Horse trainer Jason Servis gets 4 years for doping scandal
Horse trainer Jason Servis was sentenced Wednesday to the maximum four years on charges he drugged championship horses to up their winning odds.
U.S. Southern District Court Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil sentenced the 66-year-old Servis after he pleaded guilty to one felony and one misdemeanor charge that he used unapproved drugs on the horses he’d been training. In addition he must pay $311,760 in forfeiture, $163,932 in restitution and $30,000 in fines, and serve one year of supervised release.
“You have undermined the integrity of the sport of horse racing,” Vyskocil told Servis in announcing his sentence. “You cheated. You lied, and you broke the law.”
Servis was among more than 30 defendants charged in four separate cases, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York said in a statement. Each one grew out of a multi-year investigation into the alleged abuse of racehorses with performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs). The defendants were charged in 2020.
Racehorse trainers, veterinarians, PED distributors and others were also implicated, accused of plans to “manufacture, distribute, and receive adulterated and misbranded PEDs and to secretly administer those PEDs to racehorses competing at all levels of professional horse racing,” the district said.
The feds claimed Servis procured hundreds of bottles of SGF-1000, a compounded drug containing growth factors and made in unregistered facilities. It was administered to “virtually all the horses in Servis’s barn, including thoroughbred Maximum Security.”
The champion racehorse was first to cross the Kentucky Derby finish line, but was later disqualified by stewards of Churchill Downs for interference. Second-place Country House was then declared the winner.
Knowing SGF-1000 had been banned since 2012, “Servis continued to allow the administration of that drug on the horses he trained up until his arrest in March 2020,” the feds said.
Servis not only gave Maximum Security the performance-enhancing drug but also recommended it to another trainer and recruited a veterinarian in a plot to mask it within another substance. In addition, he invoiced horse owners under “acupuncture and chiropractic” care to hide the drugs from regulators.
The fraud affected races in New York, New Jersey, Florida, Ohio, Kentucky and the United Arab Emirates. Deception was carried out on both the state and federal levels, and against U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents and good-faith betting members of the public alike.
Servis appeared to express remorse when given the option to say a few words.
“I will live with this for the rest of my life, and I’m most truly sorry,” he told the court after shedding a few tears.
