AFTER renewed media interest in the case in recent weeks, Willie Mullins opened up on the circumstances around Final Demand’s positive test for local anaesthetic mepivacaine that saw him disqualified from his second-place finish in the Brown Advisory Novices’ Chase at Cheltenham last March.

The British Horseracing Authority could not determine the exact cause of the finding and opted for fines totalling £1,100 in terms of a penalty towards the champion trainer.

According to the BHA case conclusion, “the most likely explanation is a low dose contact shortly before sampling”, something that “places the likely contact on raceday in the period between when the race was run, and when the samples were taken.”

“He got a cut when he was schooling up in the Curragh one day, and we just got the nearest vet to give him a painkiller, which is called mepivacaine. Basically, if you go to the dentist, I think you get this. He got the cut up on his jaw, so he had to get stitched. I wasn’t there and our staff told [the vet] that he was running at Cheltenham. He described this as a three-day thing.

“Now, we don’t use that drug in our place because we have found over the years that it can stay in some horses way longer, and that’s why we don’t use it. My own vets at home won’t use it, and my practice I have down here, we gave it up about three years ago, because we found through testing that in some horses it stayed way over the three days. They gave an outside view of seven days, and on the eighth day he was running. We have found it actually 19 to 21 days [later] in the horse, so that’s why we won’t use it. But it was a welfare issue and this was all the vet had on the day.

“Where he had the cut under his jaw, they injected him in there, which wouldn’t be a normal place to do it. Some vets are telling me that it depends if it went into a certain tissue there, it could stay there much longer. You’ve got to be very careful with it to get it in the right area, into the bloodstream, so that it washes out quick. This is all stuff I’m learning after.

“The technicality of why we were fined was based on what we provided in the medical history of the horse for the three months previous to their run. You’ve got to do that eight days before and this happened to Final Demand about an hour after the deadline for submitting eight days out. We had 100 horses entered in Cheltenham at that stage, so all the veterinary records for those 100 horses - that’s a lot of veterinary stuff between antibiotics if they get a cough or a cold, or x-rays or anything - they all have to be written down and sent off. That got missed [with Final Demand] because it hadn’t happened as such [by the time we submitted].

Filing treatment

“And the other thing is that when we would treat our horse at home, it would go into our veterinary book, which is normal practice in our place. This [treatment] was done up in the Curragh. I saw one article that suggested it was done in our place, and why did we get a vet from 45 miles away to come down to our yard, someone who was not our normal vet, but it actually happened up in the Curragh when he was schooling. That vet never sent us the prescription to put in our veterinary record. So you have the eight-day submission beforehand, and then I think two or three days, maybe declaration day, two days before Cheltenham, you have to send in another veterinary report of what happened in the intermediate seven or eight days. Because we didn’t get the prescription, we omitted that.

“However, the aftercare, the antibiotics he got for the next three days or four days, was on our report because we gave it to him from our vet. I think that’s what I got to fine for, actually not reporting it, which is fine. Hands up, it was a clerical error. But as I said, we had 100 other horses, and that’s a lot of work. So that was the only one that got missed.

“When they came down to me to tell me that we had this, I said, ‘Well, that’s not a drug we use. We can’t have it in our horses.’ And then we just traced back, and someone said, ‘But he got cut the day in the Curragh.’ ‘Right. How was he treated?’ And then we found out it was mepivacaine, and that’s basically the whole ins and outs of the case. Thank God he didn’t win. When we take such care to counteract all that and try to be perfect, and then that to happen. It’s not nice. But we live, we move on and try not to let it happen again.”