The Australian ball-tampering saga, the biggest drama in the sporting world right now, could not be further away from the New Zealand racing industry.
Let's hope it stays that way. The last thing racing needs is the attention of the whole sporting world for the absolutely wrong reasons.
But it's impossible that the same situation would happen, anyway - not necessarily because racing would not capture the attention of the world's media like Australia's ball-tampering antics would, but because it would not know what cheating is.
The normal rules do not apply. Not seemingly, anyway. Instead, it seems to be the home of the excuse, the slap on the wrist and the sympathisers.
Racing's rules are meant to provide a line that identifies what is and what is not cheating.
But they do not. There is always an excuse, a freak occurrence. ,
Why there was that positive swab?
In many cases those excuses seem to exonerate good people who have inadvertently broken the rules.
With the highly competitive nature of racing, the need for modern animal health measures and the seemingly endless substances and levels that are tested for, there will always be accidental breaches.
But the offset for the effective exoneration of some, or more specifically the exoneration of them from the deliberate act of cheating, means those who do cheat can use or invent similar excuses.
That puts the innocent right beside the guilty.
Where racing gets it oh, so wrong, is its ability to forgive and forget and barely punish those who have been proved to have deliberately broken the rules.
I am speaking of those cases where there is no genuine excuse, where there is no doubt or very little doubt that the rules were broken.
In these cases, racing has a special way where it can slap the offenders on the back of the hand with the equivalent of a wet bus ticket.
Here is an idea. Hand out lifelong bans for those who are caught deliberately cheating.
No, the six-month holiday that was handed to a trainer who admitted he deliberately doped a horse was not good enough.
No, you cannot just transfer your horses in to someone else's name and come back like nothing ever happened.
While we are at it, hand out life bans for any driver or jockey who deliberately pulls a horse up.
There have been two examples of this in the South Island recently. Both penalties were absolutely pathetic.
No, you can't stop driving a horse out 50m short of the post.
No, you can't deliberately stay on another horse's back and run second and get away with it.
How about racing gets tough on cheats.
How about we treat deliberate rule-breakers the same way the Aussie cricketers are being treated.
There is talk of one-year bans for them - there is even talk of getting them out of the game for good.
Let those in racing who cheat face the same shame the cricketers are facing.
Or is it simply easier to continue being soft on rule-breakers in racing?
You could be thinking if Aussie cricket captain Steve Smith is run out of cricket, racing would take him with open arms. That is how easily the industry forgives and forgets.
Happy trails.
