October
SeptemberIt's grim up north
How lucky we are in Australia. How threatened can we be?
Here in England again, on another sabbatical, it is clear to me that the UK racing industry hangs by a thread. The bookmakers have not only bitten the hand that has fed them, but have chewed the arm off as well.
Since negotiating their truly amazingly greedy terms, offering “a share of our gross profits from racing”, as opposed to their already ungenerous 1.5 percent of turnover, they have now also shown their profit performance to be dwindling in that particular area.
And no wonder. The product is awful! They aren’t too far away from their foundation products of win and each way, and of course the punting dollar (pound) is spread across about 15 large bookmaking firms and quite a number of smaller ones, so that doesn’t help dividends either.
The penciller (settler) in the back room, working out the returns on copies of the slips of paper the bets were handwritten on, works about the same as he did 50 years ago. The Tote has been deserted by the controlling body and has now virtually gone, sold to Betfred the bookie a couple of years back by shortsighted politicians of the “What’s left unsold that we own?” variety.
Prizemoney is appalling. A midweek race meeting at Brighton or Kempton pays £2000 or £3000 ($A3500-$A5250) to the winning owner of each race. Accordingly, with no money coming from betting, entrance fees are high. Last month it cost £80 ($A140) to get on to the course at Goodwood — admittedly a meeting of some note, but you needed to take your own seat!
At that prestigious meeting, horses costing half a million, mostly owned in Dubai, often raced in races for £20,000.
There’s another terrible thing happening here. In each large town there are about half a dozen variously owned “betting shops”, and because the racing product is so boring and the punter is fed up with having a few bob each way, on offer is an ugly alternative which the bookmakers have fully exploited.
They have been allowed to put electronic gaming machines against the walls. These machines would be called fruit machines, one-armed bandits or pokies in Australia. They are by no means state-of-the-art, and Ainsworth or IGT would leave them for dead in terms of sophistication, but they can handle large sums of money, and they are just as lethal a money-fleecing method as anywhere.
But they aren’t in licensed clubs or in casinos! They are there, inside every betting shop on the High Street. Naturally, these machines are very successful at taking the punters’ money. Most bookmakers present them as currently responsible for between 70 and 80 per cent of their overall profits.
In truth, bookmakers aren’t being fair with the racing industry here in the UK, having had the strength to gang up and offer to pay only a pittance. Do bookies deserve to have this monopoly? Does England desperately need a Tote?
Golden Square (Vic)