You Can't Even Trust Horses These Days

Four horses have tested positive for performance-enhancing substances at the Olympics and will be disqualified, including a horse from Norway who may have been the horse ridden during the bronze medal effort in an equestrian event. (It being Norwegian, you can get one positive thing from this story: the state of Norway paid for its prohibited drug, whatever it was, because they have socialized medicine. No American tax dollars wasted, dammit.)

The scandal centers around the use of capsaicin, a substance whose name may ring a bell with you: the chemical is one of the active ingredients in hot peppers, and is the active ingredient in pepper spray. In equine sports, capsaicin is used in small doses as a pain inhibitor, and is banned by the IOC for this reason. It seems unlikely that the IOC will overturn any rulings or hear out appeals, since the only possible explanations for the horses having such elevated levels of capsaicin are:

• Recent participation in a riot where they were pepper sprayed.
• The horses have been fed huge amounts of spicy Sichuanese food in their Olympic stables.
• They doped themselves
• They were doped by their trainers.

Since horses are notoriously apathetic about Tibetan independence and free speech, we can rule out number one. We can also rule out number two, since it's a well-known fact that horses prefer the Shanghaiese school of Chinese cooking. (What can we say? They're suckers for dumplings!) Three is unlikely both because horses have no thumbs, and they cannot talk or write. That leaves us with number four. This is Monk-level deduction, and I'm not even crippled by OCD ... yet.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.