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To Disclose or Not to Disclose

I’m repeating myself, reposting this Bill Finley ESPN column, but I wanted to say a little more about the issue of disclosure. What Finley writes, in the wake of the Sweet Catomine affair and owner Marty Wygod’s CHRB hearing, is that when it comes to the public getting information on a horse’s condition,

there has to be a better system in place than the one we have now, which is, basically, the public can be damned. At the very least, when a horse undergoes any kind of surgical procedure or is shipped to a veterinary clinic for treatment, which is where Sweet Catomine spent about 40 hours the week of the Santa Anita Derby, that information should be disclosed. Has a horse missed any serious training time of late? Have there been any serious infirmities since its last race? The betting public has a right to know.

This seems like a very reasonable position to me. If a horse has a myectomy or is treated for a bleeding episode between starts, that should be made known. Really, how different is disclosing this information from the disclosure bettors get now that a horse is on Lasix for the first time? Or that it’s wearing different shoes than previously reported? Or carrying x number of excess pounds?
Hank Wesch take a contrary stance in the Union-Tribune:

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, with much potential to mislead. And disclosure can be a double-edged sword with the capability of cutting anyone….

Two days before the 1990 Preakness, Kentucky Derby runner-up Summer Squall was observed bleeding from the nostrils while being grazed in the grassy area adjacent to the Pimlico stakes barn. Come race day, the little colt performed superbly and turned the tables on Kentucky Derby winner Unbridled.

In such instances, disclosure would have meant many bettors going to other horses and coming away with the feeling they’d fallen prey to a disinformation campaign designed to boost the odds on the winner they failed to have.

I don’t buy this argument — it ignores the fact that bettors already feel cheated by nondisclosure, and it’s patronizing. If anything, I’d expect bettors to feel less cheated if they were given such information and could incorporate it (or not, depending on their preference) into their handicapping, so long as clear guidelines for what should be disclosed were established and the information was reported consistently.

Posted in The Sport on April 27, 2005

The Real Thing

“Graphic, high-quality replications of pounding horses and photo finishes at the virtual victory line amounts to a slur on Secretariat and his progeny — not to mention on the young father I quietly watched juggling his good fortunes with a tot-filled stroller at one hand and a heavily marked tout sheet in the other.
“Up from a similar gambler’s bloodline, I had $10 on Dr. Rockett to win in the third at a mile and an eighth. Leading desperately down the stretch, my horse was suddenly bumped off stride by a wayward competitor, Exaggerate This, who flashed across the finish line as the unofficial winner by a nose. Assorted hoots, groans and vulgarities rose up toward the jetliner traffic from Kennedy.
“No way virtual racing could match the scene: sunshine-drenched anxiety, replays of my bumped horse on the infield screens, the wait for an official result with serious money and sweating thoroughbreds on the line.” (New York Times)

Posted in The Sport on April 20, 2005

The Information Game

Rupert Murdoch may not be the man you think of when the subject of reforming racing comes up, but his speech last Wednesday to the American Society of Newspaper Editors is spot on in describing the technological-cultural shifts of the past decade, and what he has to say about the need to reach young people on their terms if a tradition-bound industry is to survive is as relevant to racing as it is to journalism:

We need to realize that the next generation of people accessing news and information, whether from newspapers or any other source, have a different set of expectations about the kind of news they will get, including when and how they will get it, where they will get it from, and who they will get it from….

What is happening is, in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing news. They don’t want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel….

In the face of this revolution, however, we’ve been slow to react. We’ve sat by and watched while our newspapers have gradually lost circulation….

Where four out of every five americans in 1964 read a paper every day, today, only half do. Among just younger readers, the numbers are even worse….

The trends are against us…. Unless we awaken to these changes, which are quite different to those of 5 or 6 years ago, we will, as an industry, be relegated to the status of also-rans.

Posted in The Sport on April 15, 2005

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