Flit-Gun Hop

Twelve years ago the nation's race tracks cracked down on the widespread practice of "hopping" horses; into limbo went the old standbys, heroin and cocaine, which mandatory saliva and urine tests showed up crystal clear. Inventive horsemen--and few are short on imagination--promptly began a painstaking search for a magic hop that would leave no telltale evidence. Stories and jokes about new nasal sprays and rectally-administered stimulants soon became standard race track shop talk.

Last week, nasal sprays were no joke for Silent Tom Smith, the man who developed Seabiscuit and this year trained Cosmetic Queen Elizabeth Arden Graham's top money-winning stable ($512,454 in purses). New York's vigilant Jockey Club, having found some dopey spray in one of his horses, banned Trainer Smith from U.S. tracks for a year.

The all but undetectable stimulant was a 2.6% solution of ephedrine. Sprayed up horse's nostrils, ephedrine acts within 15 minutes and the effect lasts for about two hours. Jockey Club snoopers first seized and analyzed a nearly empty bottle found in one of Smith's stalls. Then on Nov. 1, just after his Magnific Duel won at Jamaica, inspectors broke into the stall and caught the training staff with the goods--ephedrine in atomizers.

(Reported the hastily proofread New York Herald Tribune: ". . . The state chemist . . . reported traces of ephedrine in the saliva test taken from Mrs. Elizabeth [Arden] Graham." In fact, Magnific Duel's saliva test was negative.)

Owner Arden, whose Maine Chance Farm horses have made hundreds of thousands of bettors happy, was flabbergasted. "This has been a severe shock to me," she said. "I love my horses. They're so beautiful. They were my toys. And now this calamity after such wonderful success. . ." Said Trainer Smith, admitting that he had long used a mixture of salt, vinegar and ephedrine (to clear up horses' heads): "The quantity and quality of ... the so-called drug ... is infinitesimal and could not have affected [the horse's] racing condition."

Having already hired a new trainer, Roy Waldron, to handle her stable, Owner Arden then dug in behind Smith, asked the veterinary schools at Pennsylvania, Cornell and Northwestern Universities to find out what effect ephedrine had on a horse. Meanwhile, less innocent race-tracksters wondered if other trainers besides Tom ("Flit-Gun") Smith had discovered formulas of their own.

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