THIS CONTROVERSY WON'T JUST GO AWAY.

Byline: KEVIN MODESTI HORSE RACING 

If Pacific Classic favorite Lava Man keeps winning big races and is voted Horse of the Year, he'll share a less-than-flattering distinction with 2005 champion Saint Liam.

Lava Man would be the second consecutive Horse of the Year to earn that supreme honor in a season in which his trainer faced sanctions for a serious medication violation.

Whether this is a trend or a coincidence -- or a potential coincidence -- it should send a chill through a sport that counts rampant doping suspicions among its image problems.

``I would just hate to see Lava Man's awesome performance tarnished in any way,'' Doug O'Neill, the horse's trainer, said Thursday morning on the telephone from his Del Mar barn.

O'Neill's feeling is shared by almost anybody who has watched Lava Man rise from the claiming ranks to a Grade I winner on dirt and turf, and almost anybody who will be at Del Mar on Sunday to watch the 5-year-old gelding try to become the first to sweep the Southern California older-horses triple crown by winning the Santa Anita Handicap, Hollywood Gold Cup and Pacific Classic.

And that's the point: It would be a terrible blow to thoroughbred racing if the greatest four-footed athletes routinely came in for the kind of public cynicism now associated with baseball's Barry Bonds, cycling's Floyd Landis and track and field's Justin Gatlin, to name the most current examples.

Let's be clear: There has been no evidence presented that Lava Man has been the recipient of prohibited chemical help at any time during the 8-for-11 run that began when O'Neill fitted the California-bred with blinkers before a May 2005 optional-claiming race at Hollywood Park.

There are only the questions that naturally came up after an O'Neill-trained horse named Wisdom Cat displayed a higher-than-permitted level of carbon dioxide in a blood sample following a May 27 race at Hollywood. Under California's more than two-year-old penalty program designed to curtail so-called ``milkshake'' doping, O'Neill's runners were held under surveillance in a detention barn in the 24 hours before their races for 30 days in June and July. In fact, Lava Man got the detention-barn treatment before his hard-fought victory in the July 8 Gold Cup.

Addressing the matter unflinchingly on Thursday, O'Neill made several points: He ``will go to the grave'' denying wrong-doing in the Wisdom Cat case; though he applauds state authorities' anti-drug efforts, he believes the Wisdom Cat positive was the result of a testing error; Wisdom Cat actually finished last in the race in question, suggesting a high carbon-dioxide level didn't enhance his performance; Lava Man has never failed a drug test, and the horse should have vindicated himself by winning the Gold Cup out of the detention barn.

``If he had a high TCO2 (carbon-dioxide reading), I could see saying, `It's another Barry Bonds -- put an asterisk next to all of his impressive performances,''' O'Neill said.

(To be fair to Bonds, he has never been reported to fail a drug test.)

But it takes only a small crack in a trainer's reputation to create a flood of suspicion that he's getting away with something.

Last year, while Saint Liam put on a sensational season-long show by winning Grade I stakes in the winter, spring, summer and fall, New York-based trainer Rick Dutrow served a 60-day suspension stemming in part from horses' failed tests for mepivacaine (an anesthetic) in 2003 and clenbuterol (a bronchodilator) in 2004. Saint Liam ran one race during Dutrow's ban, winning the Stephen Foster Handicap at Churchill Downs under the official care of Hall of Fame trainer Bobby Frankel.

If Saint Liam was tainted, it didn't prevent him from winning Horse of the Year with 76 percent of the votes to Afleet Alex's 22 percent. But it might have accounted for the relative lack of enthusiasm for Saint Liam on the part of the public and media.

These are far from the first trainers of elite thoroughbreds to run afoul of medication rules. Still, for decades the men who trained the best-bred horses for the Phippses and Whitneys enjoyed at least a veneer of integrity, and the notion of cheating in The Big Race existed mainly in bad episodes of ``Police Woman.'' Conventional wisdom held that manipulating form with illegal potions was the work of lower-rung trainers desperate to scratch out livings with slow and gimpy claimers.

In a more egalitarian era, that seems to be changing.

As if the industry needed a further call to arms in its battle against doping, historians trying to assess the achievements of great horses might now face the same doubts that have always plagued handicappers.

It would, as O'Neill said, be awful if the awesome performances of the Saint Liams and Lava Mans were tarnished by the sanctions meted out to their trainers.

Worse, though, would be if the racing world grew so jaded that such trends, or coincidences -- or potential coincidences -- passed without comment.

heymodesti(AT_SIGN)aol.com

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CAPTION(S):

2 boxes

Box:

(1) PACIFIC CLASSIC LINEUP

(2) OUT OF THE GATES

- Kevin Modesti and Associated Press