Why are we talking so much about 3 equine deaths which occurred 5 years ago?

Because it shows that Racing has done nothing, and is seemingly doing nothing,
to clean its own house. Because some very astute handicappers play the
medication angle the way old school handicappers used to play trainer angles
and equipment changes. Because cheating,which used to be associated mainly with
leaky roof tracks and sore horses, has now permeated Racing at the glamorous
tracks and in the graded races.

Some want the issue of performance enhancement to just go away. Others, such as
Jerry, and Steve Crist, and Barry Irwin, all influential voices, want the
problem to be addressed, yet really can't afford for Racing to air all of the
dirty laundry which would be hanging on the line if Racing took a hard look
inward at itself. I do not think any of us has any inherent trust left in
government to address a problem such as this, and nobody looks forward to the
day that the PETA fanatics arrive at the racetrack.

Executive Action was a Dalton Trumbo movie (DT was a blacklisted author who
wrote the novel "Johnny Got His Gun", perhaps the most powerful piece of anti-
war prose ever put to paper) released in the late 1970s which investigated the
JFK assassination. It investigated a lot of the aspects of the assassination
which Oliver Stone addressed in his overhyped and overrated "JFK" nearly two
decades later, like the whole notion of triangulated fire and the fact that an
Oswald doppelganger was running around Dallas and New Orleans acting
erratically and drawing attention to himself.

The movie Executive Action, which begins with the narrator stating that LBJ,
speaking off the record, believed that Oswald did not act alone, ends with
snapshots of 18 material witnesses to the assassination who were dead within 3
years of the assassination. The narrator states that an actuary, engaged by the
Times of London, calculated that the chances that all 18 of these people would
be deceased within 3 years of the assassination was something like 37 trillion
to one.

I do not know what an equine actuary would say about the chances that 3 animals
coming out of one barn, following impressive performances, would all be dead
within months, all from internal illness that did not involve severe joint or
bone trauma.

Chuckles uses the Pletcher Die Off to try to discredit the Pletcher/Allday axis
(even though CTC has not established, nor do the the Bloodhorse articles he
provided us with establish, Allday's involvement). I do not know why CTC feels
that TAP embodies evil in Racing. And the fact is that autopsies were
performed, and it is likely that insurance companies cut checks, and Padua and
Melnyk and Tabor are all still in business with TAP.

Something happened in August of 2002. I believe Dick Francis had left us by
then,which is too bad because the only thing better than fiction is a true
story which nobody will believe, and Mr. Francis could have woven a hell of a
yarn here.

Whatever happened, these animals were in extreme distress before their deaths.
I do not know if the truth is that their deaths were accidental or the result
of some performance enhancing treatment gone awry. The fact is that if the
latter was the case, and Racing authorities knew of it, I am almost certain
that it would have been covered up.

Watergate and the JFK assassination. In each case the implications of the cover-
up which followed the crime had more impact than the crimes themselves. The
same is true in Racing, and until there is the type of disclosure some on this
board have called for, Jeff Mullins may have been right (though impolitic) when
he called horseplayers "Idiots".