Willie Mullins' Final Demand has been disqualified from the Brown Advisory Novices' Chase at the Cheltenham Festival after testing positive for a prohibited substance, with over £40,000 in prize-money forfeited and the trainer fined £1,100.
The horse, a 7-2 chance, finished runner-up under Paul Townend behind stablemate Kitzbuhel in March, beaten three quarters of a length. A post-race blood and urine test confirmed the presence of mepivacaine in the blood sample, while the urine sample contained the same substance together with 3-hydroxymepivacaine.
Trainer 'visibly shocked' by adverse finding
A BHA disciplinary panel was told Mullins was 'visibly shocked' when notified of the adverse finding by Dr Lynn Hillyer, Chief Medical Officer of the IHRB. Mullins told her he could not recall an occasion when the horse had come into contact with mepivacaine.
However, the yard's vet Dr Virginie Bascop disclosed that Final Demand had sustained a soft tissue injury to his lower jaw in an accident on March 3, which had been stapled in the field by another vet using mepivacaine. Bascop said she had not been aware of this at the time.
Medication declaration error
This information should have been included in the horse's medication declaration, required of all horses entered to run at the Cheltenham Festival and due by March 3, the same day Final Demand was injured, but was not.
An expert report by Dr Lucinda Tyler, the BHA's Medication Control and Anti-Doping Manager, concluded the concentration of mepivacaine found was more likely to have been found up to 24 hours after administration, rather than eight days later. She added there was no evidence to suggest deliberate administration as an attempt to improve performance.
Panel accepts accidental failure
Panel chair Sarah Crowther KC said: "This is one error made in the context of an extremely large and well-organised system for medical declarations covering a string of approximately 250 horses, and the BHA accepts that the failure was accidental and a one-off."
At a separate hearing, Cheltenham was fined £5,000 after it emerged that CCTV footage from one of the racecourse stable yards where Final Demand was housed between March 8 and 11 was lost.
