Confronted by the Duke when slipping something to a horse of no great reputation, the trainer says: “It’s nothing your Grace, just a lump of sugar. Look, I’ll have one, why don’t you?” Suspicion allayed, the trainer then takes his jockey aside and says: “Stay with them until two furlongs out Then kick on. If anything passes you it will either be me or the effing Duke of Norfolk.”
How close does such humour get to the truth about racing and every other branch of the sporting industry? In maintaining the power and duties of government can the authorities be relied on to protect the public?As put on these pages yesterday by my colleague, Richard Edmondson, anybody who mixes with racing people on a regular basis is sure to hear tales of deliberate lethargy in running, and attempts to set up betting coups in future assignments.That this week’s allegations of race-fixing did not come as a great shock to any of the regular punters with whom I have since spoken (they include a peer of the realm, a football manager and one of the waiters at my favourite restaurant) suggests that people perceive it to be just another hazard in the process of finding winners.Even though the Jockey Club sets aside pounds 14m each year to set up defences against criminal activity the fact that it chooses to deal with most matters internally causes the betting public to suspect that there is often more to the outcome of a race than meets the untrained eye. In fact it would be nigh impossible.”We are sure the three will be completely exonerated in the end.

In all my time in racing I have never come across anything that is as dicey as this is being made out. We feel it has been a big mistake.”There was not complete confidence in the ring either that the Metropolitan Police understood the machinations of the turf. “You could write on the back of a postage stamp with a blow lamp what the police know about racing,” Barry Dennis, a leading bookmaker at Lingfield, said.The languages that drive the ring are tic-tac and money, and it is the absence of any big winners from the races concerning the doped horses that puzzles the satchel-carriers. “We have had a day to think about it and the more we do the more ridiculous it appears,” he said “You can’t really fix jump races There are too many things involved. It’s all pretty unbelievable and we certainly don’t believe it for one minute.”Another Grand National winner, Carl Llewellyn, also refused to contemplate that there could be renegades changing next to him. Yesterday when we first heard we didn’t know what to think, but now it’s settled down and we’ve had time to take it all in the reaction is shock.”We just hope that it is all going to wash out.

“These are boys we see every single day and I can’t see that one of our own would be involved in this.”The atmosphere in the weighing room is completely different from normal. “We’re absolutely shattered just to be thinking that any of our weighing room colleagues could be in any way involved,” Mick Fitzgerald, the Grand National-winning jockey, said. As Richard Edmondson discovered, the consensus view was: “you’re innocent until proved guilty.”
If racing’s three jockeys under race-fixing suspicion had wanted to be among supportive friends they should have travelled to Lingfield yesterday.The card at the Surrey track was typical of the bland filler that occupies much of the winter midweek. And neither of those groups wants to think their sport is tainted by dirty jockeys and dirty practice.The womb for riders – the weighing room – was a quieter chamber than usual as friends and workmates of the three in question contemplated the revelations of the previous day The mood was largely of stupefaction. There were no Cheltenham winners here and no casual punters, the breed most susceptible to theories of grand conspiracy.Instead it was the continuation of the minor skirmishes between backing diehards and cold bookmakers. The cloud over racing didn’t arrive in the shape of this week’s allegations. It’s been there long enough to justify more positive action..

In the absence of the three jockeys arrested on Tuesday at Lingfield yesterday, weighing room colleagues, bookmakers and owners were quick to spring to their defence. Charges of match rigging that led to the suspension of David Layne, Tony Kay, Peter Swann and others (Kay was imprisoned) were brought when the imposition of the maximum wage in English football left players open to temptation.As I discovered from a document that had been carelessly mislaid by an official of the Football Association, other players of equal stature were implicated. Doubtless because of difficulties in obtaining evidence and the effect of their guilt on the game the FA chose not to take further action.The reluctance of sporting organisations to act on embarrassing information was best exemplified when the International Olympic Committee claimed to be unaware that competitors at the 1992 Games in Atlanta had access to a pamphlet that showed how to get around dope testing procedures.At the 1994 World Cup finals, Fifa, the game’s international governing body, chose not to investigate suspicions that Colombia threw a match against the USA because of threats made by drug barons in their homeland.You can go on and on like this because it has become the habit of sporting bodies to select the expedient option. “If I lose I’ll get double…” Over he went.Paradoxically, the more people earn from sport the safer the sport becomes from corruption. For example, bad movies, or at least the sensation pedlars who made them, have lumbered professional boxing with a perception, that logic cannot disperse, of fights fixed for betting purposes.When Mike Tyson was about to make a second defence of the heavyweight championship one of the popular Sunday papers carried a ludicrous story that a Japanese gambler had offered him $40m (pounds 25m) to throw the contest. It was printed in ignorance of the fact that nobody would have accepted the bet.I ought to say that in more than 30 years at ringside only a couple of fights have given rise to suspicion.