After leading midway through the $125,000 Maurello Championship for Illinois-bred pacers at Balmoral Park on Sept. 19, Martha Maxine lost a little ground in the stretch and finished a neck behind longshot Mucho Sleazy. The result was something of a surprise because Martha Maxine had paced a mile in 1:49.2, one of the best times in Chicago this year, to win an elimination race by five lengths.

"So what?" you might ask. Favorites lose races all the time. True enough.

What made the race noteworthy was not the result, but the fact that the Maurello Championship was restricted to males. Last year, racing as a female, Martha Maxine was a clear winner in the filly and mare equivalent to the Maurello, the $100,000 Ann Vonian Final at Balmoral. Martha Maxine continued racing through summer of this year as a female, and a pretty good one. She won 13 races and earned more than $193,000 as one of 2008’s leading pacing fillies, and she chalked up five victories in 2009 before an administrative sex change engineered by the United States Trotting Association (USTA) barred her from competing in filly and mare races. Martha Maxine’s win in the Maurello elimination event was the horse’s first victory since she (he?) was declared a male.

Martha Maxine’s sex became an issue earlier this year after the horse finished second in a race at Harrah’s Chester in Pennsylvania. A mandatory post-race drug test showed an elevated level of the male hormone testosterone, a puzzling result because trainer and co-owner Erv Miller was adamant that he had not dosed the horse with steroids. Subsequent testing at the University of Pennsylvania’s New Bolton Center revealed that the "female" Martha Maxine actually is a male pseudo hermaphrodite, with both X and Y sex chromosomes