A Sacramento horse owner and the silks custodian at Cal Expo are in trouble with the California Horse Racing Board for allowing a horse to improperly race in the colors of the Confederate battle flag during the state fair meet July 15.

The horse, Mute Rudulph, won the fourth race that day in his racing debut for owners Bill Wilbur, Chris Carpenter, and Bill McLean, who also trains the horse. The 2-year-old bay colt is named after Ken Rudulph, a host for the horse racing network TVG. Rudulph, who is African-American, is coincidentally from Sacramento.

The CHRB alleges that track colors man Tony Baze “received financial consideration and conspired to aid and abet” with Wilbur to substitute the “Southern Cross” for the horse’s designated colors.

There’s no excuse for Wilbur or Baze. Via @o_crunk and @superterrific.

8/7/10 Update: The CHRB hearing scheduled for today has been postponed until August 26, due to Baze appearing without legal representation.

I’ve said this about enforcement in the game over and over again: If you want to clean up racing, hit the owners…. If you made their horses come off the track, no owner in their right mind would send a string to known cheaters.

Which I was thinking of as I read that Randy Hartley, part-owner of Gato Go Win, isn’t upset with trainer Jeff Mullins over getting the horse scratched from the Bay Shore last Saturday after he was observed dosing him with a substance in the Aqueduct detention barn:

“I’m not mad,” Hartley said. “[Mullins] was trying to do what he thought was the right thing by the horse. I don’t know what they’re going to do as far as fining him or whatever, but we’ll find another race for the horse. He’s a good trainer. He’s just a down-to-earth guy who made a mistake. We all make mistakes.”

As long as owners like Hartley are willing to dismiss rule-flouting as a mistake, the ethically challenged will always have horses in their barns.

Let’s be fair, though: Mullins is alleged to have used an oral syringe to administer an anti-cough formula orally. He claims the plunger was brought into the detention area openly, in a bucket searched by NYRA security, reports the New York Post. Even if true, Mullins violated detention rules, which allow for nothing to be given except Lasix by the track veterinarians. He may have done so because he believed the substance — a mix of honey, apple cider vinegar, aloe vera, menthol, oil of eucalyptus, lemon juice and ethyl alcohol, guaranteed not to test, being an “all natural” product made up of legal ingredients — would give Gato Go Win a little edge in the starting gate [or because, as he stated later, he uses Air Power "on most of his horses"]. Regardless of the reason or motive, if Mullins did what is alleged, he should be punished for breaking the rules by the NYRA stewards. But the rest of us — by which I mean, everyone, blogger or journalist, commenting or reporting on this story, also have an obligation, and that is — even in the midst of calling Jeff Mullins a stupid, stupid man and a likely cheat — to be accurate in the details and not fan ignorance or prejudice unduly.