A curious outcome has emerged from Victoria's racing tribunal: trainers penalised for offences their regulator has formally conceded they did not commit. Five Victorian trainers including Mark and Levi Kavanagh, Amy and Ash Yargi, Symon Wilde, Julius Sandhu, and Smiley Chan faced charges over the presence of formestane and 4-hydroxytestosterone in horse samples, with infractions dating back to February 2023. Yet by late February 2026, after a five-day December hearing before the Victorian Racing Tribunal, Racing Victoria reached an agreement where all trainers would plead guilty to presentation charges rather than administration charges, with all trainers maintaining their innocence.
This distinction matters enormously. Formestane is a breast cancer treatment not approved for veterinary use, while 4-hydroxytestosterone is an anabolic steroid prohibited under Australian Rules of Racing. A presentation charge means admitting the drugs were present in the sample; an administration charge means actively giving the substance to the horse. The trainers pleaded guilty to presentation charges, constituting an admission that the drugs were in the urine samples. What remains unproven: how they got there.
For racing authorities, this creates a problem of institutional accountability. When samples test positive for prohibited substances, someone must be held responsible under the rules. Yet Racing Victoria originally laid charges for positives to the drug before shifting its position. The trainers had suggested contamination from the outset. That explanation has not been disproven, nor has it been proven. The tribunal proceeded anyway.
The penalty structure reveals the logic at work. Under the Rules, detection of 4-hydroxytestosterone typically comes with a penalty prohibiting a horse from starting in an official trial, jump-out, or race for 12 months from the date the sample was collected. The horses themselves bore the standard 12-month suspension. The trainers received financial penalties totalling $24,000 despite Racing Victoria's concession that they did not administer the substances.
This raises a genuine tension in regulatory design. Racing has a legitimate interest in maintaining sample integrity and preventing doping. A presentation charge without proof of administration creates a strict liability framework: the trainer is responsible for whatever appears in the sample, regardless of how it arrived there. From this angle, the outcome makes sense. From another, it punishes trainers for the regulator's inability to determine the source of contamination.
The Australian Trainers' Association publicly supported the trainers throughout their efforts to resolve the case, with ATA President Troy Corstens backing them and an ATA representative present at the December hearing. That backing suggests the broader racing community views the penalty structure, if not the specific outcome, as imposing fairness problems.
Racing regulators must grapple with a real dilemma. Strict liability ensures no doping goes unpunished. It also punishes innocent people. The tribunal's decision reflects that trade-off, but it creates a precedent worth examining: what happens when proof of culpability diverges from proof of responsibility? At some point, the cost of certainty becomes a form of institutional overreach.