FROM THE SHERIFF'S DESK: FOCUSSING ON THE BIG PICTURE

By John Schreck | Thursday, May 18, 2017

John Schreck, a former Chief Steward in both Sydney and Hong Kong, has seen both the colourful and the dark sides of racing. His wealth of experience and his deep knowledge of racing matters across the board is unquestioned and the reputation he built as a racing ‘lawman’ remains firmly entrenched in racing’s history. Schreck’s personal blog, ‘From the Sheriff’s Desk', appears exclusively on HRO.

Sydney is city of four million people with racetracks worth millions of dollars and I can’t get my head around the fact that all of that is closed down while they run a race meeting at a little country town of about three thousand people ... as was the case at Scone last Saturday.

It gives me no joy to say that and I mean it with absolutely no disrespect to Scone at all, but it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me.

After all, Scone had their Cup day on Friday when the town closed down and there were many more people at the track than there were on Saturday. If someone was looking from outer space and saw four beautiful racetracks standing idle they would wonder what is going on?

I have always believed headquarters is headquarters and, in terms of a consistent and on-going valuable point of interest, it deserves more than got on Saturday.

As I said, it doesn’t seem to make a lot of business sense to have headquarters standing idle in prime time.

If you don’t provide the Sydney product for your Sydney customers they are likely to go somewhere else ... the beach or the wineries for example.

Would they leave for the one day only? Probably, but why ask them to go somewhere else at all?

Surely, particularly in this day and age, you should be pushing and promoting your product to the maximum which, in this case, would mean making certain racing takes place in Sydney every Saturday.

Please don’t misunderstand.

Meetings such as the Scone carnival are wonderful occasions. The city fathers allow a holiday for the occasion and encourage people to go to the races and the whole community generally gets right behind the race day.

The Friday meeting and the town holiday is good for the game ... but it has got its place.

To close Sydney down for the Saturday for it though is taking things a bit too far.

Well, at least that is my opinion.

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I have been asked a question by a reader concerning the disciplinary records of jockeys.

The question reads: ‘Stewards often say that they have taken a jockey’s past record into account ‘when assessing penalty.’ Is there any period of subsequent ‘good behaviour’ which would allow past indiscretions to fall by the wayside so that the jockey can move on and his or her career and not be burdened by something that happened a long time ago?’

The answer is yes there is.

The black mark does go away. Just as with points on your driver’s licence, it doesn’t last forever.

For more major offences and repeat offenders though, it will be a fair amount of time before any particularly poor record is set aside.

The critical point is it has to be ‘something that happened a long time ago’ and that claim has to be backed up by a record of clean race riding for a significant period of time.

For example, if a jockey has a record of ten years of clean race riding that is obviously very much in their favour when assessing penalties.

The bottom line, in simple terms, is that the person’s record has to be good enough for long enough in order to not take into account ‘priors.’

Then, as in society, the person can start with a clean sheet.

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In closing, Australia, being an island, has been very lucky to avoid many of the threats of contagious diseases in animals.

In spite of this we have had a few cases in recent months where racing authorities have had to deal with such a threat.

It should be remembered that the proper procedure when a horse contracts a contagious disease is to notify authorities as soon as possible and quarantine the property as quickly as possible.

If everybody does that, while it is still not good to have the disease present, we will have the best outcome in the circumstances.

The game is bigger than any player and it has to be protected above everybody else.