If money is involved, there are always going to be cheaters

Everyone who truly loves horse racing would like there to be no cheating in the game. Sadly, that’s not the case.

Cheating is as old as racing itself, though it is surely not as prevalent as it was in earlier times.

Human beings are greedy and, if there’s money involved, some of them are always going to be looking to gain an edge – and that often involves bending the rules. The same thing happens in other sports and in the business and financial worlds.

Racing policemen, the stipendiary stewards, or stipes, are hugely important in maintaining a high degree of integrity – enough to convince punters to keep punting and horse owners to keep paying the teff bills. And examples of their work need to be broadcast.

While high-profile cases of misdemeanour might seem to confirm negative perceptions of racing, they also demonstrate that effective policing is happening.

High-profile cases

In 2021, US Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert was warned off for three months after his Kentucky Derby winner Medina Spirit was found to have betamethasone, a prohibited anti-inflamatory drug, in his system. That’s high profile.

In 2020, US prosecutors indicted 27 trainers, vets and drug distributors after a massive doping syndicate was bust. Leading conditioners Jason Servis and Jorge Navarro were among those in the dock.

The US had a rash of cases of jockeys accepting bribes to “pull” well-backed horses in the 1970s.

In the UK, mega-owners Godolphin of Dubai, were humiliated a few years ago when one of their trainers was found to be systematically doping horses.

Before horse passports were introduced, “ringers” or horses running under false identities, was a favourite trick of connections trying to get one over on the bookies.

Australian bloodstock agent John Gillespie and his trainer were jailed after their ruse to run a fast horse under a slow one’s name was tumbled.

Initially, they tried to dye the horse’s coat to the same colour as the doppelganger but he turned orange, so they resorted to spray painting him the right hue. Unluckily, the paint didn’t dry in time and started running when the horse started running.

National Horseracing Authority

This week, South Africa’s National Horseracing Authority issued a couple of media releases pertaining to the issue of illegality.

One announced that an unnamed trainer had been fined a whopping R125,000 after a winner he’d saddled tested positive for what the stipes called “a novel prohibited substance”. It was mephentermine, a low blood pressure medication.

Presumably it was “novel” because it previously hadn’t been detected in this country and presumably the trainer was not identified because he was deemed to be unaware of the drug or its effects – even though he signed an admission of guilt statement.

The NHA went ahead and named the horse, anyway, so anyone can look up the identity of the miscreant.

The NHA’s second release was about Tip-Offs Anonymous, a whistleblower facility that is described as “a unique service to prevent dishonesty, malpractice and/or inappropriate and unethical behaviour within the racing industry on a totally confidential and anonymous basis”.

Essentially it is a hotline for anyone to report dodgy stuff going on.

“Trained operators” are on the end of the line 24/7, and monitoring an email address, to register tip-offs and get as many details as possible. Cases are passed on to a senior executive of the NHA.

The Free Call phone number is 0800 220 777 and the e-mail address is
nha@tip-offs.com. There’s a website too: www.tip-offs.com.

Operators respond in English, Afrikaans, Zulu and Xhosa.

It sounds like a very good initiative. One just hopes the conspiracy theorists – and there are a few of them – don’t jam the switchboard.