“Formestane is not on the exempted list of therapeutic goods listed on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods,” RV said in a statement.
“The ARTG is the public database of therapeutic goods that can be legally supplied in Australia. This means that formestane cannot be legally supplied for use in humans in Australia.”
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The five positive horses – Chan’s gelding Lake Tai, Kavanagh mare Circle Of Magic, Sandhu’s gelding Alphaville, Wilde’s mare Sirileo Miss and the Yargi’s gelding Yulara – were stood down for a year under RV’s mandatory suspensions for steroid positives. Their 12-month bans have now expired.
The five stables were charged by stewards under AR 240 – a prohibited substance in a sample taken from a horse at a race meeting.
In statements released in September last year, both the Kavanagh and Yargi stables pointed to contamination as a possible source of their positive swabs.
“Since the irregularity, she [Circle of Magic] has been tested multiple times and each time has returned a negative swab,” the Kavanaghs wrote.
“This then suggests that there could be a problem with contamination either during the collection of the sample or throughout the testing process.”
Warrnambool trainer Symon Wilde has been frustrated by the 12-month ban of his mare Sirileo Miss.Credit: Getty Images
The Yargis said formestane was not a drug that “we’ve ever heard of, or our vets have ever heard of”.
“It is a contamination of some sort, and I think that it’s damaging to all trainers’ reputations, and it’s upsetting that we have to go through this,” they said in a statement.
While Chan, Wilde and the Kavanaghs have all been hit with two charges, Sandhu and the Yargi stable will face three charges because 6a-Hydroxyandrost-4-ene3,17-Dione – which is a metabolite of the anabolic steroid androst-4-ene-3, 6, 17-trione (6-OXO) – was also detected in the urine samples of their horses.
Wilde told this masthead earlier this month that he had been frustrated by Sirileo Miss’s ban because “she has missed a whole 12 months in the prime of her racing life”.
A sixth horse also returned a positive swab last year, but no action was taken because the control sample also showed traces of formestane. A control sample, used as a quality assurance measure, is taken from fluid that is rinsed through the collection pan and sample bottles before a horse’s urine sample is collected.
Control samples from the other five horses did not show traces of the prohibited substances.
It took Racing Victoria stewards almost six months before they released details of the positive swabs to the public last year. There was no suggestion of how the mystery cluster had occurred.
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