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.