BHA leads the way in anticorruption

We have had a couple of articles recently  about corruption in sports, most recently that of October 5^th where we said that bookmakers are not to blame but today we want to focus on The British Horseracing Authority (BHA) who seem to be leading the way in fighting corruption. There has been a rapid change in betting with the advent of the online option and there is no doubt that sport in general is benefitting from the move; you only have to look at shirt sponsoring  of football teams or boundary boards at cricket matches to say nothing of the sponsoring of horse racing where several meetings are sponsored by bookmakers both in the UK and Ireland. Horseracing has been a target of corruption for many a year and online betting has only made it easier so it is pleasing to see  officers, betting experts and analysts who monitor markets for suspicious betting patterns and have at their disposal an intelligence database that is fed from a number of sources including informants who are paid for their services. Each piece of intelligence is used to find connections between horses, trainers, owners, jockeys and their associates; all in all there are more than 5000 names on the database. If at one time the fear of getting caught trying to fix a race was small, things have changed considerably and we have a better racing industry for it. It seems to us that the rest of sport could do worse than to follow racings lead.