Future Star! Northern Emperor cruises home under Anton Marcus.
Despite the incompetence of Tellytrack and some shocking antics from the Greyville starting stalls, it only takes one smart horse to save a racemeeting from pure ignominy.
The meeting was Greyville night on 31 January. The horse was the son of Holy Roman Emperor. Charles Laird’s Northern Emperor looks really very talented on what we saw here.
An Australian-bred stole the show at Kenilworth on Met Day, and we had another one from Down Under rescue a night meeting going nowhere very fast.
Northern Emperor had won his first start five weeks ago in a common canter under Jessica Goslett over the Clairwood 1200m at 16-1. Last night he was backed into odds-on and won the MR 76 Handicap with contemptuous ease. Even seasoned champion jockey Anton Marcus managed an excited smile. This race ended in tragedy with Muzi Yeni taking a bad tumble from the Dean Kannemeyer-trained Jack Hobbs, who appeared to have had a heart attack shortly after the start. We are happy to report that Yeni is badly shaken but has no broken bones.
We are in the dark and we are shocked. Literally and figuratively in the words of a stressed and greying Gold Circle Chief Operating Officer Graeme Hawkins as he attempted to explain away the bizarre and mysterious ‘static electricity’ that consigned the seventh race to the null and void pile.
Sparks Flying. The Greyville Starting Stalls weren't behaving.
The starting stalls are apparently brand new and were imported from – you guessed it, Australia. Hawkins explained an hour after the scheduled start of the abandoned race that a surge of what appeared to be static electricity emanating possibly from an underground source had shocked some of the horses and jockeys. Despite disconnecting the gates to effect a manual start, the power flow continued. By then the horses had already been spooked and in the interests of safety of both horse and rider, the race was abandoned.
While investigations need to be done, and our natural first thoughts are that Gold Circle are clutching at straws, there are possible parallels with a similarly bizarre incident at Newbury in the United Kingdom just a year ago. Two hurdlers, Fenix Two and Marching Song, were electrocuted after they died within ten yards of each other at the western end of the paddock in front of a packed parade ring before the start of the first race of one of the biggest days in the jumping calendar.
Workers from the Southern Electric company, called in to help investigate the deaths, later dug up part of the paddock using a bulldozer and found a cable, which is thought to date from when the racecourse’s Berkshire Stand was being built in the early 1990s. There is no record of any work being done recently at the much utilised Greyville 1400m start, so the mystery deepens.
The fact that the meeting was concluded shortly after 11 pm was a huge credit to the jockeys, trainers, grooms and all the officials involved. However the initial delay was a public relations and communications nightmare from a television viewer’s perspective. One feels for race-caller Sheldon Peters, who had to summise and guess his way as to what was going on. We were treated to pictures of horses circling, a few attempting to load and various efforts from the starter, what looked like the Duty Manager and jockey Stuart Randpolph fiddling around with the electrical box of the starting gates. There was no word for an eternity and this patent lack of association with the customer needs to be addressed yet again.
Guess Who? Marcus or Samuel? Ask Tellytrack's Data Room!
While on the subject of the customer, the Gold Circle Board’s decision to implement an enquiry into the abandoned Clairwood meeting of 26th January, and whose findings will be addressed by a tribunal, is to be lauded. Two Senior Managers have been suspended and the Clairwood track will be closed until at least 13 March 2012. Senior trainer and former champion jockey Garth Puller and former Gold Circle Executive Wayne Simpson have been appointed to oversee the track.
Gold Circle may well unwittingly have raised the bar and entered a new era of accountability by this decisive action. Tellytrack Management will thus also be rightly pressured to take similar action against their personnel following the dissemination of the incorrect information relating to the Greyville fourth race and Pick Six opener.
In an error already admitted to by the ‘Data Room’, jockey Anton Marcus was ‘replaced’ by jockey Jarryd Samuel on the 15 horse Rokocoko in the fourth race. This change actually applied to the fifth race and Samuel in any event was riding the Drier horse Tapesco in the same race.
As fate would have it, Marcus won the race on Rokocoko with thousands of Pick Six tickets in the dust-bin and the exotic paying over R8 after the first leg. The difference for a punter in Marcus and Samuel is , with all due respect, night and day. And when Marcus ‘gets off’ a horse, it is a signal for an average punter to leave it out. The gelding had two previous unplaced runs.
We demand that Tellytrack management take action as the litany of errors from their data room is reaching unacceptable proportions and even the Tabgold website got it correct. So this was pure and utter negligence on the part of the Rivonia staff. We await to see what happens. As for the shocks and the starting stalls, we really want to say – what bloody next??!!!
