Two disturbing injustices were threatened by Newmarket's card on Saturday, so racing should be thankful the damage was limited to one. It could have produced a champion trainer by nonsensical means. As it is, we have the absurdity of what is still known as the Cambridgeshire meeting boasting of being the most valuable raceday ever staged in this country.

The cause of these distortions - a legitimate but still dubious falsification of Flat racing's accounts - is the latest extension of a troubling rash known as sales races.

While the disapproval of riches during a credit crunch may seem perverse, it is time to restrict the breed before it invites ridicule on racing in the very way that cricket is presently demeaned by staging exhibition games for Sir Allen Stanford's millions.

The concept - initially paraded as an incentive for owners to maximise returns on their yearling purchases - has swollen, this year, to a point where the races now confuse the priorities of far too many elite cards.

This week, it was the Tattersalls Timeform Millions at Newmarket - one race for colts and another for fillies. Their values were huge, crazily dwarfing the Cambridgeshire and the group one Sun Chariot Stakes, but entirely funded by owners, who paid up to £10,000 to run and up to £7,000 to think about it.

Linked to individual auction houses, which get the publicity without the pain of outlay, such sales races offer rewards way beyond their stature and are coveted only by the winning owners and the bloodstock agents who swank around them.

While owners are prepared to pay, and racecourses are keen to puff out their chests about prize-money, some may consider it an innocent practice, yet it is meddling with the integrity of racing's time-honoured values while doing nothing for the profile of the sport.

Had Richard Hannon, whose acumen with two-year-olds means he farms many such contests, won both the colts' and fillies' versions at Newmarket, he would have overhauled Aidan O'Brien in the trainers' championship. And, while Hannon has been a marvel all season, that would be a regrettable way to take the title from a man who has won 12 group ones in Britain alone.

Sales races are shallow affairs, rightly scorned by a discerning public. The racing authorities should now perform their own censorship before this self-serving fashion brings the sport into disrepute.