GARY CARTER cheated the sport he must once have loved when he fell in with some crooked punters. Paradoxically, he cheated racing again when his sins were aired and judged last week. By pre-empting the wrath of the Jockey Club disciplinary stewards and leaving the country rather than defending himself, Carter lessened the spectacle and the impact of his punishment. A five-year ban did not end his career, for he had chosen to end it already.

Carter’s final disservice to racing is a source of frustration to Paul Scotney and his security department at Shaftesbury Avenue, for this was their chance to make a public example of one of the sport’s relatively few rotten apples.

Scotney took the unusual step of going on television on Saturday to express his feelings on the outcome. “Satisfied is the word I would use,” he said. “What we were looking for is an effective deterrent for wrongdoing.”

If the strength of the deterrent is a matter of perception, so too is the role in the affair of the betting exchanges, who can be seen either as heroes for providing the audit trail to the corrupting punters, or as villains for making such nefarious activity so readily accessible.

Curiously, both arguments are sustainable. Betfair, in particular, has done much to aid the transparency of betting transactions, yet by encouraging punters to back horses to lose, the exchanges are undeniably breeding temptation to cheat.

The laying of horses in this manner is also at the heart of the City of London Police investigation into race-fixing, which has returned to public consciousness through the ongoing interviews with 20 of the people already arrested.

The most famous of them, Kieren Fallon, ended a tumultuous week by being unable to take a big-race mount in America on Saturday, or to fly back in time to ride at the Curragh yesterday. Rumour and intrigue surround this latest twist in the Fallon soap opera, though his agent, Jennifer Walsh, put his indisposition down to dehydration.

Fallon strongly denies any crime and expects the police will eventually acknowledge his innocence. This inquiry needs charges to stick somewhere, however, and not just to justify the time and expense involved. That genuine deterrent, sought by racing’s guardians, now depends upon it.