THE SUNSHINE COAST NEWSPAPER COLUMN - WHEN THE GOING GETS TOUGH ...

By Graham Potter | Sunday, April 5, 2015

Graham Potter writes a weekly column for the Sunshine Coast daily. Due to demand from those having trouble accessing the paper these columns are now also published on HRO courtesy of the Sunshine Coast daily.

It’s been a developing side theme for some months now but as each race- meeting passes into the record books the deteriorating state of the racetrack racing surfaces in South East Queensland is fast taking over centre stage ... and the critic’s reviews are not good.

And I’m not talking about rain affected tracks?

So what is it that has caused the overall, general state of the going to fall so far below an acceptable level and lead to an understandable, very worrying, downturn in betting turnover (ie income revenue).

The absence of racing at Eagle Farm for the last eight months has been a critical factor in the way both events have unfolded. As much as the old one-hundred-and fifty year old track was maligned in the months prior to its closure, we all now know that the track was closed too early.

You could call that hindsight or you could see that as a major error by those who trumpeted the closure and gave a timeline for a sparkling, new state of the art track ... knowing that the full funding for the entire upgrade project had yet to be physically received and important tenders had yet to be finalised.

Sure, they didn’t see the change of government coming, but there were delays before that eventuality which has only compounded the problem facing Racing Queensland now.

Quite simply Eagle Farm’s premature closure, or the failure of the project to run to schedule ... whichever way you want to look at it ... took more racing to other tracks than was previously envisaged.

With Doomben having to be protected as Brisbane Racing Club’s only Winter Carnival racetrack, still more meetings, with more associated track wear and tear, were handed out to other race-clubs ... some already under pressure ... whose racing surfaces, quite naturally, started feeling the strain of their burden. (We won’t even talk about Toowoomba and Ipswich here. They have their own stories).

And was another flaw in the thinking of those managing the whole process?

Enough thought doesn’t seem to have been given to the compilation of fixture lists (from draft to final to adjusted) to maximise turnover potential.

Eagle Farm was a top turnover track. One of the reasons was that the state’s top jockeys rode there. Now you can talk about betting on horses but, to a large degree, people are more confident betting on top jockeys and top jockeys just don’t go to certain venues.

Those venues obviously deserve their quota but, tactically, if you are losing one of you mainstay tracks, you surely have to rearrange the pieces you have left on the board to your greatest advantage.

I, for one, would have to question if that challenge has been successfully met.

That’s one explanation of how this current situation has come about. There will be others. Some will be more forceful. Some a bit more forgiving.

None of us are immune from mistakes, but the bigger question now is, has racing decision makers learnt anything from these past difficult months ... or not ... and, in the worst case scenario, where is racing heading if the latter option should prove to be true?

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