HORSE RACING : Black’s Ride Denies Bettors Fair Gamble

It is an old cliche that there are a thousand ways to lose a race, and horseplayers at Laurel experienced plenty of them in the Frank J. DeFrancis Memorial Dash. Bettors were victimized by some of the cruel twists of fate that are an inescapable part of the game. But they also may have been robbed in a way that shouldn’t be part of the game.

When the gate opened for the $300,000 sprint, the champion mare Safely Kept broke five lengths behind the field. People who bet her at 5 to 2 tore up their tickets without ever having a chance to win.

In the final yards of the race, Housebuster was drawing away to a victory over Bravely Bold, and anybody who had bet an exacta combining the two horses was presumably letting out a whoop of joy, for the evident runner-up was the longest shot in the field at 31 to 1. A few strides from the wire, Bravely Bold snapped his ankle and fell, rendering all of those exacta tickets worthless. Both of these misfortunes were the type that gamblers must learn to accept with stoicism.

But it was less easy for a bettor to be stoical about the other crucial aspect of the DeFrancis Dash -- the way Corey Black rode Safely Kept in the stretch.

After Safely Kept had broken so poorly, Black properly let her settle into stride. The mare caught up to the field on the turn and Black started whipping hard with his left hand as he entered into the stretch. But it became clear that Safely Kept was not going to win; Housebuster was the strong horse, and Bravely Bold was holding doggedly for second place. So in the last sixteenth of a mile, Black stopped trying.

He not only put his whip away, but he ceased to urge the mare vigorously with his hands. And in the final strides his passivity turned into actual restraint of the horse. The Daily Racing Form’s footnotes read: “Safely Kept ... was not kept under a drive in the late stages.”

When Bravely Bold fell, second place was suddenly up for grabs. If Black had been persevering through the stretch run, Safely Kept might have finished second; instead, Clevor Trevor managed to beat her by a length.

The stakes involved were considerable. Not only was there a $30,000 difference in purse money between a second- and a third-place finish, but Maryland bettors had wagered more than $180,000 on the exacta in the DeFrancis Dash and all of this money was riding on the jockey’s effort (or lack thereof) to finish second.

Why did Black stop riding? The jockey said that in mid-stretch Clever Trevor had put his head in front of Safely Kept. “He was running by me. Safely Kept was not going to find another gear. She was empty,” he said. “I wrapped up only after he had a neck on me. I hope the public understands. I’m trying to be fair to the owner and the public.” Black knew the owner and trainer of Safely Kept -- who has the $1 million Breeders’ Cup Sprint on her future agenda -- wouldn’t want to see the mare punished in an effort to get second or third money. Their job isn’t to worry about people who might have bet exactas involving their horse.

That ought to be the job of stewards. But American racing officials are generally tolerant of jockeys who don’t ride their horses to the wire. While Maryland’s stewards have occasionally handed out fines and suspensions to riders who seemingly fall asleep in the stretch drive and allow their horses to be caught, they are sympathetic when a rider doesn’t persevere with a tiring horse. Steward Bill Passmore, who won more than 3,000 races in his career, said, “You can feel when they’ve given you everything and there’s nothing more to give. To set a horse down and beat her up does no more good. If I were training Safely Kept, and the jockey beat her up (in that situation), I wouldn’t ride him again.”

This kind of tolerance by stewards is by no means universal. In Australia, all jockeys are expected to ride their horses vigorously to the wire, even if they are going to finish far out of the money. I reported this winter about one notable case where an apprentice jockey eased up on a hopeless 330-to-1 shot in the stretch run -- and was slapped with a two-month suspension. If Corey Black had done in Sydney what he did at Laurel Saturday, he’d be about to start a long vacation. And that’s the way the game ought to be enforced in this country.

Even though the explanations of Black and Passmore may sound humane and rational, the principle that jockeys don’t have to ride their mounts to the wire is one which creates the potential for abuse. Jockeys don’t merely wrap up on champions like Safely Kept; they wrap up $5,000 claimers. This happens daily in Maryland, where non-perseverance in the stretch is the most notable hallmark of many riders. Happily, the leading practitioner of this style, Donald A. Miller Jr., has moved west to torment Californians, but Marylanders still have Mario Pino, Mark Johnston and many others to give regular exhibitions of rigor mortis on horseback. Nothing undermines public confidence in the game so severely; large numbers of Maryland racing fans assume the sport is riddled with corruption because they see so many jockeys who fail to try hard in the stretch.

Wrapping up on a horse is wrong, too, because no jockey is so smart to know for certain how a race is going to unfold. After all, Black thought that Clever Trevor and Safely Kept were vying only for third and fourth place. Then, suddenly, after the spill, they were fighting for second and third. Safely Kept is an extraordinarily gutty mare, and who is to say that she could not have summoned a reserve of energy, or that Clever Trevor himself might have run out of gas in the final yards? Even Black conceded, “If Clever Trevor had stopped running, I’d say I made a mistake.”

Bettors suffer enough without having to suffer this way. Before we tear up our tickets, we ought to be entitled to see a horse and jockey give an all-out effort through every inch of the stretch run.