Officials with the Horseracing Integrity and Welfare Unit urged local horsemen and regulatory personnel to establish lines of communication to the agency in order to improve their investigations of illegal doping during a panel on Wednesday morning at the Global Symposium on Racing in Tucson. “We’re not asking for snitches, we’re not asking for tips, we’re not asking for revenge,” said Kate Mittelstadt, HIWU’s chief of operations, one of three HIWU officials to appear on the panel. “We’re asking for information to inform this program, to make it more effective for this industry.” HIWU, which is owned by Drug Free Sport International, a private company that runs anti-doping programs for several major-league sports, is a relative newcomer to the racing industry, and it was clear from the panel that the agency has gone through extensive growing pains since it started to enforce the Anti-Doping Medication and Control program of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority in the summer of 2023. Currently, HIWU devises the testing strategies and conducts investigations in the states where HISA has jurisdiction, which covers nearly all major racing jurisdictions in the U.S. Including the drug-testing budget, the ADMC program is roughly 75 percent of HISA’s total budget, at around $60 million. Dr. Jeff Blea, the equine medical director of the California Horse Racing Board, moderated the panel, and he was candid in his assessments of his initial interactions with HIWU investigators who were assigned to California tracks. :: Bet the races with a $200 First Deposit Match + FREE All Access PPs! Join DRF Bets. “I’ll be honest, in the beginning, you guys were [saying] ‘I got this,’ ” he said. “And I had to explain, this is a different world. If you don’t know what a shed row is, please, I’ll go with you and I’ll show you.” Although Blea said that his relationships with the investigators have improved over time, he also said, “It took a lot of work.” Blea said he had to “embrace communications” to bridge that divide, and said that regulators in similar positions needed to employ the same strategies. “There has been a lot of change on the HIWU side, and that’s because they are listening,” he said. “But it takes two. They’re listening, so we need to be talking.” Shaun Richards, a former FBI agent for 23 years who is the director of intelligence and strategy for HIWU, acknowledged that many of his investigators faced a learning curve when starting out in their jobs. Richards was one of the lead investigators in the recent FBI investigation that led to the guilty pleas of two high-profile trainers, Jorge Navarro and Jason Servis, among nearly two dozen other individuals tied to the Thoroughbred and Standardbred racing industries. “My guys are encouraged to get out and talk to as many people as possible,” Richards said. “If they do that, they will gain knowledge of the industry. These guys, they know investigations, and part of investigations is learning the subject matter of what you are investigating. … I do believe they have gotten better, as far as knowledge of the industry.” But HIWU officials on the panel said that their work was widely misunderstood within the racing industry. One of the largest misunderstandings is that the testing program is being conducted “randomly,” the officials said, when it is actually relying on a variety of intelligence sources to target horses, trainers, and veterinarians who have been marked for further investigation. “We are trying to be very specific in how we allocate resources in this program,” Mittelstadt said. Mittelstadt, Richards, and the other HIWU panelist, Dr. Mary Scollay, HIWU’s chief of science, described a highly collaborative process in how they conduct investigations when they discover a piece of evidence that could point toward illegal drug use, whether the evidence comes from a drug test, a tip, a data analysis, a suspicious performance, or a search that turns up an unknown or illegal substance. “It’s not information that just goes into one area and is strictly siloed, it’s constantly being pushed back and forth from every position [within HIWU’s departments],” Richards said. “And it’s proven to be successful. We have gotten more efficient in the way that we deploy our resources.” Scollay, who has held positions in the racing industry for nearly 40 years, said that modern-day investigations into doping are highly complex, and she urged racing constituents to recognize that they are critical to making those investigations succeed. “At the end of the day, this is a partnership,” Scollay said. “There’s still reservations out there about us, I know, but I just want to say we’re here for you guys and we want this to go well. So we need your help and we will do our best for you.” :: Want to learn more about handicapping and wagering? Check out DRF's Handicapping 101 and Wagering 101 pages.