Lack of Facts Gives Bettors a Real Workout

The month-long buildup of double-triple mania came to a satisfying and spectacular conclusion Saturday, when horseplayers bet a total of $4.2 million on the Pimlico program, making it one of the biggest days in Maryland racing history.

Of course, it’s easy to say the day was satisfying if you celebrated a $134,161.80 payoff by washing down a grilled duck foie gras with an ’83 Chateau Pomard. But if the double triple had been hit one day earlier, it would have left a bad taste in just about everybody’s mouth.

The third race Friday had been a maiden-claiming event with several first-time starters. Despite the obvious difficulties, bettors had attacked it aggressively and wagered nearly $560,000 on the double triple. If they were trying to employ sound handicapping or any other type of logic, however, they were wasting their time. The winner, Good Offense, was a colt whose published record looked like this:

That’s right, nothing. Not only was Good Offense a first-time starter, but he didn’t show a single published workout in the Daily Racing Form.

But some insiders knew that Good Offense could run. Before the race, rumors had circulated around the track that the colt had ability. And he was bet down to 11-1 -- by far the shortest price of all the first-time starters in the field. When he won by a neck, any non-insider who had invested in the double triple had to feel that he was playing a hopeless sucker’s game.

The Washington Post’s Vinnie Perrone reported the next day that Good Offense had been training well this winter in South Carolina, and then had been shipped north to Laurel, where, according to trainer Ham Smith, he had worked a half-mile in 50 2-5 seconds. “I worked him out of the gate and everything,” Smith said. “I don’t know how (the clockers) missed it.”

Maryland does have a rule that a first-time starter (or any horse who has not raced recently) must show a published workout within the last 30 days. If a horse is entered who doesn’t show the required work, racing secretary Larry Abbundi said, “we contact the trainer and tell him, ‘Give us a work.’ ”

The trainer can pick any figure he wants. If he is training the next Seattle Slew, who just worked a half-mile in :46, he can say the horse worked in :53 and that becomes “official.” In practice, the times for most of the workouts reported in this fashion are a pro forma 50 seconds for a half-mile or 37 seconds for three-eighths of a mile. It’s all a formality that has nothing to do with the truth, and nobody in the business takes it seriously. Yet the track announcer will repeatedly tell the crowd, “So-and-so had an unpublished workout of four furlongs in 50 seconds at Pimlico.”

The whole procedure would be ludicrous even if it were being applied to a maiden race at Charles Town on which the crowd is betting a few thousand dollars. But it is outrageous that the public gets no information or erroneous information about horses when more than $1 million is at stake. Imagine if the owner of Good Offense or some other insider had collected a seven-figure payoff Friday? What would the public have concluded about the integrity of the racing game?

Of course, the culprits in this system are not the owners and trainers of horses, nor the clockers, nor the people who work in the racing secretary’s office. They are playing the game the way track management and the state racing commission have decided that it will be played.

For years, for decades in fact, racing fans in Maryland have complained about the lack of a system to ensure the accurate reporting of workouts. The key to such a system is to require that a horse be identified before he is allowed to go onto the track to work. Such a system requires that a track employee be stationed by the entrance point to the racing strip -- the “gap” -- so he can communicate the name of the horse by walkie-talkie to the clockers. Because these employees and the clockers have to be paid, accurate workout information does not come cheap.

Years ago Maryland tracks might have pleaded poverty as an excuse for not putting into place a system governing workout information. But since the state ceded much of its revenue from taxes to the tracks, Maryland racing has entered a period of unparalleled prosperity. Pimlico’s cut from the wagering on Saturday alone would pay the costs necessary for a proper workout-reporting system for a full year.

They owe it to their customers to give them accurate information. And if the people in management who look at the balance sheet can’t think in these terms, they might think of workout information as an investment that will pay off for them by giving their customers greater confidence in the integrity of the game. It would avert the risk of a public-relations nightmare that would occur if somebody won $1 million because he possessed inside information on a horse like Good Offense.