Thursday, August 21, 2008

feague

Another olympics drug story, this time not the athletes, though.

Four horses involved in the Olympic show jumping have tested positive for the banned substance capsaicin.


Capsaicin isn't some shady synthetic steroid. It's the substance in chillies that makes them feel hot, and administering such things to horses is not a new idea.

There is a largely disused term - and I hereby present you with Word Of The Day - 'feague'.

It refers to the practice of putting raw ginger or formerly, it is said, a live eel up a horse's arse in order to make it lively and carry its tail well prior to auction.

Imagine it happening to you. You know it'd work, don't you?

If you have $400 to spare, there's a product from uber-hot chilli sauce specialist Blair Lazar, Blair's 16 Million Reserve. It's not a chilli sauce at all, it's pure capsaicin. What you get is a few specks of white stuff in a jar, the product of refining several tonnes of fresh chillies. The man himself tried it and says

It was like having your tongue hit with a hammer. Man, it hurt. My tongue swelled up and it hurt like hell for days.


And that was only his tongue. I daren't imagine the aftermath of a feaguing.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It seems -- in this case -- it wasn't the result of a concentrated chilli fisting. Apparently capsaicin is the active ingredient in something called "Equi-block" which is the horse-equivalent of deep-heat.

Presumably this stuff is to deep-heat what ketamine is to valium. Imagine applying it to your horse and then absent-mindedly going for a piss!

merrick said...

jim, it does seem like it was a blood test rather than an anal swabbing. Still, this can surely be regarded as intravenous feaguing.

And do we know, are ginger and eels on the list of banned substances?

If not, perhaps it was a double whammy of smothering poor Dobbin with Equi-block whilst slipping a gingery eel up its jacksie.