Quote:
Originally Posted by JerryBoyle
This is a bummer. There is no silver lining in that story, the entire thing stinks. The worst part, and I was naive to it, is the incestuous relationship between regulators and owners/trainers/breeders. The guy making this decision had an ownership stake?! There's no way to spin that...what a bunch of clowns ruining what should be a great sport. Depressing as f*ck.
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Regulatory capture. The Meatpacking Commission is generally full of meatpacking plant owners. The Cemetery Board is full of funeral directors. And the Horse Racing Board is full of people who have interests in the industry.
A certain amount of this is actually unavoidable, because you actually need some level of expertise. If you just took 7 random California civilians who knew nothing about horse racing, they wouldn't know the first thing about regulating the sport.
But this is why the Brown Act and open meetings are so important. This way, they have to do whatever they do IN PUBLIC. And this entire thing would have gone down differently if they had done it in public. There would have been calls to disqualify Justify as soon as the positive test was revealed, NBC would have covered it as a major story and a major embarrassment to the sport going into the Kentucky Derby, there would have been pressure on Churchill not to accept the entry, etc.
