A Not So Fine Line

Originally published in the Nov. 17 edition of Blood-Horse Daily. To download the Blood-Horse Daily smartphone app or to receive the edition in your inbox each evening, visit BloodHorse.com/Daily.

Contrary to the wisdom of Spinal Tap's David St. Hubbins, the line between stupid and clever is often quite wide. To play the horses these days, it seems you have to be either a genius or an idiot.

Handicappers don't merely cop to playing "the toughest game around;" they wear it like a badge of honor. It's as if racing's infinite variety of ways to lose—combined with exorbitant takeout—works equally well at either trumpeting your brilliance or excusing your losses.

Winning horseplayers seem to take tough beats in stride, trusting that "the breaks" will even out over time. Losing players tend to see conspiracies at every turn, and betting into a pari-mutuel system has a way of making such delusions seem real.

The Del Mar stewards voted 2-1 against fining Kent Desormeaux days after his much-criticized losing ride on 9-5 favorite What a View. The vote became necessary when Desormeaux's mind or his conditioning drifted off, allowing a race that seemed won to be lost by a nose. Even though Desormeaux has a reputation for occasionally not finishing races, two stewards gave him a pass. The split decision enabled losing bettors to conclude that both the stewards and the jockey were out to get them.

Lip tattoos and routine oversight have all but buried the old scam known as "the ringer," but two weeks ago at Mahoning Valley Race Course near Youngstown, Ohio, a bizarre variation on the scheme resulted in the 4-year-old gelding Leathers Slappin pinch-running for a hopelessly slow 3-year-old filly named Ruby Queen. In the official chart "Ruby Queen" won easily at odds of 122-1.

How a twice-victorious gelding made it into a race for cheap maiden fillies has yet to be fully explained. While it may have been due to a series of dumb but honest mistakes, that's no consolation to the players who backed Jane's Storm at 20-1. Though no match for the "winner," Jane's Storm did beat all the horses that actually met the conditions of the race.

Some welcome news for all horseplayers arrived when the New York State Gaming Commission suspended trainer Roy Sedlacek after two of his Belmont Park runners tested positive for the synthetic opioid AH-7921.

Sedlacek reportedly confessed to having tried to purchase the powerful designer molecule known as "ITPP" on the Internet, only to have received instead the eminently detectable AH-7921. Maybe Sedlacek was no Einstein when it came to doping horses, but you have to start somewhere. If racing can't catch his kind, how will they ever stop the cheaters who know what they're doing?