Flatter: The lies and untruths we accept at the racetrack

“If this room was burnin’
 I wouldn’t even notice
’Cause you’ve been takin’ up my mind
 With your little white lies, little white lies.”

Horseplayers and track goers might not recognize those lyrics from One Direction. That song was from only 11 years ago, and racetracks do not tend to play music from years beginning with a 2.

It is the thought that counts. One of the basics for racing as it is for so many sports is the prerequisite of being prepared for the preponderance of prevarication. Or, as D. Wayne Lukas told me on one of my first visits to the Kentucky Derby, “We’re all going to lie to you.”

I must have pressed him about my naïve notion all those years ago that the words spilling from the mouths of trainers and jockeys were gospel. Yeah, Ron. Sure. Just like every football coach from the JVs to Belichick are going to hide the truth about their intentions for an upcoming game.

So we live with lies, but that does not mean we have to accept all of them.

Take what happened last weekend at Pimlico. If there was one certainty on Preakness day, it was rain. It was in the forecast longer than some of the ponderous speeches at last Thursday’s alibi breakfast. OMG, I don’t think the priest’s benediction is over yet. Hmmm. Come to think of it, I better make that just OM.

It started raining Saturday at 5:30 a.m. local time in Baltimore, and it did not stop until just before the first post at 10:30 a.m. I got that factoid from a security guard whom I have known there for years. The mutual trust is so strong that, earlier in the week, I was ushered right in with the greeting, “Mr. Ron, if you were going to blow up this place, you would have done it years ago.”

Saturday’s rain was not exactly torrential, but I also remember the drive down I-83 came with the steady beat of the windshield wipers. They were on slow, not intermittent.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I got my first look at the TV monitors that showed the condition of the main course was good. The turf course also was rated good, even though the first race carded for it was moved to the, ahem, dirt.

I have grown too old and weary to get indignant about this double-good declaration, even as I watched the first race and saw the goo through which the horses were running. And then they ran a turf race during which it looked like the some of the field was hydroplaning in front-wheel drive around the far turn.

Where I could believe my eyes, I could not believe the ancient toteboard, which still said “good” and “good.”

It was not long before Equibase posted its charts for the first two races. It listed the courses as muddy-sealed and soft. Now that was more like it, and by the end of the day, track management came to agree, even after some gaps in the rain theoretically would have allowed the course conditions to improve.

Horseplayers now are expected to remember all these nuances the next time they see Seize the Grey and the 106 other horses who raced on the Preakness card come back in their next starts. Yeah, sure. Note to self. When I see “18May24 PIM” in the PPs, the track was somewhere between muddy and good. No sweat.

We do not get asterisks next to those old races to indicate something was awry in the declaration of the course conditions. We should, especially since our sub-eidetic memories barely can handle the races we see let alone the ones that we don’t.

This was not the first time this Triple Crown season we did not get the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We got a wordy explanation of the stewards’ review of the stretch run in the Kentucky Derby. That was the one that took 11 minutes to go official, even though the order of finish was posted four minutes after the horses crossed the wire.

“The stewards review every race in Kentucky live and by video replay before posting it official, and they followed the same procedure for the 150th running of the Kentucky Derby,” a spokesperson for the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission said two days after the race. “After conducting their standard review of the race, determining no further review or investigation was necessary to conclude there were no incidents that altered the finish of the race, and seeing there were no objections filed, the stewards posted the Kentucky Derby official.”

I could have saved them a lot of words. It was a seven-minute inquiry without an inquiry.

More vexing than the lack of phone calls to the jockeys and trainers involved was the lack of a clear explanation as to why. But that is how Kentucky racing works, complete with written language that compels everyone from stewards to track executives to shut up.

Trainer-speak and toteboard fiction and stewards’ silence are akin to the lies and damned lies that inevitably precede statistics, one of which has been conspicuous by its absence this year.

The Maryland Jockey Club, the lame-duck operator of Pimlico, told The Baltimore Sun that a combined 63,423 showed up for the Friday and Saturday races last week. It did not say how that number was split, so we do not know how many people allegedly were at the Preakness. The naked eye would suggest that about two-thirds to three-quarters of that two-day total showed up for the Saturday card.

Last year we were told 46,999 showed up for the Preakness. If nothing else, it was a decent poker hand. The race reportedly drew a record 140,327 people in 2017. Reportedly.

The Kentucky Derby reportedly lured 156,710 people to Churchill Downs this year vs. the record 170,513 in 2015. Reportedly.

A former track executive told me years ago that these attendance figures are not real, but they are not taken completely out of thin air, either. At the time they were a formulaic extrapolation based on wagers and program sales.

Nowadays program sales seem quaint as do physical trips to make wagers. At the Derby this month it was apparent the lines and crowds around the betting windows were a lot smaller. The theory goes that with the spread of sports betting, the use of phone apps has mushroomed. Those queues have been replaced by advanced-deposit wagering tools.

So how are attendance figures derived? No matter what explanation we get, in the end we are trusting someone who tells us what it is. Usually, it is a spokesperson who says it out loud in the roomful of media, or it is in a handout that lacks a written quantification. Either we take someone’s word for it, or we don’t.

For years the announcement of the attendance at a big horse race provoked a former colleague to yell a two-word term that described bovine waste. It was a tradition unlike any other.

We hope to be better than all these big and little figs. In truth, we need disincentives to lie. And not just in racing.

Coming back from Maryland to Kentucky, the car I was driving was clipped as I was going through Columbus, Ohio. The lane-changing artist who wound up being cited by police tried to claim he did nothing wrong until the bus driver he cut off on his way around about 99 percent of my bumper joined me in confronting him. Kids, do not try this at home.

It was either the Midwest philosopher Aldo Leopold or the former Seattle police office Martin Crane who said that ethics are what we do when no one is looking. When it comes to what we believe to be the facts in our sport, the true ethicists really are only good when we remember they can be muddied.

Ron Flatter’s column appears Friday mornings at Horse Racing Nation. Comments below are welcomed, encouraged and may be used in the feedback segment of the Ron Flatter Racing Pod, which also is posted every Friday.