Inside information is an ambiguity. What does it really mean? Ask bookmakers. They will probably have a better idea than most. Having their card marked, or being in the possession of privileged knowledge regarding a horse, has served them well and will continue to do so. And, whether we like them or not, betting exchanges are here to stay. They are proving a godsend to the sport's administrators in their determined efforts to crack down on corruption. The arrival of the exchanges has also been a blessing to many punters who feel the ability to both back and lay horses before and during a race gives them a better chance of winning. What it has done is highlight the betting trends and any abnormal activity on animals that don't run up to form, have drifted in the market and are only of interest from a laying point of view. If an individual is in possession of first-hand information that a horse has been injured at home and will miss its intended engagement, and he or she takes advantage by laying it ante-post, that falls into the cheating category. He or she cannot lose. However, if that same person is reliably told that a horse is not fancied for a particular race on a daily basis and is not expected to win, offering it at bigger odds on the exchanges for the purpose of laying, is fair play in my book. They can still lose. Members of the racing media are now being asked to sign up a code of conduct under which they will agree not to use such information to lay horses after the Horseracing Regulatory Authority were made aware of instances in which information had been "misused". The HRA's regulatory board are only interested in the negative use on the exchanges and they have gone as far as to say that it's unacceptable for a horse to be laid on the exchanges that is known to be injured, dead or a non-runner. If the media doesn't sign up, from September they could be subject to a criminal offence of cheating as betting on a known outcome simply amounts to that. It has to be said that betting exchanges have reduced the number of grey areas that racing has had to live with because of lack of concrete evidence. Only the colour has changed to red and, while much has been done by the sport's disciplinarians to stem the tide of corruption it will never be a totally honest game. To those of us professionally engaged in the sport, the year-long ban imposed on Robert Winston, concluded in February, was the highest-profile case so far. Other cases barely made the sports pages. The most important date on our racing calendar this year is at the Old Bailey in September when former champion jockey Kieren Fallon is one of 11 people facing trial as the result of the biggest police investigation into corruption in British horseracing. Fallon is a name that means something outside of the sport, so it will be a field day for the tabloids. But I suspect there will be no winners. Just an awful day for the sport. | 
