The Arkansas Racing Commission on Tuesday voted unanimously to overrule a stewards’ ruling issued last year disqualifying two horses trained by Bob Baffert and suspending the trainer for 15 days, following two days of testimony to hear the trainer’s appeal. The decision by the commission will restore the first-place finishes of Charlatan in one division of the May 2 Arkansas Derby at Oaklawn Park last year and by Gamine in an allowance race earlier on the card. For Baffert, he will no longer face the prospect of a 15-day suspension because of the findings of lidocaine in both horses’ post-race samples, but will be fined $5,000 for each positive. The commission clearly relied on its belief that the post-race positives did not impact the performance of the horses in the race and that they were the result of inadvertent contamination. During the two days of hearing, which totaled 14 hours of testimony, commissioners focused most resolutely on those two aspects of the case, even as Baffert’s attorneys also endeavored to introduce questions about the chain of custody for the samples and the validity of the test results due to a complicated arrangement between testing laboratories at the time the samples were pulled. “There’s abundant evidence that the horses were exposed to lidocaine,” said Michael Post, a commissioner, as the body began deliberations. “I trust our labs and I trust our people. But there was also abundant evidence that it would be below what is performance-enhancing.” Baffert and his attorneys had argued the horses were inadvertently contaminated in the 24 hours leading up to the race or shortly thereafter, either by Baffert’s assistant, Jimmy Barnes, who was wearing a medication patch containing lidocaine on the days he handled the horses, or by staff in the test barn following the races. Stewards later disqualified the horses and levied the 15-day suspension after a July 13 hearing last year. Lidocaine is a regulated therapeutic medication in Arkansas and other racing states, and positives for the drug are called when the concentration exceeds a certain threshold. The drug is most commonly used to numb an area of the horse, usually in order to stitch or suture a wound.  It also is a common ingredient in many over-the-counter pain medications for humans. At the start of Tuesday’s hearing, Dr. Cynthia Cole, director of an equine drug-testing lab at the University of Florida, testified that the levels of lidocaine found in the two horses indicated that the drug had no “pharmacological impact” on the horses at the time they raced. She also testified that the finding of the two lidocaine positives, along with a third on the same card, invited “suspicion” due to the rarity in which lidocaine positives are generally found in racing. “If I had the information that three horses tested positive at the same track on the same day for lidocaine, I would ask for an investigation” by the state racing commission about whether there was contamination, Cole testified. In the stewards’ ruling from last year, Baffert was held responsible for the positives under the so-called “absolute insurer rule,” which holds a trainer strictly liable for post-race test results regardless of fault. Byron Freeland, the commission counsel tasked with defending the stewards’ ruling, brought up the absolute insurer rule on several occasions Tuesday, including in a cross-examination of Baffert after the trainer took the stand midway through the second day. After asking Baffert if he was aware of the absolute insurer rule and its implications, Freeland asked Baffert if he was now certain that Barnes, his assistant, had lidocaine in the barn where the horses were stabled in the lead-up to the race, citing the medicated patch. Baffert answered, “Yes.”  But other witnesses cast doubt on whether Barnes could even be responsible for the contamination. One of the witnesses called Tuesday by Baffert’s attorneys, Dr. Clara Fenger, a Kentucky practicing veterinarian and equine pharmacologist who is a well-known critic of the scientific bases for many thresholds for therapeutic medications, testified that she believed that data on the post-race tests for Gamine indicated that the filly was exposed to lidocaine after the race, given the ratio between lidocaine and its metabolite in the horse’s urine sample.  “It’s clear to me that the lidocaine had to have been exposed to the horse in the test barn, because you only get this result if it’s within 30 minutes of the exposure,” Fenger said. On Monday, an employee of the test barn said that Barnes had visited the horse there after the race. As they did on the first day of the hearing, Baffert’s attorneys continued to attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the initial test results from the horses due to what they characterized as breaks in the chain of custody and the apparent mislabeling of Charlatan’s sample describing the colt as a gelding. They also continued to question the legality of an agreement between Arkansas’s primary testing laboratory, Truesdail, and another facility in Colorado, Industrial Laboratories, that performed the post-race tests on a subcontracted basis after Truesdail lost its laboratory accreditation in March, two months before the Baffert horses ran. One of Baffert’s attorneys, Steve Quattlebaum, who is based in Little Rock, Ark., pursued a line of questioning about the contracts and state guidelines with Arkansas Racing Commission Executive Director John Campbell in order to generate a long string of acknowledgements from Campbell about the peculiarities of the deal between Truesdail and Industrial. Notably, Quattlebaum distinctly dialed down the antagonistic tone he used the previous day with Dr. Anthony Fontana, the California-based technical services manager for Truesdail laboratory, in a remarkably similar string of queries.  But, prior to the final decision, it was unclear whether the commissioners who decided the appeal were interested in allowing the vagaries of the contractual processes to determine the outcome of the case. Instead, the commissioners focused most of their questions during the five hours of testimony on Tuesday on Fenger and Cole, especially as they two pharmacologists described their misgivings over the threshold level currently used to adjudicate positives for lidocaine. Alex Lieblong, chairman of the commission, asked Cole whether she was confident in the scientific basis for lidocaine’s threshold of 20 picograms per milliliter of blood serum, and she responded that pharmacologists like herself had doubts about a large number of the thresholds currently being used for therapeutic medications. “We are in the process of re-examining some, if not all, of the thresholds and how they were established and whether we need to go back and do additional studies,” she said. “My personal opinion is that lidocaine is one of them that we have the weakest case for.” In cross-examination, Freeland asked Cole whether her own lab in Florida used the 20 picogram threshold to determine violations for lidocaine. She answered that she did, despite her previously stated misgivings. “But this one is problematic, because horses don’t live in bubbles, they live in the real world,” Cole said. After Baffert concluded his testimony, Lieblong said that the commission was facing a difficult decision in the case, while obliquely criticizing the level of research underlying some of the regulations on the books in Arkansas due to recommendations from various national racing organizations. The comment foreshadowed the commission’s ultimate decision. “We kind of still are left with, ‘Okay the rule says this,’ " Lieblong said. “And we’re all under the microscope, because whatever decision we come up with, it will be controversial. That’s the state of the game right now. I think we all know that’s not healthy.”