The transparency trap: harness racing’s most tragic mistake

by David Mattia

Before we begin, let’s get one thing straight. I’m not going to pause to define the terms or expressions used in this piece. If you’re reading HRU, it’s assumed you aren’t a visitor passing through the gift shop. You’re expected to know the language of the backstretch and the reality of the shedrow. None of the words or phrases used herein should be unknown to you. If you find yourself reaching for a dictionary to understand the basic mechanics of our trade, you’ve already proven the point of this article.

Furthermore, there have been a few people behind the typewriter who know next to nothing about how a horse gets raced, yet they gleefully call out cheating and malfeasance which, for the most part, doesn’t exist in the sense they write about. This isn’t for them. This is a conversation for those who have sweated within the walls and conducted business in the native tongue of the harness racing industry. If you’re in this shed row, you should already know your way around the barn.

MY OWN PERSONAL REVELATION

Years ago, back in college, I had a date with a very smart girl. She was a vegan long before it was a fashionable thing to be. A second date seemed out of the question because she was a maximum level animal lover and the very thought of attending a horse race was antithetical to her nature. Still, I managed to convince her to go to the races with me.

In the very first race of her life, she bet a few dollars on a hunch horse that shared her mother’s name. Through the stretch, her pick looked like he might get up, but he hung and wound up finishing third. My date turned to me, eyes flashing with genuine anger, and said, “The crooked driver didn’t even whip him!”

In that one sentence, she killed two birds with one stone. She immediately assumed the driver was a thief and she demanded the horse be hit to satisfy her ticket. You know what they say about there being no atheists in foxholes? The actual truth is that there are no animal lovers throughout the last sixteenth-of-a-mile.

It’s a reminder that people change the moment money is on the line, and the more they change, the more they remain exactly the same. I’ve said it a billion times. Back in the golden days of harness racing, before all this forced transparency, the fans, all 30,000 of them, already thought the races were crooked and the horses were doped up. They didn’t care. They still came. They didn’t want a clinical lecture on ethics. They wanted a seat at the table.

THE TRANSPARENCY FALLACY

The current push for total transparency in harness racing is a well-intentioned but silly mistake that threatens to dismantle the very industry it aims to save. By inviting the uninitiated into the “sausage making” of the backstretch, the sport is trading its essential mystique for a level of scrutiny that the average layperson is emotionally unequipped to process.

Professional animal husbandry and high-level competition involve a raw, mechanical reality that’s functional and necessary, yet easily misconstrued as cruelty when viewed through a modern, sanitized lens. Instead of building trust, this exposure provides ammunition to those who don’t understand the sport. It replaces the allure of the finished product on the track with an uncomfortable focus on the complexities of the shed row.

THE CARE AND TRAINING OF A STANDARDBRED RACEHORSE IS NOT CRUEL

Nothing in the education of a racehorse is designed to be cruel. From the very first day, the process is about preparation, not punishment. It’s sometimes annoying or uncomfortable, but these are the essential lessons that keep a horse from drifting into those eerie outer limits where a lack of utility leads to a very dead end. Even in the wild, a stallion doesn’t ask for permission to discipline a foal. He teaches it how to belong to the pack because, in nature, the unteachable don’t survive.

I look at it through the lens of my own upbringing. For years, I was forced out of a warm bed, made to wash, and sent to school to learn how to be a functioning member of society. I had a stable of parents, grandparents, and teachers who guided that process. It wasn’t always fun and it was frequently uncomfortable, but that structured discomfort is exactly why I’m a productive adult today instead of someone lost and living in a tent on a street corner. Training a horse is simply the equine version of that same necessary preparation. We aren’t breaking their spirit. We’re giving them the skills they need to have a purpose and a place in the world.

THE ARMCHAIR QUARTERBACKS

You’ve seen it happen like clockwork. You post a photo or video of a horse rigged out for a race, and by the third or fourth comment, the experts from the armchair have arrived to derail the conversation. Usually, it’s someone who claims a tangential connection to greatness. Maybe they own a retired trail horse that’s Secretariat’s distant cousin, and suddenly they’re the moral authority on equine welfare. They see a necessary piece of equipment like a tongue tie or a headpole and immediately scream cruelty at anyone who’ll listen. These are the people who’ve never set foot in a bustling shed row or felt the heat of a horse coming off a 1:47 mile, yet their uninformed outrage gets the most engagement. They don’t understand the mechanics of the sport, but they’re more than happy to use your transparency as a weapon.

Beyond the occasional winner’s circle photo of a driver patting a neck or kissing a nose, the reality of racing has always lived behind high walls for a reason. Ages ago, the veterans of this sport realized a fundamental truth. The actual mechanics of getting a horse from pillar to post are almost entirely composed of bad optics. It’s a raw, physical dialogue that the average spectator simply isn’t equipped to translate.

Take a legend like Dan Patch. He didn’t spend his life draped in rose petals. Of course he got yelled at. There were undoubtedly moments when a handler had to snap a lead shank or shake him up to get his head back in the game. It didn’t hurt Dan Patch for a second. But if you caught that moment on a smartphone today and uploaded it without context, the digital jury would scream that “poor old Dan” was being mistreated.

THE INFORMATIVE TOUR OF DOOM

In the name of transparency, let’s take the public on a guided tour of the paddock to show off our rigorous safety protocols. We’ll show them exactly how we protect these equine athletes from the evildoers by highlighting our pre-race testing. We tell them to watch the veterinarian work and see how efficiently that glass vial fills with deep red blood the moment the needle is jabbed into a neck vein the horse can’t even feel.

The public isn’t marveling at the integrity of the sport. They’re horrified. All they see is a groom “restraining” a captive animal while a person in a white coat stabs it in the neck. By the time the tour is over, the takeaway isn’t that the horse’s welfare is being guarded. It’s that Count Dracula was probably a more compassionate roommate.

THE SPIT BOX

Then there’s the spit box, a place whose inner workings should be as impenetrable as Fort Knox. But in our new era of transparency, we let the public peek in. They see a horse that’s still a little damp from the race, now completely encrusted in wood shavings. To anyone who actually knows a horse, that sight is a relief. It means the athlete is relaxed enough to do what every horse loves to do, which is drop down and have a good, vigorous roll in a deep bed of clean timber. It’s the equine equivalent of a post-workout shower and a fresh set of sheets.

The transparency crowd doesn’t see a happy horse. They see a dirty horse or a sweaty horse. They see a creature that looks like a dying beaver who just lost his battle for a mate on a pile of shredded willow bark.

THE LOAD OUT

To paraphrase Jackson Browne, the show is over, the slots are all empty, and it’s time for the roadies to take the stage. In our case, the roadies are the weary grooms leading the athletes to the massive, shiny transport vehicles waiting in the shadows of the paddock. This is the Load Out.

It’s the part where we pack two or three or four high-strung athletes into a rolling silver box for the long haul home. Through the lens of our new, transparent public observer, they don’t see a safe, professional transport vehicle. They see a claustrophobic nightmare. They think it’s freezing or five hundred degrees and worry that the horses can’t lie down.

This is the trap. We’re showing them the most facile, standard parts of the business, the literal A-B-C of moving a horse from point A to point B, and they’re already recoiling in horror. If the public thinks we’re being inhumane just by giving a horse a ride home, imagine their reaction when we get to the actual work. We haven’t even touched the heavy lifting yet and the jury has already reached a verdict. Transparency isn’t clearing our name. It’s just providing the footage for our own over-sensationalized funeral.

THE PAPAL CHIMNEY AND THE PRESS BOX

Publishing fines and suspensions is the most grievous offense perpetrated by the harness racing industry. Think about it. You just got through taking your tour through the paddock, the very Vatican of truth, the place where they draw the holy blood and collect the sanctified urine. You were just told that the system was faithfully designed to protect the integrity of the sport. Then the higher-ups reward that faith by publicly broadcasting every positive test and every infraction for the world to see.

The industry chooses to pump that thick, black smoke out of the chapel chimney for everyone to witness. By publishing these infractions in the open air, you aren’t proving the system works. You’re confirming the public’s darkest suspicions. You’re handing them a list of criminals and then wondering why the grandstands are empty. It’s not just bad optics. It’s a total surrender of the industry’s dignity.

I recently read an interesting piece written within the industry by Mike Tanner, about as high profile as any insider can be. He spoke about the harness racing writers of old. It was nostalgic and poignant, but it missed a certain reality. There isn’t anything truly great to write about now because the mystery is gone. In fact, since the advent of racing at The Meadowlands, a few writers have helped ruin the sport with their endless tirades about cheating and drugging. My own experience in the press box tells me a different story. I’ve seen plenty of writers run to the betting windows between races. How can anyone write fairly about racing when they just tore up their tickets? Of course, they’re going to say bad stuff. Their transparency is usually just a by-product of a lost exacta.

THE PROFESSIONAL ILLUSION

So, how are we supposed to deal with the bad actors without dragging the entire sport through the mud? Look at how the entertainment world handles its biggest Hollywood stars. You almost never read substantiated, career-ending dirt about A-list celebrities. Anything you see is relegated to the gutter of rumor and conjecture from TMZ. These stars have an entire ecosystem of handlers, shippers, assistants, grooms, and trainers, and yet the “sausage-making” never leaks.

They understand that the brand is the only thing that matters. They use iron clad NDAs that operate with surgical precision. They ensure that internal problems stay internal, while the public only sees the red carpet and the flawless performance.

We need to stop being so transparent and start being professional. The higher-ups shouldn’t be publishing a rap sheet. They should be painting a rosy picture of elite athletes and world-class care while simultaneously and quietly cutting out the rot. If a trainer is a cancer to the collective, don’t hold a public execution. Just get rid of them. Deny the entries. Send them on a much-needed vacation and leave it at that. Don’t say it hasn’t been done before because we all know it has.

We’ve already signed paperwork to race, but let’s be honest, those aren’t real NDAs. If you signed a document with actual teeth, you wouldn’t dare betray the paper it’s printed on. The harness industry shouldn’t be afraid to simply show someone the door. The old guard knew how to handle their own business without inviting the world to watch the dirty work. They understood that the public doesn’t want the truth. They want glory.

Personally, I think the time is late and the damage may already be done. But perhaps there is some value in finally identifying exactly where the wheels came off and why it became necessary for me to write this. When I was in high school, one of my teachers, a monk, told me that when you have a drinking problem, acquiring the booze is the easy part. It’s getting rid of the empties that will cause trouble. We should’ve been polishing the brass on the front door while we took out the trash through the back. Instead, we’ve spent the last decade leaving the empty bottles on the front porch for the whole neighborhood to see.