Flatter: Where is the line between bending rules and cheating?

There is a fine line between getting an edge and cheating. Well, erase that. Make that a fuzzy, wandering, impossible to mark in black and white kind of line. Kind of like guessing whether a hitter is standing outside the batter’s box after the third inning.

We were reminded of that more than once in the past week within a one-mile radius of Saratoga, where racing continues to work on what is right, what is wrong and what is a loophole.

Between last weekend’s Jim Dandy and this week’s discussions of medication rules and computer wagering, racing had itself enough hot topics to give Stephen A. Smith’s producers a week’s worth of debate.

They beg the question about jockeys, trainers and batch bettors who are living on the edge of regulatory boundaries. Are they cheaters?

Jockeys, eh? The wait to see the name Irad Ortiz Jr. show up in this column ends here. Riding Forte like he was knocking on the porthole with a battering ram, he, um, split horses to win the Jim Dandy last weekend by all of a nose ahead of Saudi Crown.

Equibase’s Saratoga chart writer, who is becoming more and more entertaining with each passing objection and inquiry this summer, composed this prose to describe the move Ortiz made.

“(Forte) came out and bumped Angel of Empire multiple times to create room in the upper stretch,” the chart said, “bumped again with that foe while turned out and, given one pop of a left-handed crop inside the three-sixteenths, then was carried out by the pacesetter (Saudi Crown), switched to a right-handed crop while gaining between foes inside the furlong marker, drifted in while getting to the runner-up late and got up to narrowly prevail.”

It probably took that author a little longer than the whopping 5 1/2 minutes for the stewards to presumably pore over the video and decide there would be no change. In essence, in one-fourth the time it took to disqualify Maximum Security in the 2019 Kentucky Derby, they decided Ortiz was playing on the edge of the rules, but he was not cheating.

Putting all my useless betting slips on the table, I had money on Saudi Crown. If these are regarded as the rantings of a bettor who lost both his money and his gruntle, so be it. Didn’t I just write last week about that kind of mindset being the foundation for hyperbolically unfair criticism of jockeys?

My feeling about Ortiz is that he is a great guy who is as nice to talk to as anyone in this business. I also believe he is an admirably fierce competitor who sometimes reminds me of Bill Laimbeer from the old Detroit Pistons bad boys.

That it took only 5 1/2 minutes from the snapping of the win photo to announcer Frank Mirahmadi’s “no change” declaration was dubious. I guess the stewards did not have to click “skip ads” when they called up those video replays.

Ortiz’s ride in the Jim Dandy had something for everybody. Since Forte was an odds-on favorite, most bettors presumably were smiling when they said “whew.” The rest of us had fuel to inspire much-needed new rage for horse-racing Twi ... um ... X.

As the Ortiz debate cooled, Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority CEO Lisa Lazarus was making her tour of the Spa village this week, carrying water on behalf of the ever-malleable federal regulations that govern drugs in racehorses.

At The Jockey Club’s annual roundtable of selective spin, Lazarus seemed to work both sides of the line between cheaters and loophole chasers.

Public onlookers, she said, “don’t understand the difference between true doping substances and medications that are allowed in racing but just not on race day.”

Lazarus said it was important for HISA to parse legal, controlled drugs “which are those therapeutics that are allowed outside of race day (from) the banned substances that are theoretically the doping substances.”

In essence she was saying we should know that suspensions brought by controlled substances are the equivalent of a false start at the line of scrimmage and banned substances are like Myles Garrett hitting Mason Rudolph in the head with a helmet.

Unspoken, though, was the name Mac Robertson, the Canterbury Park trainer who lost three weeks of his livelihood and the momentum that went with it when he was suspended for what turned out to be a false positive. That was a loss of a lot more than just five yards for a penalty that never should have been called.

Trainer Jena Antonucci, the groundbreaking winner of the Belmont Stakes who was on the panel Thursday with Lazarus, went one step further when she declared that coverage of provisional suspensions is overblown, “because media gets excited about putting a headline out. ... That’s what sells is people having clickbait.”

I respect Antonucci a ton, but as I wrote on X on Thursday, that was disingenuous at best and a tarring brush at worst. This is the same Antonucci who just signed a deal to be a “brand ambassador and industry advisor” for Daily Racing Form. I cannot wait to find out how her comments went over with her new colleagues.

All that kill-the-messenger talk was just static in the foreground of the bigger topic. Between the relaxing of provisional suspensions until a split testing sample is fully graded and the reversal of course on Robertson, HISA and its guard dog known as the Horseracing Integrity & Welfare Unit are slowing their roll. Although Lazarus would beg to differ, it feels like the line separating cheaters from rule benders got a little blurry.

The drug talk came about 15 minutes after an eye-opening discussion of computer-assisted wagering, often abbreviated as CAW. Yeah. Like it has become the mating call of behemoth betting crows who could have been stunt doubles on “The Big Bang Theory.”

Pat Cummings of the Thoroughbred Idea Foundation displayed a chart that said the influence of computer bettors doubled in 20 years. That was based on 2002 betting dollars adjusted for inflation vs. actual dollars in 2022. The chart also showed a 64 percent drop in all other forms of betting on races, as in going to track or racebook windows or using a simple advanced-deposit wagering platform.

The 64 percent was shown against a crimson backdrop on the big, flat screen as was the 50 percent that total handle from all players, with or without computers, dropped in the past two decades when weighed with inflation.

Cummings led a panel that was long on quantifying the problem but short on offering solutions.

“The computers aren’t going away,” said economics professor Marshall Gramm, who could be classified as a compassionate computer player who wants to make all 21st-century technology available to everyone.

Joe Longo, the New York Racing Association executive who deals with computer wagering, came closest to offering a solution, albeit regulatory. He suggested “one industry-wide CAW policy” could be in the works that would go a long way toward mollifying us luddites who dare to bet without sophisticated software that may monopolize the marketplace.

But what are we talking about here? Locking out the CAWs a few minutes before post time? Banning them if they have most of their bankrolls offshore? Limiting the number of wagers they may make in a given time period?

All these things look fine and good to regulation lovers, but they also look like they could step on the constitutional rights of computer players. It feels like the argument between campaign-finance reform and the First Amendment.

The more basic dilemma is how to tell batch bettors they are not welcome while also turning away their money. For one thing, they are not breaking any rules. They truly are taking advantage of long-established boundaries without cheating.

So, too, are trainers who medicate horses right up to the threshold of going too far in the eyes of regulators. Same goes for Ortiz, who might not have earned many style points from stewards last weekend, but he got to keep his victory.

There is, of course, one solution that can change competitors working the edges into outright cheaters. Following Longo’s lead, just rewrite all the rules, because everyone will agree on those. 

Now that we have solved those problems, let’s tackle crime and the economy.