Up front: harness racing is a sport I’ve never paid any attention to. When I was a kid growing up in New York, I knew that there were big harness racing tracks in Yonkers and in Roosevelt, Long Island, but I never gave the sport a second thought.
What brings this subject up is, my family and I saw a little bit of Rodney Dangerfield’s “Easy Money” on TV a while back, and there’s a big scene in which Rodney, Joe Pesci and their pals have bet a lot of money on a horse at the harness racing track. It becomes VERY obvious that the driver of the horse they bet on is crooked, and that he’s going to absurd lengths to hold back the horse and make sure it doesn’t win (an outraged Pesci physically attacks the driver).
One of my elderly uncles, a guy who’s been known to bet on horses, laughed harder than everybody else, because he regarded that scene as a spot-on representation of how crooked harness racing is. He seemed to think it was common knowledge that trainers and drivers (he regarded the drivers as a sort of French-Canadian mafia) conspire to fix races all the time.
As I said, this is a subject I know almost nothing about- but I’d have assumed harness racing, like thoroughbred racing, was pretty well regulated in New York, and that, while cheating must go on, it would be very hard to cheat so blatantly.
So, what’s the real deal? IS harness racing as dirty as that relative claims?