Is it really fair to blame bookies for the poor state of racing fields? Maybe they don't contribute as much as they should when it comes to taxes, which I suppose can lead to a lack of decent prize money, but it seems a bit too simplistic to me. Most people in the game can't afford to take on the big breeders and the wealthy when comes to the sales, so have to settle for the left overs. There would have to huge numbers of struggling owners who for all intents and purposes, make up the backbone of racing. Surely the numbers indicate that it's these people who, through no fault of their own, are responsible for the poor standards we see on a daily basis. And as for the mega breeders themselves, the less said the better. Oh bugger it, I'll say it ... **** 'em.
I think the biggest factor in the decline in quality is the amount of racing we have and this is only to provide the bookies with a product for the bet on anything brigade.
Cyc, go and wash your mouth out with carbolic soap and water. Such language. Have you been drinking export dingo p*ss? I thought you only sold that to us! The reason there is so much low quality racing (other than as Bluesky9 stated the need for product to keep the bookies in the racing business) is because of the over breeding of lesser quality racehorses. I have always thought that racehorse ownership should be considered as an expensive hobby. Some people chose to pay silly money for a season ticket to go and watch their favourite football team all season and they get their entertainment for their money (depending on who they are watching!) but no actual return on their investment. Racehorse ownership should be considered the same way. Whatever your horse cost at the sales, you have to pay to stable it and have it trained and pay to have it entered in races. Naturally everyone hopes that they will win some races and the horse will pay its way. That is not the reality of the situation for the vast majority of racehorses: at the end of the season most of them will have won nothing and a few placed finishes will not pay the bills. The time honoured complaint from the racing industry is that the bookies do not pay enough for the product, so prize money levels are too low. Their solution to this malaise is to have more and more poor quality racing to increase betting turnover because the annual Levy is negotiated based on that. The people that run racing are economically illiterate. I have very little sympathy with what you refer to as “struggling owners” because if you have several thousand pounds to buy a horse and tens of thousands of pounds to pay for the upkeep, you are not on the breadline of society and there are more deserving cases of my benevolence.
Hey QM been a while mate, hope have ya' been? Well I hope. My struggling owners" quip is not so much aimed at society as such, but at the bottom end of racing. There is no doubt that the world would be a much better place if wealth was more evenly distributed. But I suppose that goes against the grain in some respect. If those who work hard or invest great sums in a business can't gain what for them is a fair return, then investment will dry up. As much as we cry and gnash our teeth at the way multi-nationals go about their business, the old hard facts are that without the top end of town, the world would not exist as we know it today. And that is not to say that there are not a whole host of things in life that we can improve on. But that is another story. There are probably millions of people who are connected to the racing industry in one manner or another. The spin off from racing is enormous. I don't what proportion of the total turn over can be attributed the likes of the middle East Royal families and the mega breeders who spend the obscene amounts of money supporting their desires, but I'd be very surprised if it was anything near what the rest of the nation passes around in a twelve month period. It isn't just the people who can't afford to buy valuable stock who are the backbone of the industry, I suppose in reality, it's the whole host of people in other professions that keep it afloat. The spin off industries reach into just about every part of the community. We have crap meetings with rubbish stock because it represents the minimum survival level. There is no easy fix. I think it's probably always been this way, and I expect that it always will be. The bookies have at times been referred to as little more than parasites preying on the poor old punter. But they too have a place in the overall scheme of things. At least it's regulated. In some respects, I suppose it's really the person with a predilection of gambling who is the true root of the problem. The strength of the industry lies in the need to play the odds. That money pumped into the game though, also makes for it's survival, for it feed millions of people. But so too does the opium trade.
From the point of view of racing, Cyc, the people that run the sport here look enviously across the Channel at the French. There are no bookmakers in socialist France and the State monopoly Paris Mutuel rakes off a guaranteed percentage that makes their racing the richest in Europe. They have loads of mediocre provincial racing but nobody complains in a land of peasants as most French punters play the horses like Brits play the lottery and never actually go to the tracks. We let the genie out of the bottle more than sixty years ago when we legalised bookmaking to stamp out the illegal back-street trade. Our equivalent of the Paris Mutuel is the Horserace Totalisator Board (the Tote) but its fortunes have waned over the years because pool betting can never compete with the variety of product offered by betting offices and we know that bookmakers very rarely actually have a mathematically sound book like the pool is assured. They rely on cleaning up on races where an outsider wins that has hardly attracted a penny. As favourites win nearly forty percent of all races, bookmakers are never going to get wealthy overnight but they should accumulate good returns over a period of time. Racing as an industry does provide a large amount of employment in the economy but much of it has always been low-paid and low skill, such as stable staff. It does not matter whether the horse is a Derby winner or a selling plater, somebody still has to look after it. From that perspective there ought to be some imperative on the elected liars to maintain the industry as a source of employment and improve conditions; but that well never happen as it is a minority sport. If the desire for gambling related directly to the quality of racing, then surely the greatest racing in the World would be at Happy Valley and Sha Tin in Hong Kong because the Chinese are absolutely gambling mad. I have been to Happy Valley; the course is surrounded by skyscrapers and the grandstand is about eight tiers high and packed with punters. They are proof that punters will bet on anything as half the horses racing over in our former colony are ex-British and European horses that have been sold because they were not good enough over here.
