National Thoroughbred Racing Association President Alex Waldrop is scheduled to testify in Washington, D.C., during a congressional hearing focusing on the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sports.
Waldrop will appear on February 27 in front of the congressional Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection during a session titled “Drugs in Sports: Compromising the Health of Athletes and Undermining the Integrity of Competition.”
Former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell released a report on December 13, 2007, chronicling steroid use among major league baseball players. This hearing will explore Mitchell’s findings as well as the use of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs among professional, college, and high school athletes of all sports.
In addition to Mitchell, representatives from Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League, the National Collegiate Athletics Association as well as a national high school sports association and others have been invited to provide testimony at the hearing.
The Thoroughbred industry is in the process of determining and passing national guidelines for the use of anabolic steroids in horses through a model rule developed by the Racing Medication and Testing Consortium and the Association of Racing Commissioners International, which have said they would like the rule adopted around the country this year.
“The NTRA welcomes this opportunity to continue its dialogue with Congress on the matter of medication in pari-mutuel horseracing,” Waldrop said in a statement. “Over the past several months, our legislative team members—along with representatives from the RMTC and RCI—have been meeting with individual members of Congress, communicating to them the many ways in which the horseracing industry has been working to build and improve the infrastructure for medication research and regulation.
“The invitation to share our work in more detail with the members of the committee via public testimony at the hearing is a logical extension of those efforts.”