Someone is doping racehorses but nobody seems to know who or why?

For the eighth time in 12 years a horse has tested positive for a 'stopping' drug. The motivation - a betting coup - is obvious, but so far the trail has gone cold. Chris Nawrat reports

ON Easter Saturday Ashgar was the 5-6 clear favourite in the six-horse 5.00 at Plumpton. It finished a distant third. When the horse was tested, a powerful sedative, acetylpromazine (ACP), was found in the gelding's system. Who put it there, and why? Ashgar's yard insisted that there was no ACP on their premises, so we have to presume the horse was 'got at'.

Ashgar's positive test set off alarm bells in the Jockey Club because it was the latest in a long saga of race-fixing and doping investigations going back to March 1997 when Lively Knight, a 1-7 favourite in a three-horse race at Plumpton finished second, and Avanti Express, a 5-4 favourite was pulled up at Exeter in the same month. Both horses tested positive for ACP.

Five people were accused of conspiring to dope horses, but the trial collapsed in October 2000 when the judge agreed with defence counsel that there was insufficient evidence to proceed. Other cases are in the pipeline but are subject to reporting restrictions for legal reasons.

Once the Jockey Club were aware of the Ashgar case, they swung into action to test if there were any unusual betting patterns on that particular race. They privately contacted one of the three leading bookmakers and the new kid on the betting block, internet firm, Betfair, and asked to see their figures for the race.

Betfair specialise in a new 'bookmakerless' form of gambling known as person to person betting, which enables punters to play bookmaker or punter using their website as a forum. In essence, you can either take a bet (punt), or offer a bet (lay). Thus, if you know an odds-on favourite can't win, you can post attractive odds on the horse on a website such as Betfair, and watch the money roll in.

From the layer's point of view, it doesn't matter which horse wins as long as the favourite won't. That's the theory. And since these betting exchanges started - some 20 months ago - critics have complained that 'P to P' sites were open to such manipulation and in fact offered an incentive to stop horses. However, there is one major flaw in this theory.

To participate in a betting exchange site you have to register and give correct credit card, or bank, details, among other things. In other words, you are very visible, and eminently traceable. As Rob Hartnett, the managing director of Betdaq UK, put it: "Because betting exchanges are new, everybody has jumped to the obvious conclusion that it would be an easy way of doing it. The only problem is that it would be like breaking into a house and forgetting to put your gloves on.

"You would leave your fingerprints all over the exchange were anything untoward to emerge afterwards. It can so easily be tracked back." Once the Jockey Club announced that Ashgar had tested positive for ACP, Betdaq immediately checked their audit trail on the race, only to discover they had had less than £7,000 in matched bets (ie £3,500 X 2) and the biggest winner netted £200, which was peanuts for him.

All the leading bookmakers reported much the same thing: nothing unusual happened on that Easter Saturday. The spread betting firms also checked their audit trails, because they have a betting option of 'selling' favourites, ie effectively betting against favourites, and they also found nothing untoward.

"The strange thing about Ashgar is that nobody's saying they lost money," said Paul Austin of IG index. "To me, if you were in the knowledge a horse wasn't going to win, you certainly wouldn't look at spread betting because, if it doesn't win the race, it can still get points for coming second or third.