Jonathan Wong, a leading trainer at Golden Gate Fields in Northern California, has been issued a two-year suspension by an arbitrator who ruled that Wong’s testimony in a recent hearing over a metformin positive in one of his horses was “untruthful.” The arbitrator, Nancy Holtz, applied the start of the two-year suspension retroactively to July 1, 2023 when Wong was provisionally suspended due to the first finding of metformin. Holtz also ruled that Wong should be responsible for $8,000 of the costs of arbitration. In a brief text message on Monday afternoon, Wong declined to comment, but he acknowledged providing a statement to Thoroughbred Daily News saying that he planned to appeal the arbitrator’s decision. Under rules enforced by the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority, Wong could appeal the decision to the Federal Trade Commission, which is the overseer of HISA, or in federal court. Wong was first provisionally suspended by the Horseracing Wagering and Integrity Unit, which enforces HISA’s drug-testing policies, when a horse he trained, Heaven and Earth, tested positive for metformin after winning a race at Horseshoe Indianapolis in Shelbyville, Ind., on June 1. Heaven and Earth was disqualified. :: Bet with the Best! Get FREE All-Access PPs and Weekly Cashback when you wager on DRF Bets. Metformin is a commonly prescribed medication to treat diabetes in humans. Beginning in 2022, however, it began showing up in post-race tests in racehorses. HIWU took over testing in most racing jurisdictions, including Indiana, on May 22, 2023. Trainers, including Wong, have argued that their horses have tested positive for the drug due to accidental contamination from human sources. Initially, Wong told numerous publications, including Daily Racing Form, that he had been prescribed metformin to treat diabetes. During the formal adjudication process, however, according to Holtz, Wong did not pursue this line of defense, and he denied that he had ever told a reporter for a different publication, The Paulick Report, that he was “the source of the metformin,” which, Holtz wrote, was a “demonstrably false statement.” Shortly after the initial articles appeared, Wong “sought out the services of a polygraph examiner, in an attempt to establish that he knew nothing about the source of the metformin,” according to Holtz. Then, on the eve of the hearing, Wong introduced a statement from a former groom who was living in Mexico in which the groom took the blame for being the source of the metformin, by either failing to wash his hands after taking the medication or urinating in Heaven and Earth’s stall while the horse was at Horseshoe Indianapolis. Holtz wrote in her ruling that the sworn statement from the groom, who could not be located, “is without any credibility. “Given its timing,” she wrote, “I find it is a recent contrivance.” Wong also challenged HIWU’s chain of command and several laboratory procedures in an attempt to get the initial positive test and the confirmatory test thrown out. While Holtz acknowledged that there were some shortcomings in the chain of command and the documentation in the positive tests, she said those “departures” did not invalidate the testing results. “To the contrary, there is ample affirmative evidence which supports my conclusion that there was no likelihood at all of a ‘false positive’ caused by any of the claimed departures,” Holtz wrote. “It is not enough to suggest possibilities or speculate.” Wong had won 1,194 races from 5,098 starts prior to his suspension, for a career win rate of 23 percent and purse earnings of $23.03 million. At the time of his suspension, he said that he had approximately 150 horses under his care. During the months between Wong’s suspension and his arbitration hearing on Jan. 9, HIWU tossed two other positives for metformin when the organization discovered that several of its six accredited testing laboratories were not using the same “limit of detection” for metformin. HIWU said that the cases against three other trainers with metformin positives, including Wong’s, would continue to be pursued, because the concentration of metformin in their samples was above the limit of detection. One of the other trainers, Michael Lauer, was issued a 75-day suspension after he presented evidence during his own arbitration hearing that a groom who handled the horse that tested positive had a prescription for metformin, and that he had taken the drug just prior to tacking up the horse for the race. That decision was released on Dec. 19, approximately three weeks prior to Wong’s arbitration hearing.  :: Want to learn more about handicapping and wagering? Check out DRF's Handicapping 101 and Wagering 101 pages. w