HAS PANDORA'S BOX BEEN OPENED?

The racing news services and websites all seem alive with the 'flavour of the moment' topic:

It appears that everybody is laying claim to varying degrees of 'entitlement to income' from racing. No matter how obscure and tenuous some of those claims might be.

I touched on this matter very briefly in another post but it is worth considering just how 'viral' this trend could become;

Subsidies : The former racing clubs provided quite a lot of 'assistance' in the past to trainers via subsidized boxes/barns and other facilities. I assume the present operator has honoured these arrangements but I wonder for how much longer?

I can think of no good reason why trainers should not conduct every aspect of their business in precisely the same fashion as other businesses are required to do.

Furthermore - in the case of stabling this would allow the operator to extract a decent return on investment on their fixed properties. Naturally profits from these incomes could be used to continually upgrade training facilities etc. Or better still - improve dividends to shareholders. Lol. Of which management hold a goodly chunk.

One of the better ways in which to do this would be to turn stabling into Sectional Title developments so that trainers (or anyone else for that matter) could own boxes. By doing this a levy would be brought into the equation which would relieve the operator of future maintenance, security and insurance responsibilities on said stabling.

The trainers could then, in turn, simply put some additional squeeze on the usual suspects - the owners. Everybody would end up happy. And the number of colour holders would continue to contract. So less admin for the NHA.

Jockeys : Jockeys contribute nothing to racing. In fact they are simply a drain. They have even been a liability to the industry in the past and their association affairs have required 'assistance' if my memory serves me correctly.

Is it not time to deduct 3% from their stake earnings as a contribution to the trough from which they feed? As a generous gesture there would be no deduction from their basic riding fee.

Jockeys Agents : Same as jockeys. They contribute nothing to racing compared to what they contribute to their friendly cellphone providers. 3% off the fee that they earn from jockeys looks like a perfectly sensible call altogether in line with what the operator is seeking from bookmakers.

As you can see - the unexplored and unexploited opportunities are multifold.

And while we are examining creative solutions let's look at another 'self funding' scam that seems to be gaining popularity with each passing day : The so-called 'buy in'.

The much publicized $1,000,000 dollar race slated for 2016 has every self-respecting racing person tugging at the bit. But what's this I see? Oh - once again it looks as if the owner will be stumping up most of the prize money directly through yearling purchases! That's a relief as present conditions don't suggest that Saftote will be capable of laying that particular golden egg.

Let's do the arithmetic :

$ 1,000,000 = R10,000,000 approximately. If the rand starts strengthening (as interest rates rise) the effective purchasing power of the prize money could actually whittle away by up to 30%. In the meantime the organizers have been merrily gouging R5,000 extra out of each yearling purchased at their recent sales for this event. If they have sold a total of 500 yearlings then they have already raised R 2,500,000 of the prize money which they can tuck away at perhaps as much as 7% for nearly 2 years.

But wait - there's more!

Can you IMAGINE what the nomination and acceptance fees for this race are going to amount to? I am not even going to try and speculate but I suspect the nomination fee alone will be well over R10,000 per entry or whatever remaining balance they have not already sucked out of owners. My gut feel is that it will cost about R50,000 ( and maybe a whole lot more seeing that we are now conversing in US$ ) in nominations and acceptances per runner for the final field. And let's not even talk about the cost of supplementary entries.

But no matter as the OWNER pays.

I see BSA is also employing this tactic so clearly owners are really enjoying both buying their own horses AND thereafter paying additional levies for their own prize money! This is a better development for the operator than waking up and finding that every bookmaker (barring Betting world, of course) has closed down.

I await further developments with interest.

What about this new deal on the operators and the RA and the stakes pot? Aren't now all sponsorship race stakes going to be included in the stakes pot calculation. So the money from sponsors does not add at all to stakes on offer, just means operator has to cough up less. The million dollar race is not in addition to the agreed Stake pot for WC it is included in it. the total stakes for WC is something like R55 million, but instead of that being spread over the whole program, about R10 million goes in one race, leaving all the other races with less stakes than they would have had if the million dollar race didn't happen.