Since he said it on national TV before the race, does he legally have to honor his guarantee to those people who bet on Big Brown?
What did he say? “I guarantee he will win”? Sounds like every boxing coach before every fight ever, and 50% of them are wrong. Why would he be liable for anything?
Without terms, a guarantee is worthless. Did he guarantee to repay losing bettors? No? Then they’re hosed if the teams loses.
The term ‘wager’ is inexorably associated with risk, regardless of what puffery is offered by persons close to the event.
He never used the word guarantee as far as I know.
Here’s a partial quote.
You remember, babe: Winning the Belmont and the first Triple Crown in 30 years was a “foregone conclusion.” You dismissed the field by saying, “These horses just cannot run with Big Brown.” You envisioned winning this race “by daylight, easily. I just don’t see no dogfight in this race.”
In general, puffery is a defense to certain types of actions. Here, it seems that a reasonable person would understand the claim, “Big Brown can’t be beat!” to be puffery and therefore not actionable.
Anyone with whom the owner had a signed contract guaranteeing a win would have good cause for action. The others not so much.
First, you should explain why you think a verbal contract to the same effect wouldn’t hold up.
But a more serious question to the real legal eagles around here: a contract, IIRC, is made out of offer, acceptance, and consideration. If me and the horse’s owner come to an agreement that he would pay me back if I lost a bet, and I made a bet with a bookie, would that constitute a valid contract between me and the owner? Neither of us had made any consideration to each other.
My understanding of the Anglo-American doctrine of consideration is that consideration does not have to be adequate as long as it is there. If the terms of teh contract amount to something of the effect that A places a bet on B’s horse and B will repay A’s losses if the bet fails, I’d say that there is sufficient consideration because A promised to B that he’d place the bet. Even a useless or worthless counter-promise can be sufficient consideration, and in this case, I wouldn’t even say the counter-promise of A is totaly useless to B - B might, for instance, get an advantage from A’s bet because it can affect the odds bookmakers will offer for a bet on B’s horse. The more money is bet on a horse, the lower the odds will typically be, and lower odds for a particular horse may make that horse appear as a favorite to the general public, which is of course in the interest of the owner.
Then again, that’s my understanding from what I know about the consideration doctrine from comparative law classes.
If it had the equivalent of a signature (e.g. was reliably witnessed), it might. Otherwise, it could well be a case of “not worth the paper it was printed on.”
And for the record, it was the horse’s trainer Rick Dutrow – not the owner – who made the pre-race boasts.
This branch of the law involves what have become known (not entirely correctly) as “unilateral contracts”.
In an ordinary (“bilateral”) contract, it is true that what is necessary is an offer from one person to another, an acceptance from the other, a communication of the acceptance, and consideration (roughly equivalent to an agreed “price”). Without the necessity for the element of consideration, all sorts of social offers like “Can I buy you a drink?” would be legally enforceable, rendering the law absurd.
The rules about consideration are very complex. Consideration must be real, but it need not reflect the true commercial value of the offer (hence the expression “peppercorn consideration”). It need not flow to the offeror. (If I say “I will give you my horse if you give $100 to the Monster Raving Loony Party” and you tell me you accept then the conditions of offer, acceptance, communication and consideration are fulfilled even though I don’t get the money.)
But questions about consideration don’t really apply here so much. If some fool punter bet his shirt on the strength of a supposed “guarantee” that a horse would win, then he may well have provided consideration.
Enter the case of Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball Company. http://www.directly2u.co.uk/carbolic/case.htm
This case is the starting point for consideration of all cases of the present sort. In Carlill’s case, the CSBC advertised that their product was so good at preventing various illnesses that they would give 100 pounds to anyone who caught influenza or the like after using their product. To prove the bona fides of the offer, the advertisement asserted that 1000 pounds was on deposit to cover any claims that might arise. Carlill used the product, got sick, and sued for her 100 pounds.
The court considered whether the offer was a “puff”, and concluded that the specificity of the promise coupled with the reference to the deposit of 1000 pounds meant that it was not, and allowed the user to collect. The court expressly excluded that the offer was a “wager”. There was no communication of the acceptance of the offer, but the court said that acceptance was achieved by fulfilling the conditions of the offer, and that the best theoretical explanation for dispensing with the need for “communication” was that by virtue of the nature of the offer being to the public at large, the need for communication of its acceptance was impliedly waived by the advertiser.
Turning to the present case, let us suppose the owner of the horse had said in a press interview something as foolish as “I guarantee my horse will win”.
Usual disclaimer that I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice etc, but I am confident that such a “promise” would be treated by the courts as puffery, so that anyone who placed a bet on the strength of it would not be able to claim from the owner. No-one (absent cheating) can make such a “guarantee” without every sensible person who hears it to understand it to be an excess of enthusiasm. It is not supported by the very specific tokens of seriousness present in the CSBC case.
A further consideration is likely to be dependant upon the local laws about gambling on racing. You will note that in Carlill v CSBC the court excluded that the advertisement was a “wager”. Here, that exclusion is not so easy to achieve. I suspect that local laws which regulate gambling on horses may have an impact in that event, because they tend to be restrictive about what bets are able to be collected on in law suits, but in the absence of local detail, I can’t say whether this affects the present case or not.