Always back the horse named self-interest, son. It'll be the only one trying
No-one is saying that the VICBRED scheme has been a raging success. Stallion numbers in Victoria are down by more than a third in the past 5 years. Service numbers have dropped by almost a third in the same period. Foal numbers are 22% less than they were in 2019. By every metric the scheme […]
In a week in which the hapless Harness Racing Victoria have announced the first of what are certain to be several tranches of cuts to prizemoney and bonuses that will devastate the sport in the State, we get a vivid illustration of what ails the sport by the fields for the feature age group races […]
For the second week in a row we’ve had to wait 5 days for the Saturday night Melton meeting Stewards Report to be published, something that we in Queensland came to accept as the norm under Chief Steward Peter ‘the Plodder’ Chadwick’s watch, but is unacceptable in every regard. When we finally do see the […]
In order to confirm or refute our contention that under CEO Matthew Isaacs watch Harness Racing Victoria is grossly failing punters and participants by operating a sub-standard swabbing regime, we decided to crunch the numbers. To do so we used the week of the Vicbred Super Series finals in the year before Isaacs took up […]
On one of the biggest nights of the year in Victorian harness racing, when the horses are competing to win $1.5 million in prizemoney, guess how many runners on the 12 race card were pre-race swabbed? Eleven. One per race excluding race nine, when none were. How many of Emma Stewart’s 35 runnefrs were pre-race […]
In our story yesterday we predicted that Emma Stewart would win six of last night’s VicBred Super Series finals. Bang on the money we were. Stewart won every single one of the pacers final, and ran the quinella in each of them too. Her horses filled the first 7 placings in one final, the first […]
Not long after we published our story about the missing Stewards Report from last Saturday night’s VicBred semi-finals at Melton, it finally went up. We learnt from it this. Emma Stewart has 39 starters in 11 races, with multiple runners in 10 of them. Only 3 of her 39 runners are pre-race swabbed. Only one […]
It is 6.00am on Thursday morning and the Stewards Report from the meeting held at Melton last Saturday night has still not been published by Harness Racing Victoria. Why has publication of this report for the feature meeting been delayed? It is very poor practice and totally unacceptable. If HRV can’t organise itself to deliver […]
Dean Elliott, the chief executive enabler Harness Racing South Australia announced yesterday that trainer Shane Loone has been charged with corruption, deception, improper conduct and betting offences in relation to a race at Gawler last month. If HRSA had done its job properly in the first place it never could have happened. About three years […]
Want to see something that should ring alarm bells? With the exception of Showsomejoy, who ran 5.8 seconds faster than its previous best winning time to take out race 1 in 1.53.8 off a soft sit on a slick pace, every single one of Emma Stewart’s eight other VicBred Super Series semi-final winners ran times […]
