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Letter of the Week

Get neighbourly

I’d love to see New Zealand tote pools combined with Australia’s.
I’m still waiting after many years for our state governments to approve national tote pools, but seemingly it is easier to get another country to combine pools, so let’s go with NZ.
They have great racing and are close enough to our timezone for our two countries to work closer together on timing of races and promotion of the other country’s product.
Currently we can bet on their races, but are lucky if we can hear the race on radio. We often only get results, as our presenters are more concerned about previews of Australian meetings than NZ race coverage.
If it’s a jumps race, they just give us the final 1000m, thinking that’s plenty. It’s not!
Sure our pools on their races are small, but if we could listen live they’d build a following and pools would grow much larger.
We seem to promote racing in later timezones fairly well — Hong Kong, South Africa and the UK for example, so why not New Zealand?
On programming, NZ’s big races are run late on their cards, meaning a clash with our busiest time. Maybe they could push their main races forward an hour so they’re run before ours get started?
Also, some of us think we are starved of jumps racing, and having clashes with our near neighbour makes it worse. Our Tasman-hopping jumps jockeys would agree.
Racing.com/channel 78 should have plenty of room for more “product”. New Zealand anyone?

John Tutty
Gold Coast (Qld)
Today's Racing
Friday 29 March
Saturday 30 March
Sunday 31 March