RA’s black type board meeting cancelled
Australia’s black type impasse continues, after a Racing Australia (RA) board meeting set to thrash out the issue was cancelled due to the likelihood of there being no agreement.
RA’s six board members were due to meet on Tuesday for the body’s September meeting, where a proposal under development from RA for a new system of determining the black type pattern in this country was to have been discussed.
However, well-placed sources told ANZ News the meeting was cancelled because of the realisation a resolution would not be reached on the matter.
It was unclear whether a new date for a meeting had been set.
Calls by this masthead to RA chief executive Paul Eriksson and board member Rob Rorrison – Australia’s delegate to the Asian Racing Federation’s (ARF) Asian Pattern Committee (APC) – were not returned.
In June, Rorrison told ANZ that RA was progressing with a review of Australia’s black type system with the aim of having “a working pattern and that it’s recognised”.
The system under development would not exactly fit the designs of the ARF, due to legal advice tabled at RA that under Australia’s state system, certain parts of the old Australian pattern system could run counter to the country’s anti-competition laws.
Australia’s black type system operated smoothly across the states for some 50 years until 2018, with no mention of anti-competition laws.
But the country has had no functioning pattern committee since 2018, amid the downturn in relations between Peter V’landys’ Racing NSW (RNSW) and Racing Victoria.
Australia has had no black type races downgraded for some 13 years.
RNSW last year had 17 “upgrades” denoted on its website and that of RA – on which V’landys is his state’s representative.
But those upgrades were rejected by the APC, not satisfied with Australia’s absence of a functioning black type committee, and thus the races involved do not appear under their supposed new designations in sales catalogues.
RNSW increased its list of rogue races to 18 last week, bumping up this Friday’s Mona Lisa Stakes at Wyong from Listed to Group 3.