The Bart Cummings trained Precedence during track work ahead of last week’s Cox Plate. Photograph: Tracey Nearmy/AAP Image
Earlier this month, Melbourne motorists pondered a billboard paid for by the Coalition for the Protection of Racehorses. It wasn’t up for long. For racing enthusiasts, the image of a dead thoroughbred just a few furlongs from Flemington was sacrilege. As always, there was scant chance of them reaching any sort of middle ground with the animal rights protesters. As far as horse racing folk are concerned, the placard wavers wouldn’t know what a horse was if it trotted into their Centrelink appointment. The protesters, in turn, see racing people as heartless and dollar driven.
Anyone who has witnessed a trainer or strapper tend to an injured thoroughbred knows the folly of this. But the ‘Industry’ – which encompasses everyone from the plummy VRC committeeman to thegobby geezer in the Ladbrokes ads – is harder to defend. Their priorities are fiscal, not equine. As long as Melbourne opens its shoulders and unleashes at the Spring Carnival, everything else is a mere trifle.
Yet if ever the turnstiles told a bald faced lie, it is at the Spring Carnival. More than 100,000 people may pass through on a warm day but the majority are there to be seen, to drink two handed, to talk crap and to get lucky. If you diverted the trains at Flinders St, dropped the hordes in, say, Boort, erected a few giant screens, plied them with Dom Perignon and cantered a Shetland Pony through thrice hourly, most would be none the wiser.
For 11-and-a-half months of the year, racing is at the margins, at the mercy of the wagering industry and increasingly at odds with life in modern Australia. “Change or die” is the mantra in Australia’s hyper-competitive sporting marketplace. Terrified by the potential physical, psychological and legal ramifications of head injuries, the AFL sanitised its core product. Australian soccer, once bedevilled by financial incompetence and occasional violence on the terraces, reinvented itself and is drawing younger fans in droves.
Some of the less conservative racing clubs have heeded the call, scheduling marquee races late in the afternoon, thus guaranteeing maximum exposure for sponsors and ensuring punters consume as much of the sponsor’s product as possible. Many have also diversified their revenue streams with corporate functions, weddings, trade shows and conferences.
But enticing young fans remains a hard sell. In 1880, when a third of Melbourne’s population attended the Melbourne Cup, many would have had some sort of affinity with the thoroughbred and a first-hand knowledge of life on the land. But the realities of horse racing contrast starkly with 21st-century life in Australia’s big cities. Ours is an increasingly urbanised and risk-averse society. In many Australian schools, somersaults, cartwheels, swings and ropes are banned. From this, racing expects are expected to draw the next generation of fans and participants to a sport where the spectre of equine and human fatality looms large. What’s more, 25% of our citizens were born in countries where they don’t have public holidays for horse races and get misty eyed about champion thoroughbreds.
But Australian racing’s problems run deeper than attracting new fans. For too long, jockeys, trainers, owners and racing clubs have been held hostage by the TAB and the breeding industry. There are too many horses and too many tinpot races. No one can convincingly explain what happens to the sizeable percentage of horses that don’t pay their way – the figures on how many are killed and how many are kept are blurry. The industry breeds for speed. The riches on offer in two-year-old racing demand it. Participants are tantalised by the prospect of a quick return on their investment. They throw enough eggs at the wall and hope the occasional one doesn’t break.
The odd freak sprinter aside, Australian horses seem to get slower every year. European second stringers have been competitive in our major staying races in recent times. Potential superstars invariably rupture tendons, jar up on the hard tracks or are shuffled off to the breeding shed. Our most esteemed race, the Cox Plate, was last year won by a maiden, the equivalent of a schoolboy winning the Brownlow Medal. On Melbourne Cup Day, as the Aga Khan’s horse lay dying in the Flemington straight, Damien Oliver, a man who has damaged racing’s reputation, was making his victory speech. As the horse was being euthanised, the host broadcaster was interviewing a mixologist in a corporate marquee.
Neville Penton, the author of A Racing Heart, once wrote that the sport “elevates a chosen few and dumps its rejects into life’s big tip”. Australian racing remains the sandpit of former casino bosses, ad men, mining magnates, bookmaking dynasties and the landed gentry. But those at the coalface do it tough. Being a jockey, in particular, is a perilous pursuit. A recent Medical Journal of Australia study found that being a jockey in Australia was more dangerous than being a professional boxer, skydiver or motorcyclist. In just over 12 months, four female jockeys have died on Australian racetracks. Training horses is also increasingly fraught and invariably a one-way ticket to the poor house. Lee Freedman, arguably the most successful trainer of his generation, recently relinquished control of his stable because he couldn’t turn a buck.
The Spring Carnival still has much going for it. A glorious spring day at Flemington still feels like an entire city emerging from its winter burrow. And racing still taps into some very Australian traits – our fatalism, our harsh humour, our love of an opinion. As the ABC’s Michael Hutak wrote last year, “the turf encapsulates this country’s will to risk, to transgress, to straighten and to punish.”
But when the booze-hounds catch the last train home, the marquees come down, the horses are sent to the spelling paddock and the celebrities stumble back to the D List, reality sets in. All we’re left with is empty racetracks, dead jockeys and a nagging question – save for a month of manufactured mayhem, is all this hullaballoo economically viable and in any way justifiable?
The Bart Cummings trained Precedence during track work ahead of last week’s Cox Plate. Photograph: Tracey Nearmy/AAP Image
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