AMERICA AT LARGE: On the first Saturday in May of 1968, the painter Bob Bolles drew the name of the victorious horse, Dancer's Image, and won more than $100 in the Kentucky Derby pool at McSorley's pub in New York City. Bolles sportingly celebrated by spending more than half of his winnings buying drinks for the house.

When it emerged that Dancer's Image had raced under the influence of butazolodin, the horse was disqualified, while runner-up Forward Pass was awarded the first-place purse.

The decision provided a pretext for reconvening the participants of the saloon pool. Meeting in emergency session, the committee ordered Bolles to return his pool winnings, which were then distributed to the fellow who'd held the ticket on Forward Pass. He was in turn, of course, obliged to buy more drinks for the house, so it was a win-win situation.

In our defence, it can at least be said that we pub patrons were acting out of pure self-interest. The same, alas, cannot be said of the group of Churchill Downs stewards, particularly one Rick Leigh, who presaged this week's investigation into the 2003 Derby result by publicly terming a post-race photograph of Funny Cide's jockey, Jose Santos, as "very suspicious" before the stewards met to consider the issue.

That the stewards got it right in the end is almost irrelevant. The accusation (and clearly it became that) will leave a cloud over Santos as long as he rides horses. Trainer Barclay Tagg, Sackatoga Stable, which owns the gelding, and the sport itself will remain under a cloud of suspicion as the result of a newspaper's mishandling of what became known for a few days as the "Derby Scandal". And while the Kentucky stewards didn't exactly cover themselves with glory in this little episode, the most severe indictment should be reserved for the Miami Herald, which instigated the whole mess in a frantic attempt to scoop the world.

Before delving into the specifics of this sordid little episode, it is worth noting the paradoxical thinking which underlies racing regulations. It is perfectly permissible to beat the living bejeezus out of your horse with a hand-held whip, but trying to goad him with a hand-held battery can earn you a stretch in the pokey.

Batteries are illegal pretty much everywhere. This doesn't mean a jockey at some backwater track doesn't try to use one from time to time, and occasionally it even happens at a major venue, but you'd have to be pretty brazen, and stupid, to try it in front of 125,000 horseplayers with 20 million more watching on television.

Nothing untoward was suggested on the day of the race. In a race favourites rarely win, 12 to 1 shot Funny Cide won the 129th Kentucky Derby and went back to New York to await the second leg of the American Triple Crown, the Preakness Stakes, in Baltimore this coming Saturday.

Then, last weekend, the Miami Herald charged clumsily into print with a story suggesting that Santos might have used a buzzer on Funny Cide, replete with quotes from steward Leigh acknowledging that a photo appearing to show an unidentified dark object between Santos' hand and his whip appeared "suspicious".

Beyond the photograph, the Herald expose relied heavily on turf writer Frank Carlson's telephone interview with Santos, whose explanation surely would have seemed suspicious - if that's what he'd actually said.

When Carlson asked Santos about a purported "object" in his hand, the jock replied that it was a "cue ring" used to alert outriders, which sounded like the horse-racing equivalent of "the dog ate my homework". For one thing, the "cue ring" is a term utterly foreign to the sport. Nobody, including Carlson and the stewards, had heard of one. For another, jockeys use hand signals, not devices, to beckon an outrider. And for a third, the Derby winner wouldn't need to summon an outrider anyway, since Charlsie Canty, with a stick microphone and hand-held TV camera, would have been there to rendezvous with him before he even had a chance to catch his breath.

Santos is a native of Chile, and, while he has been racing in the US for nearly two decades, still speaks with a heavy accent. Turns out he was describing an ionised bracelet called a "Q-Ray" he wears on his left hand for arthritis.

To be fair, it should be noted that even when he testified at Tuesday's stewards' meeting, Santos' pronunciation of "arthritis" did sound a lot like "outriders", but mightn't Carlson and the Herald editors considered employing an interpreter before rushing into print with so serious a charge? Even before the inquiry, a cursory examination of the evidence suggested the newspaper was barking up the wrong tree. Videotape of the Derby showed that Santos deftly switched whip-hands three times down the stretch run. If he could do that with a battery in his hand he should be doing magic acts in Vegas instead of riding nags for a living.

The New York Racing Association didn't even wait for the Kentucky inquiry. They enhanced the photos and determined the same thing the Churchill Downs stewards were eventually forced to conclude when they blew up the picture 250 times its size: There was nothing but a whip in Santos' hand, and the "dark space" was just the green silks of a jockey trailing behind.

When Santos returned to ride in New York last week, the first thing he heard when he lost a race was the shout of a disgruntled punter claiming he couldn't win "because they took the battery away". He'll be hearing that for the rest of his riding career.

Upon being exonerated, Santos profusely thanked the Churchill Downs stewards. He wasn't quite as sanguine when it came to Carlson and the Miami Herald.

"The guy," said the jockey, "did a terrible job."

And he's dead right about that.