PRETTY much everyone involved in the sport was appalled by the recent revelations in the Viking Hoard case, and the subject matter has been thoroughly picked over in the intervening week or so since that shocking story first broke.

It’s fair to say that this case ought to prove some kind of watershed for the industry given how extreme the details were, and those with any association with the sport are quick to express their horror that a horse could be allowed to run while virtually senseless due to doping in such a callous manner.

As many have said before me, this case has something of the Lernean Hydra about it, with many questions unanswered. Tackling any one issue involved promises to see two more pop up, and it cuts to the heart of what we deem to be acceptable in terms of racing as a betting medium in particular.

What makes the Viking Hoard affair such a slam dunk is the welfare angle. There is no need to ask about the niceties of gambling stables. The ham-fisted doping of Viking Hoard meant that horses and jockeys were placed in danger of their lives, and we can all agree that such a scenario is totally unacceptable. But where do we draw the line between such outrage and those incidents which make us shrug the shoulders and say ‘ah well, it’s all part of the game’?

Do we accept that all horses are run on their merits all the time? If we are not naïve we do, accepting that this is not a black and white issue, but a decidedly murky area of debate. The handicapper, as well as the bookmaker, is often cast as the villain, and he’s bound to punish connections who allow their horses to finish too close to better-class rivals in novice or maiden company.

Ragged starts

Therefore we accept the regular ragged starts in such races over hurdles and fences. No one is preventing one from winning, after all, just ensuring the nasty handicapper can’t get too carried away.

We probably don’t think too badly about the art of handicapping. Run them half cooked, over the wrong trip, on the wrong surface in order to get some respite from the assessor. That’s fine, isn’t it? Sure, any judge of the form book can judge that the horse in question will not be at its best in such circumstances, and any fool who backs it would have soon been parted from his money – as all good fools are – soon enough.

True enough, among the zealots to be found at Speakers’ Corner, there’s often one who thinks Sir Mark Prescott should be serving life in jail for the way he campaigns his juveniles, but most of us tip our hats at a man who understands the system and plays it effectively.

The problem is that somewhere between playing the system and stacking the odds dishonestly in your favour, there is a line which shouldn’t be crossed, and it’s not obvious where that line should be.

We don’t want to strip racing of its character, and we know that some of the great characters of the past were all the more interesting because they had a bit of mischief in them.

Such mischief makes for entertaining tales, but the Viking Hoard case shows that those tales can easily take a dark turn.

It’s all very well pushing this responsibility on to the racing authorities, but the character of racing will be personified by those who represent it as participants, and we need to ensure that its character is not besmirched by scandal.