Judging A Bookmaker By Its Cover Perception is a buzzword right now and about time too. Judging a book by its cover might be mistaken but racing's integrity is often as much about how things look as how they actually are. So while jockeys and trainers signing up with bookmakers for their exclusive thoughts might in reality be little more than a nice little sideline earner, and a mostly harmless exercise in advertising baloney, in terms of perception it can look uncomfortably cosy. If most of Punchestown week was spent calculating winner tallies and prizemoney totals, those of us in the media game could also practise totting up the number of blogs, columns and other assorted commercial presentations shoved our way by bookmaker firms who'd signed up some of the leading figures in the sport to outline their thoughts on the upcoming action. Among the luminaries were Davy Russell with Betway and Noel Fehily musing on BetBonus, Ruby Walsh and Paddy Power continuing their knockabout shtick, Joseph O'Brien in ambassadorial mode for Boylesports and Gordon Elliott donning the Betfair overcoat. No one's suggesting anything untoward in any of it. The reality is there's little or nothing different in any of this to the vast majority of first-person media bits that sell a pretence of the inside line but which are mostly exercises in the imaginative abilities of the poor underpaid schmuck entrusted to mould a few grudging and banal phrases into passable copy. Most of it is a bottle of PR smoke so rarely will you find any reasonable and informed member of the betting public paying too much attention to Frankie Dettori's Ladbrokes inspired thoughts, or the Betfair musings of Hugo Palmer, any more than they would to some other high-profile figure's contribution to the Sunday Snot sports pages. But in perception terms there's a difference between flogging exclusivity to a newspaper and a bookmaker. And if you're thinking 'well, he would say that, wouldn't he,' well you're right although maybe not for the reasons you think because racing's reality is that appearances really do matter when it comes to most things. For instance most racing professionals at heart believe the issue of use of the whip is an exercise in optics. But they've also come to realise it's not irrelevant how use of the whip looks to the public. It's no coincidence then that some of the stuff uttered about padded whips being little more than tickling-sticks make them sound like cuddly health and safety implements rather than the device employed in the way which saw JJ Slevin banned for 21 days last week. That's because racing is conscious of how it appears to the public and has no self-interest in harming its own image. Yet racing routinely risks leaving itself open to suspicion when jockeys and trainers are so openly and commercially associated with betting firms. Whatever about the more mundane reality, in terms of the perception of information for a price it simply doesn't look good. Plenty will legitimately argue it's harmless and what else is new. There's also the reality that plenty of the betting public are predisposed to believe the worst of anything anyway. But it's naive to think this grey area couldn't do with being made a lot more black and white, particularly in the era of digital mass communication. The Turf Club's Rule 273 in relation to 'Preserving The Good Reputation of Horseracing' basically comes down to licensees not liaising with bookmakers on a racecourse which is a very twentieth century way of looking at a twenty first century gambling environment. The ethics of that environment, and how sport generally feeds off the gambling industry, and the dangers contained in that, are topical right now in the fallout of Joey Barton's high-profile ban from football. Barton mightn't be the most stable operator but his point about football not being able to have it every way is valid. Racing is especially always open to suspicion from a betting public often conditioned to believe the worst so it particularly can't have it every which way. That is acknowledged in other racing jurisdictions. Around the world measures to reassure punters are taken very seriously indeed, often in fact taken to extremes. In Japan jockeys are all but put in an incubator the day before racing. How effective it is might be debatable but no one can doubt the seriousness behind the intent. It might look ridiculous to us but how ridiculous must it look to them to have images propagated of racing professionals and bookies gambolling hand in hand over the corporate horizon in a dance that in transparency terms eventually must invite the sport to ask itself if such obvious commercial link-ups ultimately do it any favours. If Willie Mullins's eventual defeat of Gordon Elliott for the trainer's title proved anything it is that bookmakers odds are really little more than a reflection of supply and demand. And so most of us got it wrong in assessing which of the two training titans would win out. The idea that Mullins would need a vintage Punchestown to overhaul a €400,000 deficit at the start of the week was wide of the mark. He won just one of the four €250,000 features and his ten wins was five shy of his 2015 record. It might sound odd for a trainer who won three top-flight races during the week but the crucial factor seemed to be Elliott's team relatively running out of puff at the end of an arduous campaign. The question now is might Elliott have missed the boat, at least for a while. Circumstances unfolded to make him a 1-5 favourite going into the last five days but he still lost out. An awful lot went wrong for Mullins during the season yet he still won. Maybe the rationale behind 2-7 odds about Mullins winning again in 2018 reflect a view that he won't have to overcome as much again. But then again, opinions change, and so do odds. These are comfortable things for the top two trainers to ponder though. The stark economic reality for most of their colleagues was reflected in Sandra Hughes's decision last week to wind down her operation, citing an inability to make training pay. This is a woman who just two years ago won the Irish Grand National and finished inside the top ten on the trainer's table for two years running. Amidst all the celebratory hoopla at Punchestown that was a serious reality check. And finally, the classics have crept up on us with the 2,000 Guineas on this Saturday. It seems to be all about Churchill but then last year it was all about Air Force Blue so who knows. The French colt Al Wukair is unbeaten too and has had a run this year. But Aidan O'Brien's Guineas winners are invariably first-time-out. Maybe Ryan Moore will shed more light on Betfair later in the week.
