After the havoc wreaked by Covid-19 on the world as a whole and on the sport of racing too, we’re starting to adjust to the new normal. While Japan and Hong Kong once again showed how far ahead of the world they are, in the sense that they hardly lost a fixture to the pandemic and their handles continued to soar at stratospheric levels. Europe and USA have also been able to continue racing behind closed doors since June in the former’s case and without a break Stateside. Meanwhile in what could be the most backward racing jurisdiction in the world; India there’s a glimmer of hope that we could start racing sometime in October.
Sometimes the shit has to hit the fan for things to happen and it just might be that COVID-19 has inadvertently forced our sport into the 21st Century. India is one of the few racing nations where the concept of conducting racing is still about packing in the audience into the racecourse, something that isn’t going to work in the age of Social distancing. The advent of the internet and the smartphone has pretty much gone unnoticed by the people who run racing. The only beneficiary of this has been the illegal bookmakers who sit and take online betting at Zero Tax from their customers’ mobile phones. While our beleaguered clubs try and run their meagre and fast declining Totes under a back breaking 28% Tax deduction. Anyway that is an argument for another time.
The “Brahmastra” that has been handed to Indian racing is permission to Four Clubs so far to conduct online betting on their totes. Now the next problem we face is whether we have anyone in the sport who has the training to use the weapon.
Bangalore, Mysore, Calcutta and Hyderabad have been granted in principle approval to conduct Online betting. One hopes the Governments of Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu too follow suit. It’s imperative that we grab this opportunity with both hands and move forward. For the first time ever racing has an opportunity to look outward rather than inward to expand our audience. So far the signs look ominous as every Club as is their wont and innate ability to always miss the forest for the trees look as if they’re each planning to go it alone. The buzzword among the aged mandarins who run the sport being their own, “APP.” What they don’t quite understand is that for this to succeed as the weapon that it’s designed to be, everything must be based on a single national totalisator pool. Or else going it alone is going to give us Pea Shooters instead of something powerful.
Further to this all of us have to change. Going online means that your audience has to be delivered a well packaged product with a lot more information and quality presentation. In between races, shots of pigeons sitting and shitting on an asbestos roof isn’t going to cut it. Professionals and owners whether they like it or not are going to have to start talking to the intended audience and involving them in the entire process of what is a multi layered and cerebral sport. We have to reach an audience and excite them into getting involved.
In the absence of any racing here in India one has had to whet one’s racing appetite with mainly English racing. It’s always fascinating and informative to listen to people like John Gosden, Frankie Dettori, Oisin Murphy and the like, further you need people like Nick Luck, Matt Chapman, Francesca Cumani and Brough Scott to ask the right questions. Similarly you need race-callers like Simon Holt and Richard Hoiles to describe races as expertly as they do. You also need journalists who have an actual understanding of the many facets of the sport so that we get some proper information out there, our current mediocre lot spend more time trolling and pushing their own opinions and agendas rather than make a little bit of an effort to make their writing interesting. We still go on with our ancient production setups at each club using obsolete technology when our smartphones have better cameras in them. It’s about time the Turf Authorities sat down and conducted a technology audit. I’m dead certain that our production work can by done a lot cheaper and in High Definition. This has to be done alongside online betting or else we’ll just look like a low end product not worth watching since the pictures are so grainy. The look and feel of the entire experience has to be rich.
In the old days one needed TV and a presence in Print Dailies for the world to know you existed. This is something that has changed drastically in the last decade or so. The advent of platforms like YouTube have meant that you can show your product to a worldwide audience without needing to be on Television. Similarly Social Media platforms like Instagram and Twitter have changed the dynamic of getting your message out there effectively. Now the problem that exists is that our people who promote the sport have scant knowledge of how all this works or the ability to differentiate between a hash-tag and a hash-brown. Unfortunately the majority of their Social media exposure is flowery Good Morning messages, poor jokes and screenshots of my tweets.
Unfortunately the raw fact is that despite not having any racing for nigh on Six Months, I greatly doubt any of the Clubs even the ones with online betting permission have done anything to prepare themselves for the way ahead. The quasi-governmental structure of the administration that runs racing in India and its ancient make-up keeps the sport in penury. A friend of mine joked the other day that in these COVID-19 affected times, when older people above the age of 60 are advised to sit at home, one doubts if we’d be able to make a quorum of Stewards on a race-day.
We have a great opportunity, our fingers are crossed that we don’t squander this too.
RACING & BREEDING IN INDIA 