Thoughtfulness | Although horse racing has been doping for a long time, Hua Tian is really more wronged than Dou E this time

Written by 丨 Horsen

Editor丨 Feng Xiao

Equestrian competitions, whether in terms of public popularity or competition ratings, are extremely unpopular niche sports in our country, and few people pay attention to them - and most domestic sports fans know the most about this sport is that there is a Chinese athlete named Hua Tian, who has made many breakthroughs in the Olympic Games for Chinese equestrian and has just won the Asian Games gold medal.

Hua Tian and his mount Chicko in the Asian Games

But I'm afraid that even Hua Tian himself did not expect that in the past two days, he would be popular on the Internet in a very different way - the horse he rode in the race "Chicko" was actually detected to be doping!

After seeing this news, many people's first reaction is probably not "old people, subway, mobile phone" or "Nick Young, question mark" face - are you kidding me? Can horses also eat stimulants?

If you think about it, people can take medicine, horses can naturally eat, there is nothing unreasonable about this, so the desire to eat melons is so flaming.

So, today let's talk about this in detail.

The first point that needs to be explained is that Huatian is not an unethical player who deliberately uses drugs. This is a matter of the reputation of the players and the Chinese equestrian team, and it is very serious, so it must be carefully clarified and explained.

First of all, the drug detected in "Chicko" is called "allylprogesterone", and its common effect is to suppress estrus by reducing hormone levels in the mare.

Friends who have had experience in animal breeding should understand very well that once the animal is in heat, the instinct will prevail, greatly affecting the owner's command and control of it, so for the convenience of the race, the mare can use this drug.

But the drug also has an effect on testosterone production in stallions – and although there are no clear studies to show whether this effect leads to apparent unfairness in competition, the International Equestrian Federation (FEI) only allows stallions to take allylprogesterone during training out of caution and convenience.

Because of the unclear efficacy of the drug, allylpretin is classified by the FEI as a "controlled drug" rather than a "banned drug".

The more down-to-earth use of allylprogesterone is in the field of pig rearing, where the drug is used to control the reproductive cycle of pigs

Another more important reason why Huatian is not an immoral player is that although "Chicko" is a stallion, it is a gelding that no longer has the function of secreting testosterone. From this point of view, feeding it allylprogesterone has almost zero benefits for the competition.

According to the subsequent investigation, the reason why "Chicko" mistakenly took allylpret was because it was greedy, and when passing by the stable next door, he showed off two mouthfuls of forage, and the bad thing is that there was a mare living in the stable next door, and the mare happened to take allylprogesterone, and more coincidentally, the mare also had the habit of urinating on her leftover forage...

Are "old people, subways, mobile phones" and "Nick Young, question marks" coming again?

In short, the conclusion of the matter is already obvious, Huatian did not subjectively and deliberately feed his horses allyl progests; And the result of the test is "trace", that is, minimal; What's more, as mentioned earlier, this thing will not affect the game even if it is fed.

Therefore, we can strongly condemn "Chicko" for stealing girls (?) The immoral behavior of food, but Hua Tian has indeed suffered a calamity of innocence and should not be morally blamed.

Then maybe some friends will ask, since there is no impact on the competition, why is the result canceled? To be honest, this question is difficult to answer, and it is not good for us to accuse EFI of rigidity and bureaucracy, we can only say... Rules are rules, and it should be bad luck.

Secondly, this penalty will not affect any of Huatian's Asian Games gold medals, nor will there be any ban.

This should also be the biggest concern for most people.

The race in which "Chicko" was detected with allylprogesterone was the F/G team qualification event for the triathlon at the Paris Olympics in Ireland in June this year.

Of course, after the penalty led to the cancellation of the results, the Chinese team also lost the qualification for the team competition of the equestrian triathlon at the Paris Olympics, which is the most serious consequence of this incident, so Hua Tian issued a public statement apologizing and saying that he was sorry for his teammates.

However, Hua Tian's previous individual qualification for the Paris Olympics, as well as the two Asian Games gold medals he has won since then, will not be affected in any way.

This is probably the whole summary of this incident.

After clarifying this incident, let's talk about horse doping by the way.

As we said earlier, many people will have questions in their minds, can horses also eat stimulants?

Of course, now everyone knows that it is okay to eat it - otherwise there would be no penalty for horses taking illegal drugs.

In fact, the name of doping in English is "DOPE", which originally meant a mixture of opium narcotics for horse racing.

The original origin of doping actually came from horse racing

As you know, people in the UK especially like to bet on horses, so some people thought of feeding opium to horses to improve their performance, and then came up with the drug "DOPE", and later in human sports, there were athletes who took doping, and everyone used "DOPE" to call illegal drugs such as doping.

It can be seen that in competitive competitions, the history of human doping to horses is much earlier than the history of human doping themselves...

What many people don't know is that the biggest difficulty in doping testing is its unknown - whether it is a urine test, a blood test or a saliva test, the premise of testing is to be targeted, know what direction you need to test, so that you can use relevant detection methods to find abnormalities.

For human drugs, because of the massive drug development data accumulated by major pharmaceutical companies over the years, what ingredients can cause what reactions, almost all can be estimated, so human stimulant detection is relatively easy.

Even so, there will be some countries or companies that continue to develop new molecular drugs to bypass testing, and wait until the International Anti-Doping Agency responds to add new drugs to the list of banned drugs before developing new drugs - which is basically the main theme of the current doping-anti-doping battle.

But for horses, there is far less research on the types of drugs they use and their effectiveness, and the prizes for horse racing (not Olympic equestrian events) are high, and many races are accompanied by gambling, so there are naturally no fewer riders who use their brains.

In March 2020, for example, the FBI raided a horse racing training center in the country, arresting 11 horse trainers, seven veterinarians, and nine drug suppliers, and accusing them of horse racing doping.

In the indictment in this case, we can see that the drug "SGF-1000" contains a certain "growth factor" that promotes tissue repair and increases the endurance of horses beyond their natural ability, and more importantly - hardly detectable by any existing detection methods.

The FBI was able to convict the other party because the training center's horse races repeatedly showed unusual results in the race, which aroused suspicion, and eventually the FBI used telephone interception and other methods, and after a long investigation, it obtained relevant evidence.

The horse racing industry in the United States has a long history, mature competitions, and the standard designation and detection methods for anti-doping are already internationally leading, but in this case, it is still impossible to rely on scientific and technological detection methods to convict violators, and must turn to the FBI to use telephone monitoring - the difficulty of investigating horse racing doping is also evident.

However, relatively speaking, the Olympic equestrian competition is not for the purpose of "direct racing", and the commercial value is very low, but there is no drug company or organization that has the incentive to develop related types of illegal drugs, so the difficulty of detection is relatively easy.

As a result, equestrians who have been punished for using banned drugs have occasionally occurred at the Olympic Games.

For example, at the 2004 Athens Olympics, the gold medalists of the equestrian team steeplechase, Beerbaum and Hoy of Germany, were deprived of the gold medal by detecting the illegal drug "glucocorticoids" on the mounts "Gold Diggers" and "Crowned Parrots".

Berbaum

Also Athens Olympics, the gold medalist in the individual obstacle course, O'Connor from Ireland, his mount "Waterford Crystal", was also found to have used banned substance stimulants and was also stripped of the gold medal.

At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Germany's Arman's horse racing "Koster" was found to have used the illegal drug "capsaicin", which led to the disqualification.

Interestingly, however, most equestrians are punished for feeding their mounts illegal drugs, but Jamie Comon, an equestrian from Australia, is one of them. Ah no, mudslides - at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, during the pre-competition doping test, Comon himself was found to be cocaine positive and was banned from racing, but his horse successfully passed the test...

It is also the only equestrian rider in Olympic history to test positive for cocaine.

Dude, it's true that horses can't take medicine indiscriminately, but have you forgotten that people can't take medicine indiscriminately...