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A Blow to British Horse Racing
Kamran Jebreili/Associated Press
Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the owner of Godolphin, with his trainer, Mahmoud al-Zarooni, holding a trophy.
By JOHN F. BURNS
Published: April 26, 2013
NEWMARKET, England — It is called the sport of kings and it has been in
this haven of racecourses, stables and studs since the 17th century,
when King Charles I and his courtiers made the 100-mile journey here by
horse-drawn carriages.
Luke Macgregor/Reuters
Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum with one of his
wives, the 38-year-old Oxford-educated Princess Haya of Jordan, in 2010.
Jamie Scott-Long for The New York Times
Horses are a familiar sight in Newmarket, a town in
England that boasts it is the horse racing headquarters of the world.
But the town has never known a darker passage than the past week. Another monarch, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum
of Dubai, and Godolphin, his global horse racing enterprise, have been
the talk of Britain after what The Times of London described as British
racing’s “Lance Armstrong moment.”
On Monday, the British Horseracing Authority
announced that 11 of the sheik’s best horses tested positive for banned
anabolic steroids, including stanozolol and ethylestrenol, which can
give horses a muscle strength that is well beyond their natural
capacity. Forty-five Godolphin horses were tested in an
out-of-competition sweep earlier this month at the Moulton Paddocks
stables.
Godolphin, which has a billion-dollar roster of 5,000 racehorses stabled
in 12 countries, including the United States and Japan, quickly
announced that its own tests found four more of its Newmarket-based
horses had banned steroids in their systems.
Although the drugs are strictly barred in Britain during training and
competition, several other countries, including Australia, Dubai and the
United States, allow their use in training, as long as they are not
present in a horse’s system on the day of a race.
Godolphin announced an immediate lockdown of Moulton Paddocks, with no
further competition for its 100 horses until all have cleared drugs
tests and the stable is judged to be completely clean. The 15 horses
that tested positive for steroids were barred from racing for six
months.
At a hastily convened meeting Thursday, the racing authority imposed an
eight-year ban from racing activities on Maktoum’s favorite young
trainer, Mahmood al-Zarooni, and left to discussion between Godolphin
and the racing authority what penalties will be served by a foreman and
two grooms on the sheik’s Newmarket payroll.
Horse racing experts in Britain have called it as the worst scandal in
the country’s horse racing history and worry that it has the power to
severely damage Godolphin.
The episode has been a severe embarrassment to Maktoum, who has taken a
leading role in international demands for clean racing. One of his
wives, the 38-year-old Oxford-educated Princess Haya of Jordan, was
elected president of the International Equestrian Federation in 2006 on a
clean sport mandate.
Although the sheik was quick to condemn the doping, saying he was
“appalled and angered,” there are concerns about how he may react in the
longer term to the blow to his prestige.
Maktoum, 63, also the prime minister of the United Arab Emirates,
single-handedly bankrolls a large chunk of horse racing in Britain. He
has been one of the few foreign dignitaries invited to join Queen
Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Philip, in the ceremonial carriage
ride that delivers the British monarch to the royal enclosure at the
Royal Ascot meeting every summer that crowns the British racing season.
The queen has spoken admiringly of the sheik, and lauded him as an
important friend of Britain’s.
Under criticism from some in the Middle East for spending such large
sums on a personal pastime, the sheik, who is said to have a fortune of
$10 billion, has responded by saying that Godolphin’s successes give an
immense boost to Dubai’s reputation. Maktoum made the link between the
success and prestige of Godolphin and the reputation of Dubai explicit
in his statement on the scandal, presenting it, in effect, as a matter
of his and Dubai’s honor.
“I have been involved in British horse racing for 30 years and have deep
respect for its traditions and rules,” he said. “I built my country
based on the same solid principles.”
The racing authority’s hearing Thursday found that Zarooni brought the
banned drugs into Britain from Dubai. After saying initially that he had
not known that the steroids were banned during training in Britain,
Zarooni changed his account before the hearing, taking sole
responsibility for the doping, describing it as a “catastrophic error”
and apologizing abjectly to the sheik and the British racing community.
In 2010, Maktoum appointed Zarooni, a former groom in Dubai, to head
Moulton Paddocks, effectively making him a rival to Saeed bin Suroor,
the trainer who helped build Godolphin into the dominant force in
Britain by winning more than 200 first-class races. For the past three
years, the two men have worked from separate Newmarket yards.
Zarooni has had some major successes in British racing and overseas,
including training Monterosso, who won the 2012 Dubai World Cup. But his
performance had come into question by Suroor’s supporters. Zarooni also
had a fractious relationship with Godolphin’s top jockey, Frankie
Dettori, who is said to have objected to training practices that he
considered too harsh and has left the stable. Two of Zarooni’s horses
tested positive for banned substances in competition in August,
triggering the out-of-competition testing this month at Moulton
Paddocks.
Racing officials said investigations would continue into how medications
at the yard were controlled, and into who else, including the
veterinary staff, may have known what was going on. But they appeared
keen to exculpate Maktoum personally, yielding to his request that the
hearing be held quickly after the doping was announced, and accepting
Zarooni’s confession after four hours of testimony.
If the haste reflected a wider concern in the industry to ease the
pressure on Maktoum, a statement after the hearing by Simon Crisford,
Godolphin’s racing manager, alluded to the concern that the Dubai ruler
might be so upset by the scandal that he would contemplate closing down
or cutting back his operations in Britain. The Aga Khan, once about as
dominant in British racing as Maktoum, did just that after a doping
scandal in the 1990s.
In Newmarket, the scandal struck with the force of a meteorite. The
sheik’s two extravagantly appointed stables are to Newmarket what Apple
is to Cupertino, Calif., or NASA is to Cape Canaveral, Fla. — the town’s
biggest employer, the linchpin of its prestige, and the guarantor of
its civic well-being.
The town boasts that it is the racing headquarters of the world. Out on
the gallops where hundreds of racehorses train from first light every
day, in the stables, and in the pubs with walls cluttered with
photographs and portraits of Newmarket-trained horses, the talk this
week has been about little else than the disaster that has befallen
Godolphin and the toll it could take on the town.
Much of the banter, at least with outsiders, takes the form of gallows
humor. One Godolphin foreman appeared for Friday’s gallops not long
after dawn wearing a blue Godolphin windbreaker and with a length of
twisted rope around his neck to be used, he said, as a tether for any
horse threatening to throw its rider.
Soaked by a persistent drizzle as he waited at the bottom of Warren
Hill, a 1,000-yard stretch of lush grass and muddy walkways that has
been used for training horses for centuries, the foreman, who gave his
name as Tom and said he had been in the racing business for 40 years,
said he had heard from riders of other yards in recent days every joke
there was to be made about the “noose” and its appropriateness for
Godolphin’s plight.
“Don’t worry,” he added, “we’ll get through this, I guarantee you that.”
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