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Horse Efficient and jockey Michael Rodd win the 2007 Melbourne Cup- AAP Image/Julian Smith
Strictly speaking this headline is dead wrong. We have a physical activity that is engaged in at a competitive level with a set of fairly clear rules and guidelines.
However it doesn’t take much digging and even less thinking to analyse what really makes this sport tick and how it manages to keep afloat and stay relevant.
Breeding horses for racing is a prohibitively expensive business.
Absolutely nothing about them is cheap: from vet bills, stabling, land, transport, training, and son on. How do the great majority of horses who continually fail to perform in the smaller meets continue to turn up throughout the year and effectively prop up the racing system?
Every sport needs its proletariat (or horse equivalent, if you will) of losers. But how do those involved afford to lose so consistently and expensively?
At the lower level of the industry, wins are shared around to ensure an even dip into the prize pool and to guarantee all involved can afford to remain involved and lend an air of legitimacy to those in the winners circle.
Higher up the wheat tends to get separated from the chaff and the better horses will take home the prize more often than not. Higher up also, the astronomical running costs are often deferred by group ownership.
But then we have to look at the influence of the betting agencies and the inextricable relationship they have with the sport.
I think it would be fair to say that horse racing is merely a facade for the gambling industry, their prime shop window. Any other sport which pledged such a complex and symbiotic relationship with the Paddy Powers of this world would be shut down and audited instantly.
But not racing.
Because it’s not a sport. It is a machine designed to facilitate socially acceptable gambling. Neither can live without the other.
As long as we’re all clear on that, then it’s okay, but please stop trying to sell it as a fully legitimate sport replete with equity, honour and athletic endeavour.
Yes, jockeys need to be superfit and disciplined, but that’s one component of a many-headed Hydra, the rest of which they have zero control over.
In a way, I feel like the guy who tells the kids Santa isn’t real. But then most kids already know when the news finally breaks anyway.
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