What interests me far more - are the GALWAY and SEDGEFIELD 'runs' ... as we know that the TRAMORE scenario was a Doping absolute.

But the SEDGEFIELD run is far more unquantifiable - given that we now know that the horse was Tested, and was Negative...

Yet VIKING HOARD was confidently LAID to potentially,  Lose £30,000 at SEDGEFIELD.

HOW DOES THAT WORK ?

Nobody has mentioned the JOCKEY in all this - the same Jockey who rode the horse in ALL 3 Races when it was heavily LAID.

We found out last season that he is not 'Heaven's little Angel' ...
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Irish racing’s regulatory body has opened an investigation into a breach of the coronavirus raceday protocols by jump jockey KEVIN BROUDER at Galway on Monday.

Brouder has admitted to having wrongfully gained an admission wrist-band for a passenger travelling with him.

In an enquiry at Galway, Horse Racing Ireland’s Covid-19 officer reported that Brouder had carried out correct screening procedures before gaining admission to the racecourse.

However the jockey quickly returned to the entrance area “claiming to have lost his wrist band and seeking a replacement band which he was given by the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board security officer.”

HRI’s Frank Lannon said that at a later stage a passenger was observed in Brouder’s car within the enclosures and in possession of a wrist band.

The passenger confirmed she had not received health screening clearance for the fixture.

The IHRB’s security officer, Declan Buckley, told the enquiry he had spoken with Brouder who admitted he had “wrongfully” claimed an admission wrist band for his passenger and had brought her into the enclosure area.

Brouder admitted what he had done to the stewards on Monday and confirmed he was in possession of two wrist bands, neither of which was mislaid.

The matter has been referred to the IHRB’s chief executive Denis Egan for further investigation.
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A little indiscretion .... or a Trait?

Dermot Browne's ban ends next year.

Cloone River,also from a danger to life angle on the rider as the horse could have collapsed at any stage of the race causing injury to him.

I watched that race a few days ago ^ he kept looking down, was laughable.

Well -   That is how it appears on the BHA site - as this  Link, that I posted

https://media.britishhorseracing.com/pdf/stewardsreport/?fixtureId=1452&year=2018

Reports on Races - 1, 2, 5 and 6
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Yes - That - 'how is your horse going to run?' - is something they tried for a few weeks around a year ago ...
Seemed to die a death though.

But the SEDGEFIELD run is far more unquantifiable - given that we now know that the horse was Tested, and was Negative...

maybe they need a better test .. Lance Armstrong stayed one step ahead of the testers for over 10 years

Would the HRI have the same info from bookmakers including the exchanges that the BHA gets? That is surely the key as any horse that takes out such a big lay from one source has to be highly suspect.

No. Betfair informed the BHA (under a longstanding arrangement) and the BHA informed the IHRB.

In today's Irish Field it says that the IHRB appointed the BHA as a betting monitor from Feb 2020 , I'm not sure if they pay a fee for same. it enables them to see exchange bets line by line and if the BHA monitoring team see anything untoward it is brought to the attention stewards immediately .

The more you read these the more it gets you thinking Punchestown , doesn't show the man in a good light now does it...

The more you read these the more it gets you thinking Punchestown , doesn't show the man in a good light now does it...

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Definitely not,his post race comment after Solwhit's victory in that race were unbelievably sharp.

Solwhit was being aimed at the old Ladbroke at Leopartowns that january off 127 he would have been some cert.
He was turned over at 1/3 on his next run in a 3 runner race at thurles with Davy in the saddle.
Charles won that same race this year that Solwhit won.May be a horse to keep the right side off.It was foggy that day as well.
Maybe Charles horse like the fog?

has anybody asked betfair for the paper trail that was promised when they allowed people to lay horses ?

The subject dealt with in a very quick mention on ITV racing today,showed a clip from Kevin Blake this morning.

Presumably they felt they covered it enough this morning but the real audience is the afternoon watching public.

Yet VIKING HOARD was confidently LAID to potentially,  Lose £30,000 at SEDGEFIELD.

onlooker , annoyingly in the RP today, the writer says that this figure represented 71% of the lay market on betfair , and that the 55k euro at galway represented 50% of the lay market

maybe they should have clarified that is was 71% and 50% of lays on the horse and not the total market lay figure as it gives a bad impression

unless betfair have calculated knowing all lay bets compared to back bets

A good piece by David Walsh in today's Sunday Times:

Case of doped horse leaves Irish racing facing some difficult questions

On December 7, 2014, 13 horses went to the start of the Weatherbys Ireland GSB Chase at Punchestown. After the race, the stewards were not happy with the running of second favourite Foxrock, who came in third, believing the jockey Adrian Heskin had made insufficient effort.

They interviewed Heskin and Foxrock’s trainer Ted Walsh, and had the official veterinary officer, Terry Smith, examine the horse. Smith noticed Foxrock had lost his two front shoes and although he scribbled, “Unusual? not taken off!?” on a notepad, he presumed they had been lost during the race. Crucially, this supported Heskin’s view that something was not right with Foxrock and explained his tender handling of the gelding. Trainer and jockey were cleared of wrongdoing.

Ireland being Ireland, people talked. Rumours circulated and one of the stewards from that day at Punchestown subsequently rewatched a video of the race and footage of the horses in the winner’s enclosure afterwards. There was a shot of Foxrock in which his two front shoes were glinting in the winter sun, after he had run his race.

Unusual as it would have been for the horse to lose two shoes in the race, that had not happened. Those two shoes had gone missing at some point after he returned to the parade ring and before he was examined by Smith. The stewards estimated the total time at seven minutes.

The stewards reopened the case. They accused Ted Walsh of removing or securing the removal of the front shoes from Foxrock “once he was alerted to the stewards’ enquiry into the running and riding of the horse”, and of having “concealed from the Turf Club and misled [its] officers and stewards as to the true circumstances in which the shoes were removed”.

Walsh has long been a successful trainer and achieved his greatest success when Papillon, ridden by his son Ruby, won the 2000 Grand National. Through his TV work with RTE, he has long been Ireland’s most recognisable racing commentator.

On April 18, 2015, four months after the race, the case was reconsidered at the offices of the Turf Club at the Curragh in County Kildare. Nine hours were devoted to taking evidence. Expert witnesses on behalf of the Turf Club talked of the improbability of a horse losing two shoes in the minutes walking from the parade ring to the racecourse stables and then on to the veterinary yard.

Witnesses for the defence, including the highly respected trainers Aidan O’Brien and Willie Mullins, challenged that view. O’Brien said he’d seen horses lose two shoes in similar circumstances “umpteen times” while Mullins insisted a horse could lose two shoes post-race but that it may happen only “one in a hundred times”.

Though they had aggressively pursued this case against one of the biggest names in racing, the authorities still lost. Ted Walsh was cleared of any wrongdoing. It was a major defeat for the Turf Club. Like every other track in Ireland at that time, Punchestown did not have CCTV cameras at its stables, which would have assisted the parties in getting to the bottom of the matter as to how the horse had lost its shoes. One might have thought that the Turf Club would since have taken action to rectify this.

In 2018 the Irish Turf Club became the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board (IHRB). That was the year trainer Charles Byrnes and his son Cathal took Viking Hoard to Tramore races. That October day they drove from their County Limerick yard to the Waterford track. They got there in the early afternoon, lodged their horse at the course stables, went for a bite to eat and waited for the race.

Second favourite that morning, Viking Hoard drifted from 4-1 to double those odds. For a horse with decent form, he ran terribly. Five strides after the start, Kevin Brouder used his whip to bustle his horse into action. The jockey kept pushing but the horse could not get up to speed.

They lost touch before halfway and soon the jockey slowed the horse to a walk and took both of them out of their misery. It is customary in Ireland to drug-test the winner of every race but on this occasion, the authorities decided to test Viking Hoard. He tested positive for Acepromazine, a sedative commonly known as ACP, the sample containing one hundred times more than the permitted limit for the drug. The investigation would run for 14 months. The central questions were how the drug got into the horse’s system and who, if anyone, benefited from it not being able to perform.

Information from Betfair, the betting exchange, indicated that someone knew Viking Hoard would not win. One layer made €3,200 (about £2,850) by betting €34,889 that it would lose. Betting patterns for Viking Hoard’s two previous runs at Galway and Sedgefield revealed that the horse was backed to lose in both, €85,279 invested for a €24,000 profit. The IHRB’s chief veterinary officer, Lynn Hillyer, concluded that Viking Hoard had been “nobbled” at Tramore — drugged to lose.

In his evidence, the trainer Byrnes said he had no idea who had got at his horse. He admitted he and his son had left the horse unattended for 20 to 25 minutes in the two hours before the race at Tramore. Whoever had administered the sedative must have done so at this time.

Without CCTV cameras at the stables in Tramore there was no way of checking what third parties had entered Viking Hoard’s box that day. Four years after the lack of CCTV cameras had had an impact on the investigation into Foxrock’s two missing shoes, the same issue in this case would affect the investigation.

The top line on the IHRB website reads: “Protecting the Integrity of Irish Horseracing.” There are 26 racecourses in Ireland and seven years after the Foxrock case, the only track with CCTV cameras at its stables is Leopardstown. The redevelopment of the Curragh cost €81.2 million, €36 million of which came from the taxpayer, and still the €20,000 necessary to install CCTV at its stables was not spent. In the UK, every racecourse is obliged to have CCTV surveillance.

Not only was the IHRB unable to discover who doped Viking Hoard, it was not able to name the layer who gambled €34,889 on the horse losing. It is believed the bet was made in the name of a company in Curacao, a small Caribbean island. Betting investigators believe the individual behind the company has been previously involved in suspicious betting on cricket. There is, however, nothing that links this individual to the connections of Viking Hoard.

Byrnes was given a six-month suspension for leaving his horse unattended in the lead-up to the race. He admitted this while saying that it is not uncommon for horses to be left unattended at racecourse stables. He is appealing against his ban.

Soon, the IHRB’s Referrals Committee will deal with a case arising from the running of the Crowne Plaza Race And Stay Claiming Race at Dundalk last March. Two horses trained by Denis Hogan dominated the betting, Yuften and Tony The Gent. On their official ratings, Yuften was 17lb superior to his stablemate, but the money came before the race for Tony The Gent, who went off favourite.

The gamble succeeded as Tony The Gent beat Yuften. Concerned by Joe Doyle’s riding of Yuften, the Dundalk stewards interviewed both the jockey and trainer and passed the case to the Referrals Committee. A week or so before that Dundalk race the IHRB had done a deal with the British Horseracing Authority that allowed the Irish regulatory body to benefit from the BHA’s better access to betting patterns.

Soon, the IHRB will publish its findings in the Yuften/Tony The Gent case. While all this is going on, the IHRB has signed up to an agreement that gives stud farms a 24-hour advance warning of “unannounced” inspections and has yet to implement a series of new protocols agreed with the Department of Agriculture. In the past, the department was a key player in protecting welfare and integrity in horseracing.

Leading trainer Jim Bolger believes doping is a problem in Irish racing. Many agree with Bolger, though they are reluctant to say so publicly. There is also a belief in Irish racing, held by many in a position to know, that within the past five years a favourite for one of the handicaps at the Cheltenham Festival was stopped.

No sedative was necessary. Just a jockey doing as he was told.

the bottom line as seen in even so called legal/straight races,there,s nothing especially punters in ireland would do to win even tiny amounts,
big on shots hammered into even bigger odds on shots
horses layed/wrung the last penny out of them
and we no its done in uk as well

this is it what needs to happen ,if racing has a future these yesterdays men need to be named and shamed in public

Cash is king , you will have to get up early to figure out the horse .

Screaming - an alternative view is that by posting on here material that is otherwise only available to subscribers, more people will become inclined to take up subscriptions so that they can access such content directly.