The Jockey Club's insistence on endoscopic examinations of many beaten horses is not necessarily achieving what had been hoped. Soon after the regulation 'scoping' began earlier this season, trainers met officials and were no longer under the impression horses were going to be turned inside out every time they started favourite and didn't win. While the professional horsemen are comfortable with the situation, though, there is still plenty of misunderstanding. Stewards' reports are featuring comments like 'a moderate amount of blood' being found in horses' windpipes - descriptions which are ambiguous and uninterpreted. More recently, mysterious uninterpreted comments have appeared regarding horses making 'an abnormal breathing noise'. Some of them are horses with excellent overall form. We aren't told if they made these noises after winning either. The result is that some trainers are finding themselves being questioned by the media about their horses bleeding, when in fact the horses have not 'bled' but have returned with some blood in their breathing apparatus as may be their norm. If some parts of the racing press have not understood the reports, then we must assume the racing public can only be holding a skewed view of the whole matter, too. There is a numbered scale of bleeding and it may be better to include such scores if this process of reporting blood in the windpipe or on the larynx must go on, although it still requires some interpretation. In all aspects of racing, the important aspect of a horse's condition or form is that which has changed to alter their performance. It might be the pace of a race, a change of tactics or a different barrier leading to a different set of circumstances. It might be the handicap weights or body weights or the level of a horse's internal bleeding. So, for example, a low-level bleeding in a horse which has not shown signs of bleeding before could be interpreted as being more important in its performance than a high-level bleed in a horse which always returns that level of bleeding. The point of the reporting is part of the Jockey Club drive for transparency in horses' form in order to assist the betting public, or, more accurately, to excuse a poor performance after the fact. Once it goes beyond the external evidence of bleeding of the type which leads to automatic bans, it is a murky area to judge and its early promise of creating more confusion than good appears to be coming to fruition.
