People think of drug testing as the omniscient, infallible arbiter of guilt and innocence in competitive sports. When I set out to write a book about doping in the monied, occasionally aristocratic sport of Thoroughbred horse racing, I thought the chemists would offer me a clear path to understanding who was cheating—who belonged in the “good guy” box, and who belonged in the “bad guy” box.
Instead, I came to realize that for all its incredible sophistication, drug screening in both human and equine sports is a limited tool, offering not clarity but endless opportunities to muddy the truth, weasel out of accountability, and hide behind uncertainty. Sometimes, it may even condemn the innocent.
Drug screening can identify known substances in an animal’s blood or urine down to the picogram level—one-trillionth of a gram. But it cannot tell you how the substance entered its system. Was a horse administered methamphetamine as a performance enhancer or was it handled by a groom who uses the drug and had the residue on his or her hands? (The latter being the explanation offered for the Italian tennis player Jannik Sinner’s doping scandal last year.)
And in many cases, unless there’s a lot of money, testing can’t tell you whether the substance was naturally occurring in a plant or synthetically manufactured in a lab. Did a horse ingest hay contaminated with a common weed that contains the same substance as a performance enhancer? Or was the horse specifically administered the performance enhancer?
That’s if the lab can even detect a particular substance at all—testing a sample in “full scan mode,” where lab technicians attempt to identify every substance they can find, is expensive and time-consuming. As a result, most labs run targeted analyses looking for known drugs. If the lab doesn’t know what it’s looking for, it isn’t going to find anything. Some scurrilous drugmakers have created new so-called designer drugs, slight variations of known performance enhancers, such as erythropoietin, which are made invisible to testing by tweaking just a single molecule.
Further uncertainty: Up until recently, different states tested for different drugs at different sensitivity levels. Cheaters could play the system by using anything that wasn’t on the list of what’s tested in a given state—or get away with murder in states where the lab’s instruments or methods didn’t detect low concentrations of certain drugs.
It’s a lesson in the naïveté of thinking that technocratic tools can offer answers to fundamentally human questions: Who is playing fair? And what is “fair,” anyway?
Anti-doping efforts in human sports have always carried with them a whiff of classism. The French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympic Games, enforced the mandatory amateur status of the Olympic athlete because it was “a form of social protection, a relic of the class system,” he wrote in 1925.
Amateur sports as an ideal of moral and social purity was an almost religious dogma for Coubertin that allowed the founding members of the International Olympic Committee to preserve the social order of the day—one in which the working classes and laborers were excluded from the sporting club. “Allowing pros to play next to amateurs would be tantamount to allowing the land-tilling peasant to join the estate-owning baron at the dinner table—a disruption of the social order,” the sports journalist Mark Johnson wrote in a history of doping in sports.
But even as the ideal of amateurism eventually died out in the face of its obvious unworkability for most Olympic athletes, Johnson and other sports scholars have argued that Coubertin’s chivalric code of purity and “chaste fair play” lived on in anti-doping regulations. Coubertin, Johnson wrote, “left a legacy that persists today as anti-doping missionaries strive to revive a contrived state of purity that never existed, most especially in pro sports.”
In 2021, when America’s most famous horse trainer, the white-haired juggernaut Bob Baffert, was disqualified from the Kentucky Derby after his horse tested positive for 21 picograms of a common anti-inflammatory, he was tarred on Saturday Night Live as a notorious doper and summarily ejected from the sport for months. Baffert was a cowboy from an Arizona border town, a hell of a horseman whose unsophisticated habit of running his mouth—and perhaps whose dominance—had often chapped the asses of the sport’s East Coast elite.
The drug almost certainly had no impact on the animal’s performance in the race. It was legal for use in training, just not on race day. Baffert argued the positive test result had arisen from a harmless ointment given for a skin rash—not a joint injection that could have unfairly enabled the horse’s performance. The labs could offer no definitive proof of this, of course. The debate over whether the penalty he faced was appropriate continues to fester in the horse-racing world.
Has testing separated the good guys from the bad guys? Or has the sport used testing to impose its own social, moral, and business judgments on its participants?
Opinions abound. Just don’t ask the chemists.
Katie Bo Lillis is a Virginia-based reporter for CNN, covering intelligence and national security
