Always back the horse named self-interest, son. It'll be the only one trying
The news that Bernard Saundry is about to become the Chairman of Harness Racing Victoria comes as no surprise to readers of this website, for we told you it would happen 8 months ago. We might have shot our load early, but our aim was spot on target. Is Saundry the right man to fix […]
It seems that Bernard Saundry will be joining the board of the bedraggled HRV, possibly as Chairman with Dale Monteith said to be ending his six-year reign in the role next month and leaving no logical successor. If he does become the Chair it will be an amazing comeback by Saundry, who was CEO of […]
There is something wrong when 9 of the 17 entrants for the Victoria Cup come from just 2 stables. That’s the situation, with Jason Grimson holding 5 of the noms and Emma Stewart another four. It’s starting to sound like Waller and Maher in Sydney staying races, and sicker again at that. Add in the […]
GAMING AND RACING—GREEN LIGHT SCANDAL PENALTIES— The Hon. Mark Latham to ask the Minister for Racing— (1) Why has Ben Sarina served a permanent warning off penalty since 2012 for alleged offences in the New South Wales harness racing ‘green light’ scandal when Mr Sarina only ever faced harness racing charges, yet other participants criminally […]
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 […]
