by Trey Nosrac

About 15 years ago, an anonymous source contacted me to write about the murder of a person in the harness racing industry. Another time, an anonymous emailer demanded that I write an expose about a suspicious trainer.

The anonymous people who contacted me were under the mistaken impression that having a byline meant I was sitting around salivating about following “leads” and rooting out evil. I do not live in a movie or television script. These hot tips widened my eyes, and my heart raced like a scorpion crawling on my leg.

No matter what the venue, sports, government, religion, business, and, indeed, harness horse racing, investigative reporting is fraught with danger at every level. It takes a strange cat to be an investigative reporter; those cats should have several lives to spare. The work is dangerous, unwanted, unappreciated, and expensive; some of the work leads to dark places and dead ends.

Yet a free press with teeth remains essential. Consider a world where nobody digs deep, nobody pokes and prods. Or consider a world where no legitimate platform was available for dissemination even if the dirty work gets done. Not just in the microscopic world of harness horse racing but everywhere.

Take a few moments and stand in the shoes of a writer or publisher.

In an earlier era, investigative workers had newspapers and magazines with wide circulations. Broadcast media were titans. Juicy stories had a place. It is debatable if journalistic investigations were as rigorous or as numerous as they should have been. Still, reporting happened because someone had the backs of the fearless ferrets of wrongdoings.

However, some content was too hot to handle, and publishers shied away. This intimidation factor is not new. The Black Sox baseball scandal in 1919 found threatening mobsters looking for the leak and the reporter. Lance Armstrong and his cycling cronies used the club of litigation. Thirteen-year-old potential Olympic gymnasts have entire nations covering their medication tracks. Even your local council member may have a shady donor who can make an editor’s life miserable.

At first glance, it seems the internet would make exposing wrongs easier; this may or may not be accurate. In most businesses, money is motivation. There is virtually zero money set aside for anyone in our tiny publishing world to root out harness-racing evil. Who is going to pay the investigative reporters? Who will pay the bills when a big toe gets stepped on, and lawyers start circling?

Fewer and fewer major magazines and newspapers fill our mailboxes. None are coming back. That’s life. Bots and content creators can twist simple facts like a candidate’s birthplace, and some recipients of the twisted facts will remain immovable. That’s more than a little sad, but the wheel turns, and we adjust. The demise of traditional outlets for disseminating information leads to a troubling question: while the motivation to dig into dark corners may still live, the structures that can afford to pay for presenting these essential investigations are dying.

For most people, thoughts of self-preservation and employment are foremost. Writers and publishers are people. Brave crusaders willing to poke into these dark corners and report on them are rare gems. More than most, this publication has a tradition of doing the work. However, it is a mistake for the public to demand too much. The messenger often gets shot when others disagree with simple facts or have a different point of view. Funding for investigative reporting, whether from the internet, radio, live streaming, or print, is problematic.

Sunlight is an excellent disinfectant, but the hands that throw open the blinds cannot, or will not, work without funding or supporting structures. Some of the responsibility to help those trying to expose cheaters is in your hands; help responsible organizations with your wallet, appreciation, and advertising.

The hunger for accurate reporting and reflection will never go away. Let us hope that the ability to tread into these murky and treacherous waters responsibly remains available to those courageous enough to splash around.

Still, in our sport, we cannot overlook the corner cutters, the members who are just keeping up with the Jones, the beards, or the juicers to run rampant. Policing and enforcing rules is a problem as old as time. The solutions are, and always have been, complex. Doping racehorses, the reality and the illusion have long been an albatross** for our sport.

The above column remained in a file for a decade. Sending it to an editor and presenting obvious problems without a hint of a solution is pointless. However, there is some light in the darkness of doping racehorses. If we hold on and act wisely, the doping albatross may fly away.

The solutions to the chemical problems in our sport should be obvious. Artificial intelligence and high-tech testing machines such as ion-mobility mass spectrometers should take over our pre- and post-race testing. These AI programs would be efficient and stunningly effective. These programs work tirelessly for free. They are not intimidated. Litigation and threats against a machine that backs up all the data is complicated.

Take out the human element, and the testing libraries would expand quickly and keep expanding because AI would be on the case. AI racehorse testing and policing will improve if we outsource the task. We can ask AI to “Vigilantly keep horses free from performance-enhancing methods, keep the racing competition equitable and safe for the animals.”

**Note: The metaphor “albatross” refers to something that causes anxiety or hinders accomplishment. The term stems from an 18th-century poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” In the poem, a mariner inexplicably kills an albatross, an omen of his ship’s good fortune. When the vessel later becomes stranded, the mariner’s shipmates blame his harmful act for their bad luck and hang the dead albatross around his neck to punish him.