ABSTRACT
Racing laboratories have measured the concentration of arsenic (As) and cobalt (Co) in equine urine to control misuse of substances containing these elements with respect to international thresholds for more than 10 years. Racing Analytical Services Ltd (RASL) has expanded the use of inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) to include the analysis of a further 11 elements, including Lithium (Li), Nickel (Ni) and Manganese (Mn). The potential significance of these elements to doping control in animal sports will be presented, together with statistical analysis of 52,189 equine urine samples analysed over a 6-year period (2019-2024 inclusive) to evaluate potential regulatory thresholds. Supervised and unsupervised machine learning models are in development to assist in vetting positive and negative samples, enhancing the reliability of classification outcomes, and identifying outliers in the dataset.