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Originally Posted by mountainman
It's a HUGE deal, a dirty, hard to confront issue that is limited to no particular track, horse, or class level, and is fast eroding trust in our game.
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Racing secretaries write races for specific horses and go out of their way to fill other races with horses that are not well meant all the time.
I assume they do it because they think it's good for business or have to fill card. I assume a lot of horsemen/owners aren't making a big stink about it because they agree or know that one hand washes the other and they may eventually need a race for one of their horses, or both.
That doesn't make it a perfect world, but to be honest, the only problem I see with that is if certain connections were being heavily favored over others. If that was the case, I think you'd start hearing the complaints and some horsemen would leave. The alternative is probably 4 horse fields and 7 races a day.
I don't know the scratch policies of most of the tracks, but I assume most tracks have some control over the reasons for scratches and can do something when/if they feel certain connections are behaving in a coordinated and manipulative way to favor their own horses.
But even a version of that is somewhat common.
It's not that unusual to run rabbits (same trainer/owner, same trainer different owner, or same owner and different trainer), enter two horses of the same running style and scratch one so they don't eliminate each other, etc.. Maybe we should DQ Damascus for his wins against Fager.
IMO it's up to the tracks to try to manage these things so the product doesn't deteriorate. They don't want to wind up with a lot small fields, easy trip winners, etc... If they don't it will be bad for business.
However, as a gambler, the only thing that would really ruffle my feathers would be pre arranged agreements between connections about whether to send horses, take back, purposely give a shipper a rough trip, etc... because then you are manipulating outcomes that can give some people (those that know) an advantage over others that don't at the windows. Once that happens, the sport is toast. The stewards are supposed to be watching for that kind of thing. If the aren't then there is a bigger problem.
Until there is a surplus of horses and tougher scratch rules in place, I don't see a way out of this, but writing easy races for RR and allowing horses to scratch didn't have any impact on my bottom line.
