‘Racing is not your conventional industry … It’s loaded with danger, physical and financial, and comes with a hint of conspiracy.’
– Les Carlyon, True Grit
RACETRACKS are full of shrewd people but few prudent ones. A more cautious man than John Seaton might have sensed the danger sooner, but Seaton was a gambler – a high roller who bet big on the turn of a card and lavished millions on harness horses. In business, he once bought a mob of 35,000 sheep knowing he would lose a fortune if the market wavered. It didn’t, and another Seaton deal became lore. Big John had mana, the Maori word that fits prestige, ego, potency and confidence into four letters. When he made his last telephone call on November 14, 2004 – the last night of his life – he seemed characteristically cocky, as defiant of public opinion and police inquiries as 30 million self-made dollars can make a big operator in a small place like Christchurch, prim and mostly proper capital of New Zealand’s pastoral South Island.
Earlier that evening, as usual, Seaton had called a stock agent to discuss buying sheep at the coming week’s sales. He’d also talked to his solicitor, as he did on Sunday nights. Now it was late and he was talking to a mate, Mick Guerin.
Guerin is racing editor of The New Zealand Herald and Seaton was one of the biggest harness racing owners he’d known in decades of covering the gallops and harness racing. But this time the call was more personal than professional. Guerin wasn’t fishing for a story.
There was a kind heart underneath his hard-bitten racetrack persona.
He was wondering how Seaton was handling two problems that had ambushed him in previous months – one intensely personal, the other painfully public.
Seaton had grown used to being in control, but these twin troubles were outside his control. First, his wife Ann had relapsed with a grave illness that had been in remission. The second problem was the devastating charge that he had conspired in racehorse doping. Specifically, that he had connived with his high-profile harness trainer, Mark Purdon, to treat one of his top horses with an allegedly performance-enhancing drug dubbed ‘blue magic’.
Seaton had vehemently denied the allegation and wasn’t about to back down. Agitated about media coverage of the case, he had demanded an apology from a prominent Christchurch newspaper which implied he had wanted to boost the horse’s race record in order to sell it at a higher price, an accusation which, if proved, would leave him open to criminal fraud charges.
Seaton had then inflamed the situation by abusing harness-racing officials at the New Zealand Trotting Cup meeting at Addington Raceway on November 12, 2004. He accused them of deliberately humiliating him by making the charges public in the peak week of New Zealand’s harness racing and social calendar.
In one outburst, the millionaire called Harness Racing New Zealand’s chief executive, Edward Rennell, ‘a low prick’, clenching his fist and threatening to ‘deal’ with him. In another ugly and embarrassing scene, he abused a racecourse detective and several harness-racing executives.
To Rennell it seemed ‘irrational’, a glimpse of inner turmoil. The quietly-spoken Rennell was shocked by the incident but did not feel that he had to apologise for doing his job, which was to keep harness-racing clean. A tough gig, some cynics would suggest.
Talking to Guerin on the telephone two nights after his outbursts, Seaton seemed calmer – but still determined to clear his name and take on his perceived enemies. Seaton told Guerin the same thing he had already told others that weekend: that he and Purdon were innocent and that he’d fight the charges to the end.
No-one doubted he would have a red hot go. He had the deepest pockets south of Wellington to fund his defence, and had already retained a Queen’s Counsel known for taking no prisoners in court. When it came to confrontation, Seaton took his cue from the All Blacks.
At 55, Seaton looked bold and bluff and bulletproof. Ruthless in business but generous when he won, he loved being the life of the party. He was, in Australian terms, a backblocks John Singleton with a larrikin edge that didn’t quite suit polite South Island society, which retained something of the reserve that had come across from Britain with the first white settlers.
Seaton’s considerable fortune was built on his own nerve and judgment. His rise from semi-literate farm boy to truck driver to sheep dealer and property and racing tycoon is legendary on the agricultural South Island, where every other farmer breeds or races a harness horse. The lush farmland of the Canterbury Plain west of Christchurch is a Monopoly board of English place names, and John Seaton was the biggest player in the game in those parts.
Or he was until early on November 15, 2004. Some time around dawn that Monday, as the wind moaned through the hedges and windbreaks of his showpiece property at Aylesbury, and the hounds of the Christchurch Hunt bayed mournfully in their kennels next door, Seaton’s private demons broke through the facade he displayed to the world.
He took a gun into the bathroom of the big farmhouse and shot himself.
He wasn’t bulletproof after all.
CLOSE to 2000 mourners gathered at the big man’s funeral – too many for a church, so the service was held at the Christchurch Convention Centre, not far from Addington Raceway, trotting’s spiritual home in Australasia and scene of Seaton’s greatest triumphs as an owner.
It was there that the best of the scores of horses he raced, I1 Vicolo, won the New Zealand Derby in 1994 and two New Zealand Cups in 1995 and 1996 (recouping in stakes more than $1.5 million of the many millions he’d spent on the sport).
It was the biggest harness-racing funeral in New Zealand or Australia since the death – also by self-inflicted gunshot – of another popular larrikin, the champion reinsman Vinnie Knight, in Victoria in 1991.
But a strange thing struck mourners: although racing people had come from all over New Zealand and Australia to be there, racing and horses were not once mentioned in the service. It was like sending off Sinatra without mentioning singing. Hundreds of people who had known Seaton only from the racetrack, stud and sales ring listened in astonishment to a lopsided eulogy that referred only to his other life as a sheep dealer and farmer.
It must have been unnerving for his trainer, close friend and co-accused, Mark Purdon, a member of New Zealand’s most famous trotting family. It seemed clear that Seaton’s ailing widow, Ann, and their daughter, Ann-Marie, blamed harness-racing officials – and perhaps even the sports itself – for his death.
The muttered accusation was that a jealous industry influenced by the steely Christchurch establishment had deliberately lopped a tall poppy for a minor misdemeanour.
There was, perhaps, another and darker interpretation to be made: that Seaton’s name was so tarnished by the doping scandal that his mortified family and friends were pretending it had never happened.
But no amount of wishful thinking could stop the gossip. People asked why a man worth $A30million would kill himself. Some speculated that there must be more to it. The ‘blue magic’ saga was certainly tragic – but was it also sinister?
CONSPIRACY theorists had plenty to work with. Seaton’s sudden death was not the first connected to the case. Four months earlier, the man at the centre of the doping investigation had also killed himself. His name was Robert Asquith. He had returned to New Zealand only a few months before his death, and was the Australian connection in a racket that unsettled racing on both sides of the Tasman.
Asquith had some things in common with John Seaton, though $30 million wasn’t one of them. He was tall, good-looking and extroverted, and liked racing, gambling and big-noting. A friend of Asquith’s said of the pair: ‘One had money; the other wanted money’.
Seaton knew Asquith had ‘blue magic’, which meant each had something the other could use. Security footage studied by police showed that Asquith and Seaton had rubbed shoulders in Club Aspinall, the high rollers’ room at the Christchurch Casino. Whereas Seaton could afford to lose $10,000 a night, Asquith merely pretended he could.
Behind Asquith’s confident front, his life had run off the rails. There were rumours of an affair with a younger woman, the sort of escapade that had led him to leave New Zealand suddenly in the late 1990s, followed by his long-suffering wife, Jill.
Then, at 47, he had been charged by New Zealand police under the Medicines Act with possession of a drug he used for horse doping. Technically, it was a minor offence and probably would have meant only a fine, but the real stakes were higher. The charge followed months of pressure as the scam unravelled, exposing him as a fraud and a failure – and as a potential informer against anyone he had supplied with ‘blue magic’.
On July 20, 2004, two days before Asquith was due in court, his wife found a note in the neat brick house on their pleasant farmlet near Oxford, a sleepy town tucked below picture postcard snow-capped alps an hour’s drive north-west of Christchurch. She called the police. They found Asquith’s body hanging in an outbuilding.
The answers to questions that stewards and police wanted to ask had died with Asquith. He was the only person who knew the facts behind the ‘blue magic’ story – such as who had been using the drug, and who had the inside knowledge to back the horses injected with it. Whether Rob Asquith would have told the complete truth, of course, was debatable. He was careless with facts. Still, some people in harness and thoroughbred racing in both countries might have felt a twinge of relief when they heard he was dead. After all, who knows what he might have said under pressure?
As racing scandals go, the ‘blue magic’ affair did not seem as dramatic or outrageous as when the galloper Rocket Racer won the 1987 Perth Cup by nine lengths on ‘elephant juice’ before collapsing in distress and later dying. And there was no Fine Cotton moment – as at Brisbane’s Eagle Farm in 1984 – when outraged punters jeered ‘ring-in’ and ‘wrong horse’ at the horse’s nervous handlers, who did not fear the authorities as much as the ruthless but stupidly reckless Sydney betting men who’d ordered the switch and then highlighted the shambolic rort by leaking the information and plunging huge bets on it all over Australia, Papua New Guinea and in the Pacific islands.
The few people who know exactly when the drug they called ‘the blue’ was first used in Victoria are quiet about it. But by late 2003, there were whispers of a drug in harness racing that was going undetected by routine swabbing.
It was said that some trainers around Mildura in the far north-west of the state were giving horses more than bran mashes. How long it had been going on was unclear. A couple of extra wins in a season might not attract attention, but a couple is rarely enough.
A winning edge is hard to refuse and even harder to hide. Statistics eventually tell the story, even if rival trainers, owners and drivers don’t. When a pattern emerges showing a big improvement in horses prepared by particular trainers, suspicions harden. In this case, perhaps, the first win to raise eyebrows was in a race at Victoria’s city track, Moonee Valley, on October 31, 2003.
At the advanced age of twelve years (horses usually die of old age in their twenties), a brown gelding with the unlikely name of Our Equal Opportunity had hardly set the harness world on fire. In fact, he had never won at a city meeting in 142 starts. His form suggested he never would. But he did win that night, a ‘first-up’ victory after what was apparently a long and beneficial spell away from racing.
Punters might have wondered if Our Equal Opportunity had been spelled at Lourdes, not Ballarat, so miraculous was the improvement. But it’s likely the form reversal was due to more prosaic reasons.
The old horse’s new trainer was a Ballarat horseman called Rod Weightman, who had trained him for only a few weeks. Weightman, then 37, had not had many horses, but over the previous decade had gradually built up his annual tally of starters from a handful to more than 50. The son of a seasoned harness man, he’d inherited his father’s touch in patching up old campaigners to coax a few good runs out of them. In the ten seasons ending August 31, 2003, Weightman’s annual strike rate of winners to starters rose from zero (admittedly from only nine starters) in 1993–94 to a high of 35 per cent (six wins from seventeen starters) in 1997–98, to average twenty per cent overall, a figure that only the most astute trainers achieve.
There was no doubt Weightman could train winners. The trouble was, he started to train too many. In the 2002–03 season, he averaged a believable 23 per cent strike rate with fifteen winners from 63 starts. But in the new season, starting September 2003, he ran red-hot, as the saying goes.
By the time the posse caught up with him eight months later, he had trained 31 winners from 69 starts – a stunning strike rate of 45 per cent. And he was doing it with cheap old horses that had lost their early form, bought out of ‘claiming races’ for a few thousand dollars each. They weren’t winning much before he got them, less after he got rid of them.
Take Weightman’s favourite, ‘a magnificent old fella’ that rejoiced in the name Angus Puddleduck, who had lost form while trained for his original owners. Weightman knew he could make ‘the Duck’ fly. He got him on Boxing Day, 2003. A month later, he won at Maryborough, the first of four straight wins.
Early in March 2004, Ballarat police began surveillance of people suspected of handling drugs and stolen property. Among the properties under watch was one belonging to Rod Weightman.
One of the police on the case had once worked for the racing squad. He suggested that as Weightman was a licensed trainer, Harness Racing Victoria stewards might just happen to fancy being on hand when his property was searched.
The stewards jumped at the opportunity to accept this thoughtful offer.
So it was that on a cold, foggy morning on April 28, police with guns and dogs raided Weightman’s property as similar teams swooped on five other houses around the district. The phlegmatic Weightman didn’t make a fuss. He is not that sort. But when they led him, handcuffed, into the backyard, he saw the stewards waiting for him and muttered, ‘That really tops off the morning’.
Something told him they wanted to talk about the 62 unlabelled vials of blue liquid the police had found in his refrigerator. Compared with that, the stolen ride-on mower and a bag of cannabis in one of the sheds were the least of his problems.
Two days later, Harness Racing Victoria suspended Weightman indefinitely, pending analysis of the blue liquid and a full inquiry. He was also bailed on various criminal charges, for which he would eventually be fined a total of $4400. Weightman ducked questions about what the blue liquid was or where he obtained it, but the stewards already had a fair idea.
A reliable source had slipped them a sample of ‘the blue’ a few weeks earlier and even before the laboratory tests were done, they were confident the 62 vials held the same prohibited drug – propantheline bromide.
It had been supplied by Robert Asquith, late of Ballarat via Queensland, who had recently returned to New Zealand’s greener fields where he had been so busy hawking his blue mixture that, in the same week the Australian authorities made their move, the Christchurch police and racing stewards already had him – and the people he’d been dealing with – in their sights.
For a man who said he was related to Herbert Asquith, the puritanical British prime minister who became the first Earl of Oxford, Robert Asquith had some bad habits. He chain-smoked and drank so much coffee he would have tested positive to caffeine if the stewards had swabbed him as carefully as the horses he backed.
As a gambler, he wasn’t only a punter: he played baccarat in casinos and boasted he could ‘beat the house’ at blackjack, a claim that was unlikely to be true. There was no doubt he was both clever and a con man, a Walter Mitty-type figure with delusions that led him to dream up oddball get-rich-quick schemes.
One such scheme was to fleece suckers by advertising a surefire ‘cure’ for shortness – the plan being to mail anyone who sent money an old telephone book they could stand on to measure themselves. He set up a male escort agency to provide escorts for older wealthy women. He invented a plastic meal tray he hoped to sell to McDonald’s (they didn’t buy it), and he designed a line of ‘comical’ greeting cards that no-one else thought funny.
A taunting image … map maker Robin Rishworth used a picture with his victim in the background.
Haunted … Belinda Phillips endured years of stalking before telling Rishworth to ‘piss off’.
Loneliness of the long distance runner … Robin Rishworth stalks out of court.
Sell-out or setup? Wendy peirce tells police the story she later recants.
A smile to die for? Margaret Tapp was vivacious, friendly and attracted men.
Seana Tapp … strangled in bed at nine years old.
Former abalone poacher Cam Strachan on a Bass Strait island.
Robert Asquith … slow horses, fast bucks, mysterious death.
Millionaire John Seaton …destroyed by doping accusations.
When Asquith and his wife turned up at Ballarat some time in 1999, they didn’t look like a success story. They were driving an old car and looking for somewhere cheap to live in Miners Rest, a horse-training district next to Dowling Forest racecourse.
A retired policeman let them move into a converted loft above his stables ‘for a year or two’ in return for looking after his young horses. Asquith, a tall man in his early 40s, told his landlord they had been in Queensland since leaving New Zealand, though he said little about what they had done there. He gave the impression he had been a leading New Zealand reinsman and had driven horses ‘in America and Canada’. This was an exaggeration: he had been an also-ran trotting trainer before handing in his licence in 1994 after being caught illegally importing hormonal drugs.
Jill Asquith, later described by a neighbour as a ‘natural horsewoman who married badly’, got a permit to train gallopers at Ballarat. It didn’t go well.
In more than three seasons, she was to train just three winners from 54 starters. Then, in mid-2003, she was suspended and fined when one of her horses returned an illegally high bicarbonate reading. This was the result of a ‘milkshake’, a drench given to improve stamina by reducing lactic acid in tired muscles.
Robert Asquith, meanwhile, promoted himself as a horse chiropractor. As he got to know trainers who wanted horses manipulated, he offered to treat them with unprescribed drugs. The source was not explained, although some suspected the chemicals came from Mexico via Sydney and that Asquith mixed the solutions himself, using various food dyes to provide different colours before settling on blue. The name ‘blue magic’ was coined when the story was first broken by an alert racing writer called Adam Hamilton in the Herald Sun.
Asquith slipped from stable to stable. Some trainers gave him a wide berth – either on principle or because he made them nervous. Others would try anything that might give them an edge – provided it wasn’t ‘swabbable’, as they say in racing to describe any substance not known to be detectable by conventional swabbing.
Asquith, as much con man as horseman, took a shrewd guess that Victorian authorities weren’t yet testing specifically for propantheline, and confidently claimed his solution wasn’t detectable.
He offered discounts if told which horses were to be treated, so he could punt on them. This also might have been shrewd salesmanship – at least in some cases. It was later discovered that not all the vials of blue liquid he sold contained propantheline; some had only the food dye that gave it the distinctive colour.
By accident or design, Asquith seemed to deal mostly with harness trainers – some of them at Mildura, hundreds of kilometres away from his home base at Ballarat, which is much less than two hours drive west of Melbourne. This connection with harness racing could have been because he had a natural rapport with harness racing people, who tend to favour chiropractic manipulation, massage and acupuncture to relieve spinal problems in their horses caused by the unnatural pacing gait.
There is also a faint suggestion that harness racing – seen as galloping’s poor relation – had more ‘desperate’ and perhaps more gullible trainers, many of them small-time operators who combined training with other forms of income. It’s possible some galloping people avoided Asquith and his bag of tricks because they were fully-fledged professionals who had big stables and far more to lose if anything went wrong.
There is an Australian racing adage: ‘Never trust a Kiwi or an alsatian dog.’ While such attitudes are patently unfair, probably racist and possibly illegal, they linger in some quarters. Racing people might be superstitious but they are also suspicious.
One leading Ballarat thoroughbred trainer, a robust character whose stables are near the entrance to Dowling Forest racetrack, told the author that Asquith approached him offering to ‘help’ his horses, but that he’d refused point blank.
The trainer said he didn’t believe in chiropractors and wanted nothing to do with anything else Asquith might have been peddling.
As the trainer had already been disqualified for some time over allegedly ‘tubing’ his horses with ‘milkshakes’, he was entitled to be wary of any offers of artificial stimulants.
Racing people can be warm-hearted and generous but racecourse gossip is vicious – and often inaccurate. Gossip later linked the Ballarat trainer and at least two other successful galloping trainers with ‘blue magic’, but there is not even circumstantial evidence to support such a theory.
Each of the three trainers prepared plenty of winners before and after the ‘blue-magic’ scandal. Unlike Rod Weightman’s, their strike rates did not appear to alter much either way.
Living in a glorified shed with a few slow racehorses away from family and friends must have worn down Jill Asquith, then in her late 30s.
The respectable butcher’s daughter from Oamaru had married Asquith as a teenager, had two daughters by him (since grown, and living in England) and had stuck with him despite his various vices. Jill Asquith was homesick, but staying in Australia gave her husband a greater chance to turn a quick dollar to fuel his gambling. He did make some money – though not enough for a house. They paid $90,000 for a few hectares with a hayshed near the racecourse and converted the shed into stables and a room to live in. It was a shrewd buy. The pity was that Asquith’s preoccupation with making a dishonest dollar ultimately prevented them from turning an honest one when they had the chance.
The long-suffering Jill mixed cement while Robert laid it, and they toiled to build an elaborate front fence with concrete posts and painted rails to set the place off.
They lined the shed and converted it into stables with a flat upstairs but that was as far as it got. They picked out a house site elsewhere on the block but nothing came of it before their life all went wrong yet again.
Meanwhile, word spread and Asquith kept moving the mysterious blue stuff. It was at this stage, in late 2003, that Rod Weightman, who trained on the other side of Ballarat, asked Asquith to ‘look at’ his horses after hearing on the grapevine about other trainers gaining a winning edge, the most coveted thing in racing.
Weightman was soon willingly paying $150 a shot for ‘the blue’, although he insists it did not improve all horses and only marginally improved the others. Either way, there’s little doubt most of the 31 winners he trained from September 2003 until his arrest in April the following year had been injected with the drug.
What saved Weightman from a suspension even longer than the five years and three months he is currently serving, was that only seven of the many urine samples held by the authorities came up positive when retested for propantheline after his arrest.
The man who cheerfully calls himself the scapegoat for the blue magic affair doesn’t hold many grudges. For a start, he says, he is still alive. He is bemused that two men whose involvement was still unproven – and might have stayed that way – would kill themselves ‘when I’m the one found with 62 vials of the stuff in my fridge’.
Weightman is a chunky, calm little man with a professional horseman’s strong hands. His slow drawl and dry humour belie alert eyes, which dart around the Ballarat pub-TAB agency where he meets people these days. He likes to know who is coming in the door and which races are coming up on the television screen.
He is torn between the code of silence and wanting to tell the oldest and best story in racing – how we beat the bookies. Weightman claims to have no regrets – ‘I needed the holiday’ – but is proud enough of his considerable training ability to resent being written off as a cheat who couldn’t win without drugs.
He cites his career record at improving old horses with skill and patience, and insists he wasn’t using ‘the blue’ until late 2003.
The authorities stripped him of seven of his 31 wins after the new drug tests, but he’s still living well on the proceeds of the rest. He sold his farm, horse truck and gear, and bought a house in town with a swimming pool and spa ‘because I want to do a bit of entertaining’, he quips.
Weightman says he backed his winners but bet only ‘$500 to a grand’ and scoffs at suggestions of organised crime connections and big betting coups. ‘Nothing that dramatic,’ he says, and seems unworried enough to be genuine.
Ask him if the rest of the samples must have deteriorated and he shrugs, deadpan. Ask if swabs from other trainers’ horses might also have deteriorated and he smiles. Ask if any thoroughbred racehorses were on the stuff and he laughs outright. Of course, he says.
When the story of Weightman’s arrest broke last May, he did his own code of harness racing a backhanded favour by saying he had backed gallopers that had been treated with ‘blue magic’.
When thoroughbred racing investigators asked for details, he lost his memory.
Later, it seemed he got some of it back. Weightman told the author that he knew of several gallopers that raced on propantheline. He cites an ‘80-1 shot at Flemington with three duck eggs beside its name that jumped out of the ground and ran a place. A good thing beaten’.
But he won’t be telling any tales. ‘Why would I want to name names?’ he asks. ‘What good would that do? I might get a bullet in the head.’
Then he stares at the television screen, distracted. He’s backed a pacer at Cranbourne and, sure enough, it gets up. He still knows a winner when he sees one. It’s in the blood. Even when ‘blue magic’ isn’t.
SO what is ‘blue magic’? The active ingredient of the solution is not blue and, according to some experts, not necessarily magic. Nor is it new.
Rumoured to have been used on harness horses in North America since the late 1980s, propantheline bromide was detected in Canada in 1994 and came to Australia soon afterwards, when it was reputedly known as ‘Canadian pink’. Racing, like the drug sub-culture, has an unerring instinct for coining catchy names.
It was first detected in Australian racing at Sydney’s Harold Park Raceway on September 12, 1997, when a leading reinsman, Jason Proctor, was disqualified for fifteen months after his horse, My Paleface Navajo, returned a positive swab. The suspension stalled what had seemed a brilliant career. Proctor, then 22, led both the Hunter Valley drivers’ and trainers’ premiership tables, had set new records in both premierships in the 1995-1996 season and was New South Wales’ leading junior driver for the previous four seasons.
But after his suspension (on this and other drug charges), Proctor lost his winning edge. He now struggles to be in the top 25 NSW drivers and trainers.
Harness-racing insiders believe Proctor was not the only trainer to use prohibited drugs over several years, and that propantheline has also been used in thoroughbred racing.
The champion reinsman Brian Hancock, a staunch opponent of drug use, once endured more than 100 consecutive losses at Harold Park, a ‘slump’ some believe was due to a few rival trainers using a range of drugs that made some horses virtually unbeatable at their own level.
Hancock will not go on the record about his suspicions while he is still a licensed trainer and driver, but off the record he is a savage critic of drug cheats – and the way some of them have allegedly got away with wrongdoing for years.
Drug detection has certainly been patchy. In 1998, former world champion driver Ted Demmler – who knew John Seaton, coincidentally – was suspended for nine months when his horse Breenys Fella tested positive to propantheline, despite a strong case that his veterinarian legitimately administered the drug to settle the horse’s stomach on the long trip from Victoria.
In May 2003, a New Zealand veterinarian found a vial of blue liquid at a harness-racing stable near Invercargill and sent it for analysis, but no action was taken.
In May 2004, a trainer called Doug Willis was prosecuted when his horse Rocket Score tested positive to a ‘bronchial dilator’ similar to propantheline at Harold Park. Propantheline and its derivatives have been used in humans to treat stomach ulcers.
Its legitimate veterinary use is to relax the muscles of pregnant mares for rectal examinations. The ‘blue magic’ name derives from food dye added as a marketing device.
Similar solutions have reputedly been supplied in several colours.
Though there is not yet scientific proof that the drug enhances a racehorse’s performance, authorities believe it can marginally lift stamina in stayers by dilating veins, airways and lungs to allow more efficient distribution of oxygen.
Racetrack wisdom has it that it is of little use to sprinters but is suited to Australasian harness racing, in which horses race over relatively long distances.
It is not a stimulant like caffeine or the notorious ‘elephant juice’ (etorphine), which boost heart rate and cause the animal to move abnormally fast. Instead, it helps the animal to maintain an existing speed for longer, in the way that altitude training might.
Anecdotally, propantheline is considered more effective in helping older horses regain lost form than helping young, healthy horses find winning form.
‘It does not make slow horses fast,’ says one well-informed trainer. ‘If a horse is already fit and has enough ability, it makes a good thing into a certainty.’
However, harness-racing stewards believe the drug is usually sufficiently effective to change the pattern of racing, with horses winning regardless of how well or poorly they may be driven.
Edward Rennell, the chief steward in Christchurch abused by John Seaton, is certain he has seen horses win despite being ‘extravagantly’ driven around fields in a way that would usually ensure a horse ran out of stamina before the line. He and his Australian counterparts in harness racing suggest that some drivers have driven far more conservatively since the drug was exposed.
Galloping stewards have not been so forthcoming. As far as the thoroughbred racing industry is concerned, ‘blue magic’ had nothing to do with them.
April 28, 2004: 62 vials of blue liquid found at harness trainer Rod Weightman’s house near Ballarat. Weightman stood down.
May 4: Six New Zealand racing stables raided. NZ analysts identify propantheline in samples obtained by an informer.
May 27: NZ police charge Robert Asquith with selling the drug.
June 1: First Victorian positive swab for propantheline.
June 3: NZ harness legend Mark Purdon charged with using the drug.
July 7: Seven Weightman swabs test positive.
July 21: Robert Asquith found dead at home in Oxford, New Zealand.
July 26: Weightman disqualified for 63 months on seven charges.
July 28: Mildura trainer Andrew Vozlic disqualified for twelve months for using propantheline on one horse and twelve months for elevated bicarbonate levels in three horses.
July 29: Trainers Martin Herbert and Clayton Tonkin disqualified for a year and fined heavily for using propantheline.
November 13: Prominent NZ owner John Seaton and his trainer Mark Purdon charged over alleged use of propantheline.
November 15: Seaton found dead at his luxury Canterbury Plain property.
