Mark Gerard
Equine veterinarian
Mark Gerard (6 October 1934 – 21 June 2011) was an American equine veterinarian. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and graduated from Cornell University.
As a student, he worked as an exercise rider for, among others, Hall of Fame trainer James E. Fitzsimmons.
Gerard started practice as a veterinarian for racehorses, some highly successful ones, such as Canonero II, who won the Kentucky Derby; he also cared for Triple Crown winner Secretariat. In 1977, he masterminded a highly publicized scandal involving horse switching. He had imported two horses from Uruguay, a champion named Cinzano, and the much cheaper Lebon. After Lebon had under-performed in his earlier races, Gerard ran Cinzano under Lebon's name. Entered as "Lebon", Cinzano subsequently won as a 57-1 outsider, at New York's Belmont Park, and Gerard collected a $77,920 winning on a bet.
Later, a Uruguayan journalist recognized the horse as Cinzano from a newspaper photo, and an investigation was started. The story was broken in the States on October 21, 1977, by News World's racing editor, Daniel Keating in New York.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mark Gerard” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.