Op/Ed: For One Sport, Uniform Rules are Looking Like a Pretty Safe Bet

[Chief Stipe]

About a decade ago now, I remember dutifully playing the races one evening. I had Penn National and Mountaineer up on my two screens, looking to make a few dollars.

In one of the early races at the Mountain there was an infraction the stewards were examining–an inside horse was drifting mercilessly, moving the outside challenger into about the six path. This decision was taking some time.

Coincidentally, while this inquiry was going on, the exact same thing happened at Penn National. I, as I think a fairly seasoned bettor, saw little difference between the two situations.

When the respective inquiry signs came down, at Penn the inside horse was left up. At Mountaineer, he was pitched. I imagined the thousands of bettors, owners, jockeys, trainers and fans who watched this, collectively finding their palms meeting their foreheads.

This phenomenon doesn’t only occur in Thoroughbred racing, of course. For the trotters and pacers–with pylons, breaking stride, fair start poles as only a few examples–it’s a very regular occurrence.

In one of the two sports, though, it appears change is on the horizon.

In the summer of 2017 the winningest harness driver of all time–John Campbell–retired and took a new job as the head of the Hambletonian Society. Campbell believed that harness racing, despite rules that are enforced (or not enforced) state by state (and the countless factions in the sport all seemingly pushing and pulling in a hundred directions), could do better. He called for a review of the rules in the sport, with the hopes that they could be uniformly written and enforced.

“We should have universal rules throughout harness racing. [It’s] difficult for the judges to rule consistently. This will benefit the gamblers betting on our game, as well as participants and judges. It will be better for all involved to get this accomplished,” noted Campbell at the time, as he took on the role as Chair of the effort.

Now, I would not blame you for thinking this sounded good, but like most ideas that get bogged down due to the sports’ disparate structures, it would not get off the ground. That’s not what’s occurred. In fact, not only has this effort moved ahead, it’s growing.

As Campbell and his committee, made up of trainers, drivers, horsepeople reps and various regulators, worked to standardize the U.S rulebook, standardbred racing north of the border decided to join the fight. This directive quickly moved to being North America wide.

It’s in Canada where I was asked, as a horseplayer, to take part in these meetings.

Going into them I was not overly confident; I’ve been to similar ones before as a horseplayer representative in both harness and Thoroughbred racing, and phrases about herding cats filled my head. But I must confess, I am more than pleasantly surprised.

Despite there being a rule for virtually everything in the sport – when horses show up to race in Ohio and Ontario, how a post parade for the public is governed in Nova Scotia versus New York, how interference is adjudicated at Monticello compared to the Meadowlands–they are all being handled meticulously, professionally and with a real desire to come to workable solutions. To hear representatives from a half dozen provinces amalgamate a rulebook, rule by rule, is pretty impressive.

I think it’s worked this well because, like in Thoroughbred racing, everyone in the sport agrees that bettors and participants playing a game of jurisdictional, state by state roulette is something that should be a thing of the past. It perfectly exemplifies the proverb, “where there’s a will there’s a way.”

After the initial rules are written, modified and amalgamated, there’s still hard work to do and it could take many months; something John Campbell cautioned about very early on when he set no timelines. But I’m pretty confident this will happen.

As a part of a volunteer horseplayer organization, quite a bit crosses our desks. We’ve looked into decisions by stewards–decisions that involve hundreds of thousands of dollars of customers’ money–that seemed to have little rhyme or reason; we’ve examined the first-time gelding reporting rules and processes, which are, at best, nebulous. We’ve been asked to explain what a whip rule is at track A versus track C; what a late surface change does to a bettor’s pick 5 in Texas versus what happened to them last week in California. That list barely scratches the surface.

These are all very tough questions to answer, and they’ve at times caused more than one hair to be pulled out in frustration. But maybe one day they will be questions that aren’t so impossible. Harness racing is proving that these seemingly impenetrable cross-jurisdictional walls can at the very least be navigated. That’s a heck of a good start.

Dean Towers is a board member of the Horseplayers Association of North America and has presented on wagering topics at various gambling conferences across North America.

 

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