Horse Racing is not a one-team sport
I barrack for Essendon (haven’t had much to cheer about for 20 years) and I was as parochial as you can get in the Ashes, supporting the Aussies against the Poms in the five Tests just gone during the current English summer.
There’s also a passing interest in the State Of Origin in the rugby league where I can be torn, living in New South Wales, but classing myself as a Victorian (being born there), but often finding myself siding with the NSW Blues three times a year.
Tomorrow at Flemington, I might decide to have a bet on the Ciaron Maher and David Eustace-trained Cardigan Queen in race four. For that race, naturally, my loyalties are squarely with Maher and Eustace and her jockey, Harry Coffey, for the approximate 85 seconds of the 1410-metre race.
An hour and ten minutes later, in race six at Headquarters, the Maher and Eustace stable have four runners accepted and I might want to bet against the premier stable and put my money on another horse, from another stable and jockey.
Trainers and horses aren’t football teams or T20 cricket sides – punters’ loyalties come and go race-to-race – which is not what Racing Victoria, helmed by ex-T20 executive Andrew Jones, would want you to believe, if the recent strategic leaks from head office can be taken as is.
Reportedly, Jones and Ben Amarfio, another ex-cricket and AFL club executive before joining RV, want to have teams-based racing where “the top trainers all select two horses each per race and pick the jockeys they want to ride for their team on the night”.
Prize-money, the News Ltd report suggested, could be up to $150,000 a race with a pool of $1.5 million up for grabs, including bonuses for winning stables and staff.
RV is also floating a whip (persuader)-free period of racing over summer as part of the teams-based concept, but that’s another issue altogether.
Owners should not be disadvantaged because they choose to have horses with trainers who are not inside the top ten. I may prefer to have a horse with, for example, David “Butch” Bourne – and wouldn’t that be fun – rather than Maher and Eustace (sorry, Will Bourne), but in doing so, under RV’s “innovation” I’d be excluding my horse from numerous lucrative races.
The Lindsay Parks, Price and Kent Jnrs, Moodys and Mahers have built highly successful businesses – the Coles and Woolies of Victorian racing, so it’s no knock on them in the slightest – but owners shouldn’t be forced to walk past their corner–store trainer, so to speak, if they don’t want to.
There’s room for innovation, but turning racing into a scarf-waving, footy jumper-wearing sport, where loyalties stay with one trainer or jockey isn’t one of them. I’d bet the punters’ agree.
And while I am at it, T20 isn’t really cricket anyway. Five-day Tests is how cricket should be played.
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Congratulations to Bernie Kane who will join Middlebrook Valley Lodge, as is reported earlier in this edition.
The racing and breeding industry, as anyone who has worked in it can vouch for, is a relentless business and Kane admits his three years away from the day-to-day grind was a welcome refresher for him.
That said, he can’t wait to get back working at Middlebrook and being a regular at the sales – as he was most of the time anyway over the past three years.
“I kept my eye in by doing those things for Smithy [Ian Smith of Edinburgh Park] and other people as well as doing my own bloodstock work for a couple of years with all those Queensland clients I had from when I was at Aquis,” he says.
“But it was good to step back a bit and not have that 24/7 responsibility, not having your phone and emails going all that time, and all that sort of thing.”
No doubt many can relate to that and at the same time if you have the passion, often it keeps drawing you back and there’s no doubt Bernie will do a fine job in his sales and bloodstock role.
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Now, from Bernie Kane to Bren O’Brien.
ANZ’s By The Numbers columnist Bren O’Brien will be a panellist at next month’s Backing The Punt conference in Melbourne, to be attended by many of Australia’s most influential racing administrators and wagering minds.
The two-day conference, to be staged on September 13 and 14, will see O’Brien seated alongside Entain’s Karl de Kroo, Racing and Wagering Western Australia chief executive Ian Edwards and JP Morgan’s Don Carducci. They will discuss Australia’s current wagering landscape.
The forum comes at a time when the appetite to bet is declining and regulation is set to be ramped up. Integrity, sponsorship and marketing and modern–day bookmaking and the opportunities for new entrants will also be a topic of conversation.
The game’s much easier when revenues are going up, but the value of quality administrators is when they are operating in far more challenging environments.
This writer, meanwhile, will be doing his own research the previous week in Cairns at Ladbrokes Cannon Park, where the intention is to provide a small economic stimulus package with hopefully some of it completing a full circle.
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On a more serious note, Racing Queensland chief executive Jason Scott, who will also speak at Backing The Punt conference, suggested earlier this week in a radio interview that the whip would eventually be phased out, and in the shorter-term its use be even more heavily restricted than it already is.
He was asked the question in the wake of the revelation that Racing Victoria wants to stage whip-free race meetings in the summer period. It has already staged a series of whip-free races when Giles Thompson was in charge of RV.
“I think in six, eight, ten, 12 years it is inevitable that we’re heading in this direction. My personal opinion is that jockeys always need to carry a whip because we’ve all seen horses hang, two-year-olds, three-year-olds causing trouble, (so they need them) for safety but in terms of using the whip as an accelerator, as you see now, those things are going to change,” Scott told RadioTAB.
“I think people in racing don’t like this. If you read social media, half the people will never bet in Victoria again, which won’t happen. We’re going to need to do something here in Queensland (and) my preferred option is a much slower, more gradual change where we will reduce the number of strikes of the whip per race down even three or four times before we get to zero, just to let the public understand what’s happening and the jockeys can get used to it.
“We’ll certainly make an announcement in the foreseeable future. We won’t be as strong as Victoria. We won’t go from 100 miles an hour to zero, but it’s coming. It’s come everywhere in the world and we’ve got to move with it.
“The sustainability of racing is really important and there’s a lot of challenges to it everywhere.”
Scott comes from a wagering background, having previously worked for Ladbrokes and was running around Sydney betting rings two decades ago. In the same interview he pointed out that in order to maximise turnover, meetings at the major tracks, such as Eagle Farm, would be favoured.
He said punters were wary of the Gold Coast’s polytrack, so he was looking forward to the turf track reopening later this year, predicted to be around Melbourne Cup time.