Six weeks ago when 4Racing stepped out with enthusiasm, I wondered whether in the face of all the new bells and whistles, would we come to miss the devil we knew, our homely Tellytrack?
Tony Mincione wrote about the racing television saga in his editorial entitled Racing TV – Who Do We Trust?
Today he writes further in the Sporting Post Mailbag…please tell us what you think.
In an amazing turn of events, it now transpires that 4Racing has managed to divide racing and drag us back in time to when the clubs were jealous rivals. At the very least they have made getting along impossible.
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions”, which means good intentions are meaningless unless it is followed by a good action.
In an effort to “save” racing, 4Racing took the money provided to fix the game, and decided it was a one party job.
They determined that the solution was to have great images beamed into homes and overseas.
Fair enough.
They used the pre-licencing time to experiment at Kenilworth to design a new TV approach.
The Phumelela-Gold Circle partnership (ie Tellytrack) was to run its course and fizzle out by March 2022.
Each track has its own equipment, and the whole lot needed to be replaced anyway to perform in the new world.
They plotted racing’s great rescue, and the R50 Million per year Tellytrack, would be replaced by an estimated R100 Million per annum high definition streaming-broadcast, rendering most Tellytrack assets obsolete.
Presented with a ‘fait accompli’, Gold Circle had to either accept a completed solution as is, or go it alone.
The option came at double the original expense, is already hard wired with equipment demands, already has contracts signed with 3rd parties, and they would have to accept an all-or-nothing offer.
One has to imagine that would be a very hard sell to a board battling with its own financial dips and swings. And so it turned out.
One wonders what happens if ever we have a 4Racing and Gold Circle meeting on the same day.
It doesn’t matter what they do after this, the blunder exposes them as inexperienced and dangerously over confident.
I believe that there is not a single person in racing who doesn’t think this is now an EPIC FAIL.
Perceived unity of the racing product had to be the very first issue to deal with, not the last.
On 1 March nobody no one will trust them or believe that they have a clue. People will know.
So will we miss Tellytrack? Oh, YES!
