Sports cheating

[ex-khobar Andy]

I'm not a great horse racing guy but it's kind of mandatory here in Louisville. So I watched the Kentucky Derby (I even call it the DURR-bee and not the DAR-bee) last weekend and enjoyed Medina Spirit's win. Seemed like a brave horse that would not give up.

I see that he has failed a drugs test with 21 nanograms/L of betamethasone in his blood. That's not a lot but well above the detection limit of the test and certainly in the physiological effects range. Mistakes happen in testing labs (ask me how I know: I can talk about it for hours) so of course there will be a B sample, just as there is for Olympic athletes.

I didn't know - because I don't follow the sport closely - that trainer Bob Baffert's horses have failed drugs tests 29 times in the last 40 years.. He is clearly the Lance Armstrong of horse racing; and owners who deal with him in order to make a winning horse which will be worth $$$$$$$$$$ at stud are equally complicit.

Taking the Armstrong analogy: obviously, without the drugs, he was an amazing athlete and I'm sure he could have made a decent living as a team rider. But after the Oprah interview I wanted him impoverished and living on the streets. He had cheated all of us. In the same way I want to know why this perennial cheating trainer is allowed to live in luxury.

Horse racing has a long tradition or regulations that if the bookies pay out and then the winner is DQed, anyone who had the second horse gets nothing. I think it's the same in Europe. That's why, if there is an incident on the track where one horse appears to interfere with another, nothing is paid out until the stewards have had a chance to look at the tape and decide if it was substantive and the places should be changed. Obviously those who bet on the winner on the day are not going to hand that money back, and clearly the bookies should not have to pay out twice for the transgressions of the trainer. But I'd like to see a system here whereby the trainer has to pay out to all those with tickets for Mandaloun (second place on the day) from his pocket.

I think that bike racing has more or less recovered from the days when they were all doing it. (But there are still big clouds hanging over the Sky teams.) Baseball has (I think) come out of the MacGuire/Bonds steroid era. Or maybe they are just smarter. I hope that horse racing can come out of this. Obviously it is big business around here so it's economically important - industry sources say there are 60,000 jobs and $6.5 billion in annual impact locally.

[Joe Guy]

You'd think that after the sport's world's pointing out of the noticeable difference in the physical appearance of Barry Bonds and others while using steroids that people in the horse racing business would have gotten a clue and would have been suspicious of the physical changes in Medina Spirit....(shown here)...

[ex-khobar Andy]

And I see that Medina Spirit died after a training run. Meanwhile, Churchill Downs, operator of the Kentucky Derby, have still made no announcement about the result (from May this year - seven months ago!) and whether it should be vacated due to the PED in his system.

[BoSoxGal]

If thoroughbred racing was ever a sport worth admiring, that time is long past.

[MajGenl.Meade]

Horse jumping too - or is that "eventing"?

[ex-khobar Andy]

And of course we now have chess cheating. Maybe it will be the way of the world, going forward.

[BoSoxGal]

What about this recent sport cheating scandal?:
Fish tales

[ex-khobar Andy]

What beats me about the fish story is how did they hope to get away with it? Anyone who has ever caught a fish in a lake could look at those and guess they were in the 3 to 5 pound range and nowhere near the 7 or 8 pounds they would have to be to make the weight total.

[Long Run]

Maybe a bit too much like the Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.

[Bicycle Bill]

Well, the Jumping Frog story was a case of where someone cheated by hobbling the presumed winner so it couldn't compete.   Are you insinuating that the fish were stuffed not by those that caught them, but by someone else who would stand to benefit if they were disqualified?

As far as cheating goes, there's another story/'scandal' out there about a poker tournament where cheating or some other form of obtaining inside information is presumed.  As near as I can tell, one of these so-called 'legendary' card players got burned on a hand of Hold-'em poker by a relative noob...  and the only thing they can point to to 'prove' their accusation is that the noob didn't follow the expected pattern of betting, raising, or folding according to some set of arcane practices and traditions based on mathematical probabilities, countless thousands of hands played before, and some combination of unwritten rules, customs, and protocols.

Or in other words, someone's tactics, whether they were done with intent or by accident, caught someone else by surprise, and when the cards fell her way on top of it, she was accused — without concrete evidence — of obviously having to be cheating!!

And of course, the Miss USA Pageant is also embroiled in its own controversy after Texas native R'Bonney Gabriel — who had already attracted attention by becoming the first Filipino-American woman to be named Miss Texas (although I must admit to a perverse joy at thinking of the majority of the 'Texas Redneck BBQ and Bullshit Society' being forced to accept an Asian-American as the ideal of Texas womanhood) — went on to take the overall title.  It took about thirty seconds before the shit hit the fan and accusations that the results were pre-determined started to circulate among the also-rans.

I also expect that well before the World Series has run its course, there will be scads of articles written about how Aaron Judge was juicing, using a corked bat, being somehow tipped off as to what pitch was coming next, or how the balls had somehow been doctored to fly farther.

Quite frankly, any time you have a competition for anything, you're going to wind up with one winner ... and a whole bunch of pissed-off losers.  And with the ubiquitousness of social media accounts, where even inanimate objects have a presence on Twatter or the Book of Face, these sore losers now have a bigger soapbox to stand on and a louder megaphone to bitch through.

-"BB"-