For anyone with any interest in horse racing, there is one small mercy in the Kieren Fallon affair. Next week is the Cheltenham Festival – the greatest three days racing on the planet, the highlight of the racing year. The small mercy is this: as a flat race jockey, Fallon has nothing to do with Cheltenham, which is a jump racing festival.

That is about the only comfort from the past few days in which racing has moved from the back to the front pages, for all the wrong reasons. Now, today, comes a fresh set of allegations over the departure from his horse, while in the lead, of Sean Fox.

In the week before Cheltenham, racing should be in the headlines for the magic which will be created next week, as the incomparable Best Mate attempts to win the Gold Cup, the most important race of the calendar, for the third successive year. Instead, the stories have been about alleged corruption, incompetence and skulduggery.

Instead of asking about the horses, the questions have all been variations on one theme: how bent is racing?

I have seen the sport from four different sides: first, working in the Disciplinary Department of the Jockey Club, which enforces and upholds the rules of racing; then as a racing commentator; for a while as the Evening Standard’s racing columnist, the Mug Punter; and now as an owner. It’s clear to me that there is indeed corruption in racing, but that it needs to be kept in proportion.

It’s an unfortunate fact of life that no sport can remain entirely clean once it becomes a vehicle for betting. Bruce Grobbelar, the ex-Liverpool goalkeeper, was accused of throwing football matches; Hansie Cronje, the former South African cricket captain, was as corrupt as they come; the list of fighters who have been thought to have taken a dive is practically endless. As a sport in which betting is so integral a part – racing is in large measure funded by betting – horse racing is especially vulnerable to cheating.

That vulnerability has increased markedly in the past few years with the rise of the betting exchanges, in which sophisticated computer programmes make it possible for punters to bet directly with each other, missing out the bookmaker altogether. And, crucially, punters can bet not just on whether a horse will win, but on whether it will lose. Anyone can offer odds on the websites about a horse, and can make fortunes if the horses they choose to lay (to use the jargon) loses.

Hence the idea that some horses might be ‘stopped’, and the careful scrutiny of betting patterns which look suspicious, which lies behind some of the more lurid accusations against Kieren Fallon. The current trauma began last Tuesday, when Fallon rode an undistinguished horse, Ballinger Ridge, in an undistinguished race, to finish an undistinguished second. Undistinguished, that is, but for one thing: moments before reaching the winning post, Fallon had been a massive ten lengths clear, before easing the horse down and then getting pipped on the line.

Punters who had backed the horse were, with good reason, up in arms. Fallon, clearly, should have won. The jockey apologised, saying he was only human and had made a mistake. But Fallon has been dogged by a reputation as being a character who, at the very least, gets into scrapes. Allegations started flying around that he had deliberately thrown the race, fuelled by a Jockey Club investigation into ‘irregular betting patterns’ on the race.

To anyone who is not speaking through their pocket – who did not lose money on the race – it is obvious, however, that while Fallon might have made a dreadful mistake, he did not deliberately lose the race. If he had wanted to ‘stop’ the horse, he would have been a certifiable idiot to have pushed it into a ten length lead, and then blatantly to stop riding. The real problem is when, very subtly, a jockey never makes any real effort, never puts his horse into a decent position, and never lets it look remotely as though the horse stood a chance of winning. And then the question is almost impossible to answer: deliberate or not?

Whether or not Fallon is as bad an egg as the further allegations made against him at the weekend – that he boasted of his corruption and handed over inside information about his horses – is in some ways irrelevant. Even if Fallon had never been born, racing would, by its very nature, be open to corruption.

But what to some people might be extremely dodgy behaviour is to others perfectly acceptable. Take handicapping, in which horses are given different weights to carry so that, in theory, they all finish together. If a horse is given a high handicap, his chances of winning can be destroyed. So trainers will sometimes run a horse in a race which is quite unsuitable; when the horse runs poorly, the handicapper will then drop his weight, so next time he runs he has a much better chance. When I worked in the Disciplinary Department, that was by far the most common problem with which we had to deal. But one person’s skulduggery is another’s wiliness.

My own horse, Spring Dawn, ran earlier this season over a distance which turned out to be far too long. We didn’t do it deliberately – the trainer thought he might benefit from a longer distance. His handicap fell. Were we cheating? Absolutely not – we wanted more than anything to win. But there is no denying the benefit he had next time out of a reduced weight. And even when such ‘errors’ have been deliberate, half the fun of punting is trying to work that out for yourself, and bet on the horse when it finally runs in the right race.

Racing is never going to be entirely clean. Nor is football. Nor is cricket. It’s fashionable to dismiss image as mattering far less than substance, but it matters. Do people think of cricket as bent? They never used to, but then the evidence of match-fixing emerged. Instead of denying the problem, cricket faced up to it. That is the racing authorities’ challenge. In the past, they’d have denied any problem. Now, at last, they seem to realise that they don’t merely have to take action – they have to be seen to be doing it.