by Brian de Lore
Published 13th May 2022
The slow, painful death of New Zealand racing has never thrown up more evidence in recording its own demise than from the figures I extracted from the New Zealand Stud Book during the past week.
But far worse than the picture painted by these undeniable and tragic statistics is the ineptitude thoroughbred industry administrators display in refusing to recognise the major problems and then act with positive remedial action.
Asleep at the wheel, self-interest, and incompetence are the terms that come to mind when I think about the road New Zealand thoroughbred people are heading down, a road soon to be renamed Path of Penury.
When Mike Hosking related ‘Mike’s Minute’ on Newstalk ZB this past Wednesday morning, he spoke of the NZ Government, but it mirrored everything about the administration of the thoroughbred industry.
He said: “My biggest frustration with this country is that it’s not what it could be. In fact, it’s not what it has been; we lack an aspiration and a determination to be great, we are muddlers, we are dabblers, and we are led from the top by a bunch of out-of-touch theorists who have provided an unprecedented amount of damage to our culture and economy.
“The lack of delivery, the wastage in expenditure, and the recession almost upon us will add another nail in the NZ economic coffin.
“…people can go anywhere, and you know what, they will” – Mike Hosking
“This is a small-minded government with a small-world view, and the result is we are basically shrinking – people can go anywhere, and you know what, they will. In a world screaming out for skills, we are lining ourselves up as a country moderately interested in skills, but not overly, and when you get that, you get a loss of demand.
“Having a smaller number of people paying a greater share of an ever-increasing bill is a path to depravation, not a prosperous future.”
Mike’s rant all but describes racing administration in the new millennia – lacking aspiration and determination, muddlers, out-of-touch theorists, wastage in expenditure, shrinking, and a path to depravation.
If you want to view shrinkage, study my graph below, which I composed from four years of actual figures from matings/foals 2016/17 through to 2021/22, and projected the same rate of decline for the next two seasons to 2022-23. The 2022 matings predict a crop in the 2023 spring of only 2013 foals which equates to a foal depletion of 42 percent over six years.
If that’s not shrinkage, what is? Comparing Australia’s foal crop from stats over the latest available six-year period from 2014/15, foal numbers decreased only 2.76 percent, from 12,989 to 12,640. The 2.76 percent against NZ’s 42 percent directly reflects the lack of sustainability of NZ racing through the diminished viability of racing horses for paltry stakes against ever-increasing costs.
At NZTR, they talk about the assets of racing, i.e., the racecourses they wish to sell up to bolster their finances; they talk in press releases about the wonderful work they’re doing with horse welfare; they talk about the success of twilight racing and the Waikato racing clubs merging to secure the future; they talk about appointments of non-racing university graduates to the executive team with even more administrative expansion to come.
They talk about the opening of synthetic tracks as the panacea for winter racing; and they talk about lots of other similar stuff, none of which will return any increased stakes to the majority of owners who are on the bones of their backside.
They talk only about the items that pat themselves on the back and do nothing for the long-term security of racing. As the Titanic heads straight towards a giant iceberg, they stand on the deck, looking the other way and rearranging the deck chairs.
…crumbling under the threat of a shrinking horse population and the Pattern
It makes you wonder if most of these ever-increasing ‘have no skin in the game’ non-racing directors even understand that the foundations of racing are crumbling under the threat of a shrinking horse population and the Pattern.
In the last report of the NZ Pattern Committee, published on September 15th, 2021, three important races received downgrades for the current season; the Auckland Cup from Gr.1 to Gr.2, the ARC Easter Stakes (formerly the Easter Handicap) from Gr.2 to Gr.3, and the Rotorua Cup from Gr.3 to Listed. A further rationalisation is inevitable in an industry annually contracting in meetings, races run, and thoroughbred population.
Is NZ moving in the same direction as Italy, which ran its last group one race 18 months ago? Italy will never recover; it’s too late for them.
Take as an example the case of the Group Two Ultimate Mazda Japan Trophy run at Tauranga on March 26th. The race worth only $110,000 had only six starters, and the winner, a rising eight-year-old gelding named Gino Severini, won with a local rating of only 93 – an embarrassment that the Pattern Committee will have to deal with at its next meeting. Numerous other examples exist this season.
In the Pattern Committee report, it states: “While each NZ Pattern race justifies its status with respect to the APC (Asian Pattern Committee) Ground Rules, the NZPC views the percentage of Pattern races as unacceptably high if confidence in the integrity of NZ black type is to be maintained.”
…the NZ Pattern race percentage is uncomfortably high at 6.0%
In 2020, a Pattern Review, in part, in its findings, stated that: “the NZ Pattern race percentage is uncomfortably high at 6.0% and could compromise the credibility and commercial value of NZ black type.”
The Australians are already saying the value of New Zealand black type is well overstated, and not without justification, but they have to go quiet occasionally when NZ-bred and trained horses cross the Tasman and continue to win a good percentage of Australian group races with consistent regularity – thank God for the defunct Tavistock and the rising 21-year-old Savabeel.
But soon, we will enter a post-Tavistock and Savabeel era in which our broodmare population has continued to decline. Only five new stallions joining the ranks in each of the past two seasons is worrying when you consider that only one new stallion addition in 14 or 15 makes the grade. A much smaller percentage rise to the heights of Tavistock or Savabeel.
New Zealand has an enviable history of past success thanks to good horsemanship, judicious selection, environment, the temperate climate, suitability to grow good grass, and a fantastic record of rearing and developing quality racehorses since the days of Carbine.
…our horse people are the true assets
But that’s the past; the future looks anything but rosy. The environment will always exist, but our horse people are the true assets. As the thoroughbred population declines, so do our people numbers, with fewer entering the horse business as a career – coinciding with a rising age demographic.
New NZTR CEO Bruce Sharrock is saying the club collateral are the assets. He’s promoting selling all the clubs silverware, putting the money in the NZTR bank at five percent interest, and injecting $50 million annually. He said exactly that.
Sharrock doesn’t say to who, what, and where the $50 million would go, and that’s a worry because NZTR has a poor record of financial management, highlighted by the sale of the four-story Taranaki Street building in Wellington early in the millennia, and then paying rent forever after. That was nothing to do with Sharrock but the departure from similar thinking has not surfaced in recent times.
In a NZ Racing Desk article on April 12, Sharrock said: “At a very high level, if you look around the country and look at the asset base that the industry has, it would be safe to say, including Ellerslie, there would be a billion dollars worth of assets”
“If we can work together.” – Sharrock
Sharrock continued: “You could argue that it is not returning what it should to the industry. If we can work together and rationalise the assets and start generating a reasonable term, and let’s assume five percent which I think is conservative, that’s another $50 million running into our business annually.
“That all of a sudden, transforms the industry for generations beyond ours. Further track closures will also be part and parcel of the way forward. “I think there is further rationalisation of venues to come, without a doubt,” concluded Sharrock
The problems for Sharrock are that, firstly, the New Zealand industry has never worked together and never will; secondly, economists worldwide predict a recession which is likely to diminish discretionary spending at the TAB; thirdly, he is not talking up the need for stakes to increase which we all know is the only mechanism available to drive ownership, and straight-line the thoroughbred population.
Racing people have lost control of their industry, and that’s the problem. The game has undergone a 20-year hijacking by the government and the corporate world. Instead of the TAB and NZTR acting as service providers for the overall health of the thoroughbred industry, they now operate as corporate entities in their own right and have money on deposit that doesn’t appear to be in use for anything but their own expansionism.
the minimum stake could easily be $20,000
If just some of the cash reserves held by the TAB and NZTR went into prizemoney, the minimum stake could easily be $20,000. But there is no appetite surfacing from these boards for increased stakes, especially at the minimum.
New TAB boss Mike Tod didn’t waste any time employing a former workmate from Air New Zealand, a lady named Jodi Williams, who apparently made the corny safety videos that appear on the small screen for compulsory safety procedure viewing before every takeoff. Tod inherited an existing marketing manager, but he must have needed another?
Is anyone getting a sense of Deja Vu here with the name of John Allen coming to mind? And Sharrock has admitted employing two graduates with two more yet to be employed.
Is anyone getting a sense of Deja Vu here with the name of John Allen coming to mind? And Sharrock has admitted employing two graduates with two more yet to be employed. How could they possibly add value or save an industry that’s foreign to them?
So, an expanding admin is needed to preside over an industry haemorrhaging to death. Does anyone in racing comprehend this mindless stuff that results in our best horse people retiring or their relocation across the ditch to Australia? They are our assets, and we are losing them.
Mike Hosking hit the mark when he said, “people can go anywhere, and you know what, they will.”