Top Flight Handicap

[miff]

The rule states:

\"A whip to the face is not cause for an automatic disqualification unless the stewards deem it was a willful act. Such was not the case on Friday, the stewards said, but they did believe the incident cost Malibu Mint a fair shot at winning.\"



These stewards should immediately be dismissed for incompetence. How can someone who views races for a living conclude that MM had ANY chance of winning that race.Unfortunately the courts will probably uphold the stewards ruling. A travesty.


Mike

[jbelfior]

Miff:

Nice job. I agree with you 100%. I had no interest in the call ( I bet on MISS SHOP) but the connections and the people who bet RAHY\'s APPEAL deserved better.

Another example of too tight white shirt collars cutting off the oxygen to one\'s brain.



Good Luck,
Joe B.

[Michael D.]

sorry guys, but if this incident happened ten thousand times, the horse would come down ten thousand times (any track, any state, any planet).

allow a jock to whack a horse that hard in the face with a whip, and you have lost control of the game.

do you realize why you rarely see a horse get whacked like this? it\'s because the jock knows he is coming down if it happens.

and no, they don\'t do it on purpose, but it\'s willful dangerous riding by not taking care of the whip.

[NoCarolinaTony]

It\'s sort of like roughing the passer penalty, or helmet to helmet contact (see Michigan -Ohio State) he threw the pass before the hit, the pass was off-line so the PENALTY should not be called. (Hey Michigan you should sue to overturn the call and replay the game from that point!!)

Why do we accept those penalties and not these? Because someone bet money would be my guess.

NC Tony

[bobphilo]

How many times has an apparently beaten horse dug in and come back again when challenged. There is nothing like a hard whip to the face to prevent a horse from coming back in these cases. Racehorses are trained to react to the whip. Try taking a whip to the face and tell how eager you would be to continue racing. It is the job of the stewards to determine if such a foul has clearly occurred, and if so, to penilize it by taking down the offender. Playing psychic and guessing who would have won the race is a job I do not want them to do.
These automatic calls for them to be replaced when they have the stones to do there job is the main reason whey so many of them act like pussies and turn a blind eye to so many flagrant fouls, especially in big stakes races where anything goes.

Bob

[bobphilo]

Hi Mike,

I\'m glad that you agree that the rider should be penalized but I doubt that any penalty to the jockey alone will conteract his payoff on the 23-1 bet he probably had on the horses plus his share of the purse in a major stakes race. Horses are taken down because that is the only thing that detters such careless riding. When a trainer hires a jock or a better bets a horse ridden by a particular rider, he casts his fortune on the riders decisions. Should the owner still get the purse and winners still collect their bets if they bet on a horse whoe\'s rider lost the race by taking the horse too wide or misjudging the pace get the. Bad rides by the jock are part of the assumed risk. If a rider cannot win a race cleanly even with the best horse, he needs to come down. The bettors, owners and trainers that go down with him have no one but him and themselves to blame for putting their money on him.

What next, are we going to allow a jockey to beat a rival jocky with the whip or try to knock him off his horse as well claiming that that his opposition had no chance to beat him anyway?

Bob

[imallin]

Racing is fascinating in the sense that the \'investors\' get punished for the crimes of the participants.

If you own stock in a company that does something illegal, should you be punished financially or go to jail? Thats what happens in racing, the innocent horseplayer is the one who\'s punished financially.

Also, the biggest horseplayers in the world get punished for MORE than the connections quite often. Imagine getting dq\'d for a million bucks in a massive pick 6 pool where you would have been the only winner. Should a random horseplayer get \'fined\' one million dollars for a mistake of a jockey? Isn\'t that an extreme fine for someone who\'s bascially innocent?

Funny thing is that in dq\'s, its either or. If the judges are sitting upstairs and are totally deadlocked and are in a 50/50 position, the dq\'d horse gets punished fully and not partially.

Lets say its a 10k claimer. The rider loses his share of the purse, gets 3 days of sun and fun on the golf course but a horseplayer can literally lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in income. A horseplayer can be \'fined\' a hundred grand when the guy who made the mistake gets fined a few hundred bucks and told to go play golf for a few days.

[miff]

Don\'t want to go on but some have missed the point in this entire incident which,imo,is solely about the stewards decision making capabilities, not the rules or jockey behavior.

1.This was a discretionary call by the stewards.The whip strike was unintentional according to the stewards and did not cause an automatic DQ.

2.The DQ was made because the stewards felt that MM would have maybe won had he not been struck by the whip.

3.A racing novice can see that there was virtually no chance that MM would have won that race as the incident unfolded.To suggest, in this case, that MM may have \"come again\" and won if not struck looks very remote after viewing the race carefully.At best this was a case of \"insufficient\" grounds for DQ as the final outcome of the race was not changed by the incident.

4.This discretionary call by these stewards shows lack of basic racing knowledge and calls into question their overall expertise to make decisions that can affect many people for millions of dollars.Such power should only be in the hands of persons with the highest skill levels in adjudicating the rules of racing.

5.Given the above, it seems far better that the powers that be take the discretion away from the stewards and make the DQ automatic for any whip strike, period.


At Aqueduct on Sat or Sun there was not one person who spoke of the incident and was not at a loss in understanding the stewards decision.


Mike

[basket777]

if the rule does in fact say its up to the stewards  then as a person who had the 3.  yes others were robbed.  there was no chance none that mass was going to win that race.

[richiebee]

All good points, Imallin, and I hope this particular DQ didn\'t cost you.

Dont you think, however, throughout your \"career\" as a horseplayer, that the
\"take downs\" have been evened out by an equal or nearly equal number of \"put ups\"?

One of the most bizarre DQs in recent memory was the Drysdale/Stevens (?) runner
who was taken down in the Arlington Million. Almost everyone who watched this
race seemed to think that Stevens\' mount bore out into a rival AFTER he had
crossed the wire.

The fact that the \"rules of racing\", and stewards interpretations of these
rules, are not uniform in every racing jurisdiction is just one of racing\'s
problems.

[Michael D.]

im,
 
you wrote:

\"If you own stock in a company that does something illegal, should you be punished financially or go to jail? Thats what happens in racing, the innocent horseplayer is the one who\'s punished financially.\"

jail no, but of course you get punished financially when you buy stock in a company that does something illegal. if not, our capitalist system would have collapsed many years ago.

[Wrongly]

The race your talking about was the 2003 Arlington Million where Storming Home was taken down and Godolphin\'s Sulamni was placed first with the dead heated Paolini and Kaietuer moved up to second.  What makes it just a terrible call was the jackass stewart Edward Arroyo statement, \"We viewed the replay to determine if there had been interference and after determining that there had been, we viewed the replay again to determine if the interference had occurred prior to the finish of the race,and we determined that the incident had occurred about 20-25 feet prior to the finish; therefore we disqualified the winner and placed him fourth for interference to both Paolini and Kaieteur, who dead heated for third.\"  

Oops he did it again in the 2004 Arlington Million taking down Adain O\'Brien\'s Powerscourt and putting up cry baby Kent Desormeaux\'s Kicken Kris.  O\'Brien did come back with Powerscourt to win the 2005 Arlington Million as if to say FU.

[bobphilo]

Mike.

On that point you are correct. As the rules stand, If the stewards feel the foul was accidental they then have to determine whether it influenced the order of finish.
I agree with you 100% that the whip rule should be automatic so the stewards can concentrate on whether there was a foul at the spot rather than speculating on calling the winner from the head of the stretch. This would do away with a lot of controversy with decisions varying wildly depending on the interpretation of the stewards and lets jockeys know that being on the apparent winner does not exempt them from the rules.

While Garcia's action cannot be proven to be deliberate; to recklessly swing away with a left-handed whip when he knew there was another horse right inside of him was gross negligence and not some innocent unavoidable accident. The rules should make some distinction between such reckless riding and innocent accidents and make such fouls automatic DQ's, but you are right Mike, that is another topic.

Bob

[imallin]

richie,
No, this particular dq didn\'t cost me, but i have had my share of dq\'s over the years. I know they all say they are \'supposed\' to even out, but my view on this is that i want to be paid if i cross the line first UNLESS my rider and or horse does something drastic. If there\'s a severe bump and i wipe out the field and crash a few horses, i deserve to be dq\'d. If i bear out and physically jar a rival and then go on to beat him a half length or less, i deserve to come down. I mean JAR him, not brush him.

Racing is a contact sport. Could you imagine if every time a player \'touched\' another player in the NBA there was a foul? We\'d have 10 hour games and fouls on every single play. You have to let go the minor contact. \'stuff\' happens, you have to, quoting Kelly  Leak from the Bad News Bears, \"let them play, let them play\"

If its a severe bump or \'crash\' than a dq might be warranted. But, only if it costs the horse the race.

Seems like every time there\'s a lawsuit involving a \'wrongly\' disqualified horse, NYRA is the favorite to be involved. If Vegas made odds on which track is the next track to get sued by an owner who felt he\'s been wrongly disqualified, NYRA would be 8-5 morning line. Seems like the judges there are just not very good.

About those Arlington DQs. I actually bet on gary stevens when he fell off, but i made such a small bet, i wasn\'t worried about it, i\'m just Gary didn\'t get his face stepped on.

The Powerscourt DQ made me a really nice score. I don\'t remember what i bet, but i remember hugging someone after they took that number down.

[imallin]

Michael,
I know what you are saying, i think that there is at least a small window of opportunity to \'sell\' your stock before the price goes down. Lets say you are sitting at your computer and you hear that your stock in XYZ may be in trouble because that company did a boo boo. You can sell immediately, no? You at least have a shot as small as it may be to \'get out\' or only lose a little bit. WIth a dq, you have no shot to do anything, you are at the mercy of 90 year old men with coke bottle glasses who need help getting dressed by themselves in the morning...that can never be a good thing.