Team Valor nominates two stories for 2014 Bergstein

Team Valor International will offer the Stan Bergstein Writing Award again in

2014 and has already nominated two stories for its panel of judges to consider. 

The award carrying a $25,000 prize is open to any story published in North

America between November 2, 2013 and November 1, 2014 about horse racing.

Frank Angst of the Blood-Horse and Joe Drape of the New York Times

wrote the two stories that have been nominated. 

Angst's November 14 piece, "Texas Compounder Draws Industry Scrutiny," points

to a Texas compounding pharmacy as one of several "problem compounders" that

some racing regulators and leaders believe are "either manufacturing substances

designed to provide illegal performance-enhancing and painkilling effects while

skirting enforcement, or marketing their substances as such."

Angst's full story is

here. 

Drape's November 22 story, "Despite the Evidence, Trainers Deny a Doping

Problem," addresses a two-day period that began with a Congressional hearing in

which an executive from a national horsemen's group testified that horse racing

does not have a drug problem. Drape then cites a report issued hours later by

the California Horse Racing Board that revealed that trainer Bob Baffert gave

every horse in his barn a thyroid hormone "without ever checking to see if any

of them had thyroid problems."

Drape then pointed to the arrest early the next morning, on November 22, of

three Thoroughbred trainers on federal charges of devising a scheme to defraud

bettors by administering banned substances within 24 hours of a race. 

His full story is

here. 

Drape and Walt Bogdanich won the inaugural Stan Bergstein Writing Award in

2012 for a story on the role of veterinarians in the use of drugs in horse

racing. 

The 2013 award went to Ray Paulick of the Paulick Report for his piece on a

drug violation in Florida in which a vet was observed illegally injecting a

horse with a pain-blocking agent on raceday. 

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