampant sport is about to set some records this week. Big Brown is vying for just the 12th Triple Crown in the history of the sport, but almost no one seems to care that he’s being doped up with the same steroids that Ben Johnson and Rafael Palmeiro were busted with.
When Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire were juicing and cranking baseballs at a historic pace, baseball fans only cared about excitement and records falling, and the league didn't care to investigate an uncommon spike in production as long as attendance was on the rise.
Horse racing was a fading sport before Big Brown helped attract some national attention.
Big Brown is trained by Richard Dutrow Jr., who proudly proclaims that he gives all of his ponies Winstrol (also known as Stanozol) on the 15th of every month because it helps the horse therapeutically. Barry Bonds also used The Cream and The Clear for therapeutic purposes, right?
Winstrol, along with a number of other steroids, are legal in horse racing just like steroids were legal in baseball. And even though Dutrow can dope his horses with as many legal steroids he wants, he has still had one of his horses test positive for illegal steroids every single year since 2000.
But with fines of roughly $2000 even after double-digit positive tests, trainers like Dutrow essentially factor the penalty into the cost of business.
Interestingly enough, while there is a drug mart's worth of legal anabolic steroids permitted for usage in the sports, that's only in North America. In England, Hong Kong, or wherever else they race horses, steroids – and the drugs that Big Brown is being enhanced with – are completely banned.
On Saturday, the casual fan will be watching the Belmont because of a potential Triple Crown winner. Just like casual fans who didn't care about baseball for years all of the sudden had a renewed interest in the America's game when Bonds, Sosa and McGwire were re-writing the home run records.
When Big Brown wins the Triple Crown this Saturday, the languishing sport will get the artificial shot in the arm it desperately needs. The problem is the fans, media and congress don't care enough about horse racing to put an asterisk next to the roided horse or to truly investigate the problem.
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Comments on this entry:
Tomorrow just remember that the reason a stupid person is called a "dope" is because that's the only sort of person who would bet on a horse race where the fix has been applied. (Look it up.) Clearly the Europeans have the right idea about banning steroids (and racing remains popular there).
Dutrow is one cocky MF. maybe its this type of attention that will get more attention for the bad stuffi nteh sport too.
From my blog:
Those stupid pukes were running their horse Big Brown with a SPLIT HOOF. They put some kind of super glue patch on it. Well, he just refused to run- horse has more brains than half the human race, and the jockey let him alone when he wouldn't respond. I was so pissed off about that race but what an amazingly talented, intelligent horse.
Jonathan Swift was correct when he made the horses have the smartest country in Gulliver's Travels and their population "the perfection of nature!"
It's misanthrope Monday y'all!
From wikipedia:
Shortly thereafter he meets a horse and comes to understand that the horses (in their language Houyhnhnm or "the perfection of nature") are the rulers and the deformed creatures ("Yahoos") are human beings in their basest form. Gulliver becomes a member of the horse's household, and comes to both admire and emulate the Houyhnhnms and their lifestyle, rejecting humans as merely Yahoos endowed with some semblance of reason which they only use to exacerbate and add to the vices Nature gave them. However, an Assembly of the Houyhnhnms rules that Gulliver, a Yahoo with some semblance of reason, is a danger to their civilization and he is expelled. He is then rescued, against his will, by a Portuguese ship that returns him to his home in England. However, he is unable to reconcile himself to living among Yahoos; he becomes a recluse, remaining in his house, largely avoiding his family, and spending several hours a day speaking with the horses in his stables.
"Horse sense" is the thing a horse has that keeps it from betting on people. - W.C. Fields