Socalman3 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> BitPlayer Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > I see from Andy Serling's Twitter feed that he
> is
> > going to have David O'Rourke, President of
> NYRA,
> > on at the beginning of Talking Horses today to
> > "discuss events from this past weekend." I
> have
> > no idea what the scope of the discussion will
> be
> > (just the breakdowns, or also the off-the-turf
> > decision making?), but it might be worth a
> listen.
> > The show starts at 12:05 EDT today and is
> usually
> > uploaded to Youtube afterwards.
>
> Thank you for heads up on this. Due to work, I
> wont be able to listen to it live, but I will be
> very interested to hear what he has to say. If it
> is anything less than abject acknowledgement of
> the failure, the problem remains.

Well, you have to give the O'Rourke credit for acknowledging that what they did was wrong and that they need to do better. So, on the positive side of the ledger, they finally acknowledged wrongdoing (albeit, 3 days late) and admit they need to do something for the bettors. On balance, his statement was more positive that negative, but there were some negatives.

One, he said, by way of explanation, that they asked for time to extend the post time and they asked to cancel the bet and were not permitted this. Well, that seems to me mighty significant. He did not say who he asked and why that person said no, but it seems to me that any dealing with this issue needs to expose exactly what happened here and proactive measures need to be taken so whoever it is doesn't make the wrong calls in those situations. If they had not been denied their request to delay post time or two cancel the bet, this situation wouldn't exist. To the extent blame is relevant, it is now clear who deserves to be blamed for this. This cannot get fixed without getting to the bottom of this.

The other is that he did not address the elephant in the room. Declaring the races ALL WIN was contrary to the rules and regulations. Did the same wisenheimer who wouldn't allow him to cancel the bet or delay post time allow this breaking of the rules? Why did they choose to break the rules in favor of one group of bettors against another group of bettors? These were all legitimate questions and the guy did not address them.

I am not sure who Serling is. He may be conflicted and it is not appropriate that he doesn't clearly disclose his interests. Is he supposed to be a journalist, a pitch man, a consumer advocate? Is he on the side of horseplayers or on the side of management? That needs to be disclosed because you cannot understand what he is saying without knowing that. He sort of said that he is NYRA but he is also a horseplayer (sort of trying to have it both ways) - but in situations like this, you cannot really have it both ways, you need to come out on one side of the divide. The one thing I can say is that IF Serling is supposed to be either a journalist or a consumer (horseplayer) advocate, then he completely fell down on the job. He did not ask the obvious tough questions and he allowed the guy to get off with just giving an abject apology without getting into the difficult stuff. However, if he was interviewing his boss, then that is a really difficult position. I would just say there shouldn't be a veneer that O'Rourke actually faced the betting public because Serling was conflicted and couldn't ask the questions a pure member of the betting public could.

It looks, at least, like they have stopped digging in the hole and have throw away the shovel, but they still have a lot of work to do - including addressing the glaring omissions from the talk.