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Integrity Services and Licensing Blog
Welcome to the Integrity Services and Licensing team Blog. We will be using this area to periodically bring you the latest news from our team and developments in the world of integrity and how we are keeping the sport clean
Mark Blackman: Speed Mapping
3rd March 2010
Raceday Integrity Coordinator Mark Blackman discusses the merits of 'speed mapping' and how it could be applied to British racing
ALMOST every week, it seems, the integrity services department at the BHA’s headquarters in High Holborn receives a visit from someone interested in learning more about what we do.
Our benchmark intelligence-gathering and betting analysis procedures are a lure for interested parties from all manner of other sports and jurisdictions, and many sections of the media, fascinated by the systems we have in place for keeping the sport as clean as possible, and taking the fight against corruption ever forward.
They come to learn about how we operate in racing, and leave with ideas about how our methods can be employed in their own sports.
Sometimes, of course, it can work the other way, and a visitor to our offices can engage us with details of their own operation. That’s exactly what happened when two racing integrity chiefs from Australia dropped in for an afternoon recently.
Terry Bailey, the chairman of stewards for Racing Victoria, and Brant Dunshea, general manager of integrity services for Harness Racing Victoria, provided a brief but fascinating insight into the ways in which their sports are policed and refereed. The most absorbing topic for discussion – one I could have spent hours talking to them about – was their reliance on ‘speed mapping’.
Prior to every meeting in Victoria, the stewards are given a 45-minute ‘race pace’ briefing by their equivalent of one of our handicappers. During this thorough going-over of the day’s events, they are guided by the speed mapper on precisely how they should expect each race to be run.
"No.1 breaks quickly and will lead on the rail; No. 2 likes to sit just behind the pace and will track No. 1 on the rail; No. 3 is always held up towards the rear; No. 4 breaks fast and should track over the two-path...." and so on and so on, for every horse in every race.
That level of briefing does not take place in Britain, and to be fair, with the volume of racing that is centrally governed here, it would require a huge investment in resources to do it.
Armed with this depth of pace expectation, the stewards in Australia know exactly where each runner should be in the early stages of their race if its chance is to be maximised, on all known evidence. If the race does not pan out as expected, then be in no doubt, the stewards WILL ask questions of those who don’t play the game as expected – although, as Dunshea pointed out, “they’re horses, not slot cars”, and the stewards are experienced enough to take account of that.
Furthermore, if any connections plan to change their tactics for a particular race – for example, they intend to hold up a horse that usually front-runs, whether for tactical reasons of because of the barrier draw – they are required by the rules to inform the stewards beforehand.
I wonder what trainers here would make of that. If the tactics are wildly different and they haven’t informed the stewards, or if they report a change of tactics but don’t then implement them, they can again expect to be asked some pretty searching questions.
In an ideal world, it would be wonderful to be able to brief the raceday stewards with this sort of speed mapping in Britain. There are a number of barriers that would need to be overcome, but so there were in Victoria when stricter rules were brought in five years ago governing changes in tactics.
Trainers initially went volcanic when they were told they would be required to inform the stewards of their intentions, but now that it is woven into the fabric of the sport there, it reportedly works well and has made the sport more transparent for the stewards and punters alike.
The volume of racing and the resources that would be required to cover it are the main reasons why ‘speed mapping’ briefings are a long way off in Britain, but there is no reason why the principals cannot be applied a lot more often.
To my mind, when a jockey rides a horse a different way from what we have all come to expect, regardless of how hard he or she has tried during the race, there’s no reason why we can’t ask a simple question of them: “Why did you ride the horse that way today?” Most of the time, I’m sure, their answer will provide an acceptable explanation, and surely that’s more informative for everyone than not to ask a question at all?
Mark Blackman: Going the extra mile to keep racing clean
27th October 2009
Mark Blackman, the BHA's new Raceday Integrity Coordinator, talks about his switch from the Racing Post and what he will bring to the BHA's already significant Integrity Services department.
POACHER turned gamekeeper – that’s how my friends at the Racing Post labelled me when I told them I was leaving the paper after 15 years to take up a new position with the integrity department at the BHA. It was an understandable reaction, but was it fair? After all, protecting the integrity of this great sport is in the interests of everyone – from the regulator, to the media who want to sell it as something wonderful, to the punters placing their hard-earned cash on the outcome of horse races. Not to mention the overwhelming majority of jockeys, trainers and owners who play the game straight.
In the Questionnaire feature I commissioned for the Racing Post, racing folk are asked: is the sport straighter than it was 20 years ago? Most respondents find a way of ducking the question, but here’s what I think. I believe racing IS straighter than it was 20 years ago, because there is far greater vigilance, much stronger intelligence and a transparent means of monitoring the betting activities of wrongdoers through the BHA’s integrity relationship with the exchanges. But has the battle been won; has corruption been drummed out for good? Don’t be daft. Where there’s money to be made, there will be those seeking to grab a piece of it by playing outside the rules.
It has been an interesting first seven weeks in the job, with the focus thus far on meeting as many people as possible, learning about the work that is already being done and putting together a plan for how best I can fit in and take the fight against corruption forward. After I started, the Racing Post announced my appointment by calling me the BHA’s ‘first dedicated in-house race-reader’. This I found not only embarrassing, but very misleading.
Let’s be clear, the BHA employs dozens of experienced, vigilant and professional race-readers. 17 stipendiary stewards, the majority of whom are ex-riders themselves, do a difficult job fantastically well, picking up on interference, whip and running and riding offences on the day with a thorough, forensic eye, and performing many other tasks behind the scenes. Anyone who has ever criticised a decision should spend one afternoon with the stipes and stewards to see the volume of work they get through and their even-handedness and expertise.
In addition, the handicappers could not carry out their jobs without outstanding race-reading skills borne out of years of experience, while at High Holborn, the disciplinary department’s monitoring team and the integrity department’s betting investigators demonstrate a deep perception of what is happening on the track. There is no shortage of dedicated race-reading at the BHA, and between them all, they barely miss a trick.
The BHA has eyes and ears away from the track too, and snippets of information are dropping into the intelligence-gathering system constantly, where they are logged, analysed and filtered. The diverse team of stable inspectors, stable security officers, weighing room security officers and veterinary officers, not to mention many other sources, are all empowered to feed into the intelligence system, and their information might just provide the missing piece of a puzzle in an investigation.
As time goes by, I will be spending most of my afternoons working alongside the betting investigators, monitoring the live racing. They will be watching what happens on the exchanges, I will be watching what goes on at the track, and we will all be aware of pre-race intelligence too. Occasionally we will feel the need to provide the stipes with some of that pre-race intelligence, but at this stage, my gut feeling is that this will be very much the exception rather than the rule. A better scenario is to allow the stipes to reach their conclusions independently of our own, and if the two corroborate, so much the better – a ‘double blind’ approach arguably builds a much stronger case.
In addition to monitoring the live racing, I will be profiling jockeys, trainers and owners whose performance patterns give rise to suspicion. I have recently put the wheels in motion to secure some racing analysis software that will allow us to monitor results on the track. Which trainer-jockey combinations, for example, are most susceptible to being slowly away? Which ones are most frequently turned over at odds-on, or miss out on a place when starting at cramped odds? Which riders are unseated more often than others? I’ll soon find out, and who knows, that might set us down another intriguing road – especially if those incidents marry in with the activities of suspicious betting accounts. In those cases, there will be lots of race videos to plough through and analyse.
If all this sounds like I am out to ‘get’ jockeys, I should conclude by providing some context. In my old job, I met and interviewed many riders, and I come from the standpoint that in the jockeys’ room, as in all walks of life, the majority of people are straight down the line.
Last month, during my ‘meet the stipes’ induction week, I went racing from Monday to Friday, clocking up more than 1,000 miles. It was a privileged and enjoyable week at five different tracks, but when I arrived home from Newmarket on the Friday evening and flopped in front of the TV, I fell straight to sleep – I was shattered. And that was after just five days of racing.
What these jockeys do week in and week out – getting up at the crack of dawn to ride work, travelling the length and breadth of the country to race, frequently going from afternoon to evening meetings, squeezing in weekend rides overseas, and in many cases fighting a constant battle with their weight and putting up with bone-crunching falls – is bordering on super-human. They deserve the admiration of everyone who loves the sport, but they also deserve not to be tarred by the same brush as the bad apples, or to come under the spell of corruptive influences. The integrity of British racing is as much in their interests as anyone else’s.
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