When news broke on the morning of the third Ashes Test that Indian bookies had boasted to Britain’s The Sunnewspaper that they could fix cricket matches, it quickly became an international story.

While betting corruption and cricket have staged a delicate dance since the major scandals involving Hansie Cronje and the like broke in the early 2000s, there is always a raised eyebrow when such brazen claims of match fixing are raised. Why? Because society still cares about the integrity of cricket.

Last Saturday, three significant Queensland harness racing identities, Shane Graham, Leonard Cain and Vicki Rasmussen, were charged with match fixing and it barely made it past the court notices and in brief sections of the paper.

The people involved are charged with serious crimes, essentially fixing a race result for the purposes of profit. These crimes carry maximum terms of 10 years in jail.

In the last six months, three of Queensland's five leading harness drivers have been charged with match fixing, while there have also been arrests in Victoria in a long-running investigation into impropriety there.

Each harness racing scandal that breaks, and they seem to be weekly at the moment, barely raises a murmur in the general public.

The punting fraternity, those who essentially fund the sport, through betting on it invariably trot out the old ‘Cheats on Seats’ and ‘Crims on Rims’ references.

But while cheating and skullduggery in the sport of silks and sulkies is hardly a new thing, it certainly casts a pall over an industry which appears to be dying a slow and painful death.

You see, the arrest of Graham, who is Queensland’s leading driver, as well as Rasmussen and Cain occurred less than 12 hours after a race once revered as one of the biggest in any code, the Inter Dominion, was staged at Perth’s Gloucester Park.

The win of harness racing’s new superstar Lazarus (at 11pm AEDT on a Friday night) got even less coverage than the arrests in Queensland on Saturday.

So if no one, apart from the crowd at Gloucester Park, saw Australia’s best harness race, did it really happen?

Next year, the Inter Dominion returns to Melbourne for the first time since 2008. Well when I say Melbourne, it’s Melton, 35km west of the city at a facility opened in 2009 to service the needs of the sports participants and certainly not its dwindling fan base.

While organisers will no doubt do their best to promote the event, with Lazarus’ title defence centre stage, the Inter Dominion won’t make a ripple in the competitive sporting landscape of the Victorian capital.

Certainly nothing like the 40,000 who packed Moonee Valley for the 1985 edition. At that time, the sport was in its prime, helped by the fact that night-time entertainment in Melbourne outside of the trots, was virtually non-existent.

The broader question is does harness racing, once a thriving sport in the 1970s and 1980s, have a pulse in Australia? On the current evidence, the news is grim.

The diagnosis becomes completely terminal if it can’t rid itself of the cancer of corruption, which has been a long-time problem for the sport.

If those within the industry – and we are talking about major players here – don’t act with integrity then the social licence of the sport is under threat.

We saw how close the greyhound industry went to being banned (especially in NSW), when major players acted like cowboys (and worse), and lost the faith of the general public.

It’s a pretty simple formula for harness racing. If the cheating and corruption reach a level where it costs more to enforce the law then the benefits which flow back to the community, then it will quickly lose the last skerrick of relevance it has.

At that point, it will be consigned to history. That will be a great shame.

By Bren O'Brien

Reprinted with permission of Punters.com.au

Bren O'Brien is a lifelong follower of harness racing.