This is Part 3 of the Thoroughbred Idea Foundation's (TIF) series “Wagering Insecurity.”
Faced with remarkable competitive pressure from the rise of legal sports betting, horse racing is at a crossroads.
Confidence amongst horseplayers and horse owners is essential to the future sustainability of the sport. Efforts to improve the greater North American Thoroughbred industry will fall flat if its stakeholders fail to secure a foundation of integrity, along with increased transparency of the wagering business and its participants over time. Achieving this is growing increasingly difficult after the sport has neglected its core base–horseplayers –for decades.
“Wagering Insecurity” details some of that neglect, and the need to embrace serious reform. Fortunately, there are examples across the racing world to follow.
The major North American tracks, which are now vertically integrated companies controlling most of the major ADWs, tote companies, other service providers and even some of the high-volume betting shops like Elite Turf Club, have had little incentive to upgrade the oversight of wagering on the more than 30,000 annual Thoroughbred races on the continent.
The one entity which does offer some wagering security apparatus–the Thoroughbred Racing Protective Bureau (TRPB)–is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the tracks themselves, through the Thoroughbred Racing Associations of North America (TRA), a consortium of racetracks.
Despite several attempts from TIF, the TRPB's Executive Vice President Curtis Linnell declined to answer questions for this series.
What was once a robust organization, even called horse racing's own “little FBI,” is now a shell of itself, focused primarily on the microchipping of horses.
The headline of a 1960 piece in Sports Illustrated may offer that generation's perspective of where racing stood relative to security and integrity measures:
“The Best-Policed Sport of All.”
Today, the TRPB does offer its member tracks a tool known as the Wagering Analysis and Security Platform (WASP).
According to its website, the TRPB says: “this platform currently provides each Thoroughbred Racing Associations' member track officials with a robust integrity toolset for distributed betting networks. A variety of reports and modules are included which assist users with timely examination of wagering detail.”
This description suggests the tracks are mostly responsible for monitoring WASP themselves.
When TIF questioned a TRPB official in mid-2020 about a curiously low superfecta payoff, it was affirmed that the organization does not respond to individual questions about incidents, but only those raised by member tracks. If we wanted more insight, we would have to contact the track directly. The burden of dealing with a customer inquiry is on the racetrack.
North American racing does not have independent oversight of betting or wagering systems. The lone protection comes from a small office wholly-owned by the tracks, which gives them tools to monitor their own races.
This was not the plan when many in and out of racing recognized the need for radically improved wagering oversight in the early 2000s.
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