Belmont-based trainers Mark Hennig and Todd Pletcher, two of the best and brightest young horsemen in America, were given a 48-hour reprieve yesterday by the N.Y. State Racing and Wagering Board after being suspended under highly suspect circumstances by the Florida Division of Pari-Mutuel Revenue for equine drug positives.
One horse each trained by Hennig and Pletcher tested positive at the Hialeah meet for what were described by their lawyer, Joel Turner, as “trace amounts” of cocaine in their urine “not consistent with willful administration.”
Trainer Dave Donk reportedly also had a horse test positive in Florida but he has not yet been served a suspension or otherwise notified. “I wouldn’t know what horse or race it was if I hadn’t read about it in the Racing Form,” he said.
Hennig and Pletcher were handed summary suspensions in Florida May 12 and their appeals were denied at an administrative hearing held by conference call May 14, described by Hennig as “a kangaroo court like you’ve never seen.”
Hennig was allowed just 21 minutes to present his case when the hearing officer refused to extend the conference, saying the court reporter’s time was up. Neither trainer was able to offer a split (urine) sample tested by another lab in his defense, as is the case in most states, although both requested the samples be re-tested.
New York rarely suspends a trainer until a split sample comes back confirming the initial result.
“You think you have rights as a citizen,” said Pletcher, “but they raked us over the coals and jammed it down our throats without any due-process.”
New York Racing Association president Terry Meyocks, a character witness for Hennig and Pletcher, said in the transcript, “I have never heard anything as a travesty as what I have heard (at this hearing) in thoroughbred racing, the state, the United States. It’s outrageous.”
Deborah Miller, outgoing director of the Fla. DPMR, did not sign off on the hearing officer’s denial until yesterday afternoon. Until she did, Hennig and Pletcher were unable to appeal for a stay in court.
Under the reciprocity rule that authorizes each state’s regulatory body to honor the others’ rulings, SRWB counsel Robert Feurstein recommended that New York recognize the suspensions, and so one of Pletcher’s horses was scratched yesterday.
But at the board’s monthly meeting held in the afternoon at Belmont, common sense prevailed.
Board members Michael Hoblock, Bennett Liebman and Joseph Neglia, after hearing emotional pleas from NYRA attorney John Russo and the trainers themselves that their horses be allowed to run until a stay was granted, gave Henning and Pletcher until Sunday before the suspensions take effect.
