Sheik Mohammed gets 6-month ban for horse doping

GENEVA — The International Equestrian Federation banned its president’s husband — Dubai’s Sheik Mohammed — from riding in endurance races for six months after his horse twice failed doping tests.

Sheik Mohammed accepted the suspension based on his horse Tahhan’s positive tests for a hypertension drug and the steroid stanozolol, equestrian’s governing body said Monday.

“Consistent with the FEI’s strict liability approach to anti-doping rule violations, the panel has found Sheik Mohammed responsible for the doping of his horse,” a tribunal panel said in a ruling published on the FEI’s Web site.

His ban runs through Oct. 3, and he was assessed $4,200 in fines and legal costs.

The sheik’s horse trainer, Abdullah bin Huzaim, admitted giving the horse drugs without the sheik’s knowledge before the 74.5-mile desert races at Bahrain and Dubai.

Bin Huzaim was banned for a year and fined.

Sheik Mohammed’s wife, Princess Haya of Jordan, is president of the FEI and has campaigned to clean up equestrian’s doping and medication problems. She took no part in the disciplinary process.

The three-man panel said bin Huzaim, manager of the sheik’s Emaar Stables in Dubai, “clearly wanted His Highness to do well with the horse. This behavior is not acceptable and needs to be sanctioned severely.”

Sheik Mohammed’s horse tested positive for guanabenz, a drug used to treat hypertension, after he rode it in Bahrain in January and Dubai in February.

The horse also had traces of stanozolol — the anabolic steroid used by sprinter Ben Johnson at the 1988 Seoul Olympics — after the Bahrain race.

Sheik Mohammed’s lawyers informed the FEI in April of the failed doping tests. He asked to be disqualified from both races and said he would investigate how his stables were managed.

He told the panel in a written statement that he had an ownership stake in 700 endurance horses and could not be expected to be aware of each one’s medication protocol. He is also one of the world’s most successful owners and breeders of thoroughbred racehorses.

The panel of FEI officials from Belgium, Ireland and Norway said it received a signed statement from Bin Huzaim saying he believed the horse needed the medications, and that both would be “outside FEI detection times.”

Sheik Mohammed suggested that his status presented “exceptional circumstances” allowing for his ban to be reduced, the ruling said.

Suspending the sheik from FEI competitions for six months, the panel noted that “as a person of high government status he executes his governmental role from a position of authority and effective delegation, the same principle should apply to stable management.”

While the sheik had not proposed changes to his stables’ management, he rode as an amateur and got credit for proactively informing the FEI of the test results, the panel said.

The FEI tribunal is considering a separate doping case involving Sheik Mohammed’s son, Sheik Hamdan.

Sheik Hamdan rode his endurance horse Eo Fawati in January in Bahrain where it tested positive for metabolites of stanozolol.