On Sunday, Nikita was charged with her tenth weight offense in twelve months. She was 1.5 kg (or just over three pounds) above her registered weight. According to Australian news outlet The Age, Beriman "explained to stewards that her diet proved to be unreliable as her sugar levels appeared to rise, even though she had very little to eat. "I was 52½ on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday and I've only had a sandwich before the races today, and I'm a kilo-and-a-half over that. It's so hard to regulate.""

Racing stewards were lenient with Beriman, bypassing a suspension with a $500 fine and a directive to work with a sports nutritionist. But she won't be allowed to return to racing until she has medical certification to prove her weight is back on track.

Not a New Problem
The pressure to drop pounds for racing has led to starvation diets, laxatives, sweat boxes, purging, and other dangerous practices by jockeys. Eating disorders are rampant. The subject of jockey weight has long been controversial in the racing world; the guidelines are controlled on a state-to-state basis and in recent years there has been legislation proposed to relax long-held standards. In 2005, the California Horse Racing Board approved a proposal to up the weight scales for jockeys and establish a minimum body fat content of 5% for men and 10% for women in an effort "to promote better health and to help prevent the cycle of self-abuse caused by jockeys engaging in unsafe weight-reduction practices." Traditionally, such efforts have met with resistance from horse and track owners, who see any move that may slow a racehorse as a potential financial hit to horseracing as a whole.

Interesting Horsey Fact Of The Day
George Woolf, the renown jockey who rode Seabiscuit to fame in the late 1930s, had type 1 diabetes - a fact he kept hidden from all but his closest friends in the competitive world of horse racing. Those that knew him reported Woolf would frequently and suddenly nod off to sleep, a sign of chronic high blood sugars. It's likely that Woolf was persistently running high -- insulin was new and dosing adjustments and testing were in their infancy at that time. But given what we know about the life of a jockey and Woolf's own public struggles with weight, it's also quite possible that he had discovered the weight loss potential of running chronically high blood sugars by cutting back on insulin - a phenomenon known as "diabulimia" today.

RELATED: Diabetes and Eating Disorders