Quote:
Originally Posted by classhandicapper
There are conflicts of interest all over the place.
It doesn't matter whether you are married, dating, living together, brothers, sisters, brother and sister, best friends, there are 2 horses trained by the same trainer and the weak part is used as a sacrificial lamb on the assumption the favor will be returned at a later date, a rider not going after a loose speed because that horse is trained by a trainer that gives him valuable mounts, a rider that opens up the rail for a horse trained by a trainer that gives him valuable mounts etc..
I could go on and on.
I even think there are politics involved in stewards decisions.
Good luck finding a solution.
Good luck proving any of it.
But better luck if you are naive enough to think everything going on out there is on the up and up. You are going to need it.
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In theory, what you need are good stewards. I don't know if you get that in practice, but I'll use the obvious example of this, Justify's Belmont, where the other Baffert horse appeared to run interference for him.
In that situation, what the sport should have done (but didn't, because of course the breeders control everything and would have made life miserable for any racing official that disqualified a TC winner), is investigate fully. They should have taken the deposition, under oath, of the riders of both horses. They should have subpoenaed cell phone records and text messages. (And by the way, there should be a rule that all licensees have to preserve their text messages and cell phones for review for a certain period of time. This is the rule that got Tom Brady suspended when he was deflating footballs.) And if it turns out there was collusion, they should disqualify all the horses involved and issue suspensions for all the people involved.
Coupling helps sometimes (it lowers the possibility of one specific kind of conflicts of interest), but the only thing that truly works in this situation is an active, aggressive regulatory agency.
Here's another example. It's not 1973 anymore. It's possible to investigate betting coups. Trainers, jockey agents, and jockeys placing bets can be tracked. There's either an electronic record or security camera video of every bet. So why haven't we heard about investigations of betting coups? If a horse has a suspicious form reversal, why aren't betting records routinely examined to determine if the trainer bet on the horse? If a trainer bets on enough of these, it should be an automatic suspension. And don't tell me about due process- it would be perfectly permissible for the sport to ban trainers from betting at all. No other sport allows its participants to bet on the results of the contest. So the lesser rule of suspending a trainer involved in betting coups should be totally legal.
My point is not that it is possible to prevent all conflicts of interest- it's possible for the sport to be a lot more aggressive about conflicts than it is. It just needs a backbone it doesn't have right now, and a mandate to protect the bettors rather than protecting the insiders.
ran for purse money only in the last at Aqueduct yesterday? I was wondering what was going on.
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