Yes it was aaron mulroony and shamrock stables. He was batting .450 but I believe he got a posititive on black ice.
Mm I don't know about that. Not unless 'black ice' is what the kids are calling an elevated CO2 result these days and you're just moving the goalposts accordingly. It probably just sounds believable and satisfying for its exotic and nefarious quality. But to my knowledge there's never been a positive for it. I think it was a term Pelligrini threw out there to send the overzealous Richard Sams into the tailspin that resulted in the Aminorex debacle of his making. Not to be construed as a defense for the guy, because he really was something of an asshole. However, documented, demonstrable facts, objective reality, and science are nice...
*Aaron Mulrooney
2004 304 starts $368,536 .501 average.
10-17-04 High TCo2 at Raceway Park on a horse (Clincher) which finished 5th. Suspended 1 year and fined $1000. 5th place and the rubes are still going for the soda being a magic performance enhancer spiel though no one is actually testing for and proving the administration of a substance; and the science has been screaming otherwise for going on nearly two decades now already!
The following is an exchange conducted on the Yahoo! Harnesslist news group I picked up on and posted elsewhere in '06:
Subject: [harnesslist] Lactic Acid Not a Foe
"Upon his retirement a distinguished chemistry professor
was asked if he had any regrets about his long career. "Yes," he
replied, "I regret having flunked so many students for failing to learn what we now know is not true."
For years horsemen have been fighting lactic acid with
baking soda and racing commissions have been penalizing them for their efforts. Apparently both sides have had it wrong for a long time.
The following is from the NY Times."
-Russ
May 16, 2006
Lactic Acid Is Not Muscles' Foe, It's Fuel
By GINA KOLATA
"Everyone who has even thought about exercising has heard
the warnings about lactic acid. It builds up in your muscles. It is what makes your muscles burn. Its buildup is what makes your muscles tire and give out. Coaches and personal trainers tell athletes and
exercisers that they have to learn to work out at just below their "lactic threshold," that point of diminishing returns when lactic acid starts to accumulate. Some athletes even have blood tests to find their personal lactic thresholds. But that, it turns out, is all wrong. Lactic acid is actually a fuel, not a caustic waste product. Muscles make it deliberately, producing it from glucose, and they burn it to obtain energy. The reason trained athletes can perform so hard and so long is because their intense training causes their muscles to adapt so they more readily and efficiently absorb lactic acid.
The notion that lactic acid was bad took hold more than
a century ago, said George A. Brooks, a professor in the department of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley. It stuck because it seemed to make so much sense. "It's one of the classic mistakes in the history of science," Dr. Brooks said. Its origins lie in a study by a Nobel laureate, Otto Meyerhof, who in the early years of the 20th century cut a frog in half and put its bottom half in a jar. The frog's muscles had no circulation - no source of oxygen or energy. Dr. Myerhoff gave the frog's leg electric shocks to make the muscles contract, but after a few twitches, the muscles stopped moving. Then, when Dr. Myerhoff examined the muscles, he discovered that they were bathed in lactic acid. A theory was born. Lack of oxygen to muscles leads to lactic acid, leads to fatigue. Athletes were told that they should spend most of their effort exercising aerobically, using glucose as a fuel. If they tried to spend too much time exercising harder, in the anaerobic zone, they were told, they would pay a price, that lactic acid would accumulate in the muscles, forcing them to stop. Few scientists questioned this view, Dr. Brooks said. But, he said, he became interested in it in the 1960's, when he was running track at Queens College and his coach told him that his performance was limited by a buildup of lactic acid. When he graduated and began working on a Ph.D. in exercise physiology, he decided to study the lactic acid hypothesis for his dissertation. "I gave rats radioactive lactic acid, and I found that they burned it faster than anything else I could give them," Dr. Brooks said. It looked as if lactic acid was there for a reason. It was a source of energy. Dr. Brooks said he published the finding in the late 70's.
Other researchers challenged him at meetings and in print.
"I had huge fights, I had terrible trouble getting my
grants funded, I had my papers rejected," Dr. Brooks recalled. But he
soldiered on, conducting more elaborate studies with rats and, years later, moving on to humans. Every time, with every study, his results were consistent with his radical idea. Eventually, other researchers confirmed the work. And gradually, the thinking among exercise physiologists began to change.
"The evidence has continued to mount," said L. Bruce Gladden, a professor of health and human performance at Auburn University. "It became clear that it is not so simple as to say, Lactic acid is a bad thing and it causes fatigue."
As for the idea that lactic acid causes muscle soreness, Dr. Gladden said, that never made sense. "Lactic acid will be gone from your muscles within an hour of exercise," he said. "You get sore one to three days later. The time frame is not consistent, and the mechanisms have not been found."
The understanding now is that muscle cells convert
glucose or glycogen to lactic acid. The lactic acid is taken up and used as a fuel by mitochondria, the energy factories in muscle cells.
Mitochondria even have a special transporter protein to move the substance into them, Dr. Brooks found. Intense training makes a difference, he said, because it can make double the mitochondrial mass.
It is clear that the old lactic acid theory cannot explain what is happening to muscles, Dr. Brooks and others said.
Yet, Dr. Brooks said, even though coaches often believed
in the myth of the lactic acid threshold, they ended up training athletes in the best way possible to increase their mitochondria. "Coaches have understood things the scientists didn't," he said.
Through trial and error, coaches learned that athletic
performance improved when athletes worked on endurance, running longer and longer distances, for example.
That, it turns out, increased the mass of their muscle
mitochondria, letting them burn more lactic acid and allowing the muscles to work harder and longer. Just before a race, coaches often tell athletes to train very hard in brief spurts. That extra stress increases the mitochondria mass even more, Dr. Brooks said, and is the reason for improved performance. And the scientists? They took much longer to figure it out. "They said, 'You're anaerobic, you need more oxygen,' Dr.Brooks said. "The scientists were stuck in 1920." "
"Ivers was telling people this for years before his passing."
-Dean
"You are right about Ivers. In fact he developed some
Nutrition formulas aimed at facilitating the use of lactic acid as a
fuel. One of the more interesting conversations I had with him was
when he went into detail regarding a study he was doing with a group in
South Africa. He was studying the conversion of lactic acid to a fuel in racing pigeons. Apparently the racing pigeon folks are far ahead of
horse people in applying science to racing."
-Russ
"The real point of all this is that testing for milkshaking, the way they are doing it, is a fool's errand. Stupidity at the very top. What is sad is how many positives there are going to be from guys who never gave anything but what is called legal--like Lasix. God help the guy if he happens to be winning "more than his share" at the time. " –Tom Ivers
"The joke is, they're not doing themselves any favors with that approach. Blood buffering is not the key. Intramuscular buffering, a different concept, is one of the keys. Higher post race lactate is the goal, because what that tells you is that you've processed more glycogen during the race." -Tom Ivers
Cue the whiners not liking the message who'll circumvent a proper, substantive attack against it by attacking me or the length of the post instead.
