From lloveday at ozemail.com.au Thu Aug 23 14:43:48 2018 From: lloveday at ozemail.com.au (L.B.Loveday) Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2018 14:43:48 +1000 Subject: [AusRace] SportsBet new site Message-ID: <000001d43a9b$e30ae170$a920a450$@ozemail.com.au> Another "upgraded" site that is actually degraded, seemingly: No longer shows time of scratchings and deductions. I know there is a table of deductions, but it is harder for us to see what the basis of deductions was. It is now impossible to know at what time they took the scratchings out of their market, increasing the necessity of taking screen shots of each bet. They no longer have provision for downloading a spreadsheet of bets. It was invaluable to sort and print out bets to monitor while at the pub, and to do long-term analyses. The download of transactions does not work at all. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From greg.j.conroy at gmail.com Thu Aug 23 16:08:16 2018 From: greg.j.conroy at gmail.com (Greg Conroy) Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2018 16:08:16 +1000 Subject: [AusRace] SportsBet new site In-Reply-To: <000001d43a9b$e30ae170$a920a450$@ozemail.com.au> References: <000001d43a9b$e30ae170$a920a450$@ozemail.com.au> Message-ID: <6B672E56-E67A-46DF-A8D1-55CD51EDDC88@gmail.com> Hi Len, I contacted them (as I am a VIP there) and got this swift reply to your comment: "We have had a lot of feedback about this not being on the site at the moment, it has been passed along to the Customer Experience team who are developing the site and hopefully this will be available shortly for customers. In regards to the spreadsheet of bets you will be able to download a spreadsheet of all transactions that occur on Sportsbet.com .au, which includes all your bets.? H2H Greg. > On 23 Aug 2018, at 2:43 pm, L.B.Loveday wrote: > > Another "upgraded" site that is actually degraded, seemingly: > > No longer shows time of scratchings and deductions. I know there is a table of deductions, but it is harder for us to see what the basis of deductions was. It is now impossible to know at what time they took the scratchings out of their market, increasing the necessity of taking screen shots of each bet. > They no longer have provision for downloading a spreadsheet of bets. It was invaluable to sort and print out bets to monitor while at the pub, and to do long-term analyses. The download of transactions does not work at all. > > _______________________________________________ > Racing mailing list > Racing at ausrace.com > http://ausrace.com/mailman/listinfo/racing_ausrace.com Greg Conroy, Inventor of Award Winning and Free: www.rewardbet.com ? more: https://about.rewardbet.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lloveday at ozemail.com.au Thu Aug 23 21:01:37 2018 From: lloveday at ozemail.com.au (L.B.Loveday) Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2018 21:01:37 +1000 Subject: [AusRace] SportsBet new site In-Reply-To: <6B672E56-E67A-46DF-A8D1-55CD51EDDC88@gmail.com> References: <000001d43a9b$e30ae170$a920a450$@ozemail.com.au> <6B672E56-E67A-46DF-A8D1-55CD51EDDC88@gmail.com> Message-ID: <003c01d43ad0$aaf55380$00dffa80$@ozemail.com.au> Greg, This is what they had to say to me: "Both features you have alluded to are being worked on at the moment - we should have them up and running shortly for you" Unfortunately they have closed the MBL loophole I discovered and have long used. It gets harder almost month on month to live well! From: Racing On Behalf Of Greg Conroy Sent: Thursday, 23 August 2018 4:08 PM To: Ausrace Racing Subject: Re: [AusRace] SportsBet new site Hi Len, I contacted them (as I am a VIP there) and got this swift reply to your comment: "We have had a lot of feedback about this not being on the site at the moment, it has been passed along to the Customer Experience team who are developing the site and hopefully this will be available shortly for customers. In regards to the spreadsheet of bets you will be able to download a spreadsheet of all transactions that occur on Sportsbet.com.au, which includes all your bets.? H2H Greg. On 23 Aug 2018, at 2:43 pm, L.B.Loveday > wrote: Another "upgraded" site that is actually degraded, seemingly: No longer shows time of scratchings and deductions. I know there is a table of deductions, but it is harder for us to see what the basis of deductions was. It is now impossible to know at what time they took the scratchings out of their market, increasing the necessity of taking screen shots of each bet. They no longer have provision for downloading a spreadsheet of bets. It was invaluable to sort and print out bets to monitor while at the pub, and to do long-term analyses. The download of transactions does not work at all. _______________________________________________ Racing mailing list Racing at ausrace.com http://ausrace.com/mailman/listinfo/racing_ausrace.com Greg Conroy, Inventor of Award Winning and Free: www.rewardbet.com ? more: https://about.rewardbet.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lloveday at ozemail.com.au Thu Aug 23 21:06:27 2018 From: lloveday at ozemail.com.au (L.B.Loveday) Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2018 21:06:27 +1000 Subject: [AusRace] SportsBet new site References: <000001d43a9b$e30ae170$a920a450$@ozemail.com.au> <6B672E56-E67A-46DF-A8D1-55CD51EDDC88@gmail.com> Message-ID: <004101d43ad1$57c2ff40$0748fdc0$@ozemail.com.au> Greg, This is what they had to say to me: "Both features you have alluded to are being worked on at the moment - we should have them up and running shortly for you" Just for me?! How could a multi-billion company, that claims they are the biggest and best, like that go live with crap? Unfortunately they have closed the MBL loophole I discovered and have long used. It gets harder almost month on month to live well! From: Racing > On Behalf Of Greg Conroy Sent: Thursday, 23 August 2018 4:08 PM To: Ausrace Racing > Subject: Re: [AusRace] SportsBet new site Hi Len, I contacted them (as I am a VIP there) and got this swift reply to your comment: "We have had a lot of feedback about this not being on the site at the moment, it has been passed along to the Customer Experience team who are developing the site and hopefully this will be available shortly for customers. In regards to the spreadsheet of bets you will be able to download a spreadsheet of all transactions that occur on Sportsbet.com.au, which includes all your bets.? H2H Greg. On 23 Aug 2018, at 2:43 pm, L.B.Loveday > wrote: Another "upgraded" site that is actually degraded, seemingly: No longer shows time of scratchings and deductions. I know there is a table of deductions, but it is harder for us to see what the basis of deductions was. It is now impossible to know at what time they took the scratchings out of their market, increasing the necessity of taking screen shots of each bet. They no longer have provision for downloading a spreadsheet of bets. It was invaluable to sort and print out bets to monitor while at the pub, and to do long-term analyses. The download of transactions does not work at all. _______________________________________________ Racing mailing list Racing at ausrace.com http://ausrace.com/mailman/listinfo/racing_ausrace.com Greg Conroy, Inventor of Award Winning and Free: www.rewardbet.com ? more: https://about.rewardbet.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lloveday at ozemail.com.au Sun Aug 26 05:22:57 2018 From: lloveday at ozemail.com.au (L.B.Loveday) Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2018 05:22:57 +1000 Subject: [AusRace] Paywalled, so I'm likely breaching copyright (=right to copy?) but am certainly too old and grumpy to give a toss. Message-ID: <000201d43ca9$0a24a3e0$1e6deba0$@ozemail.com.au> Secret behind Gai's success She's risen above the doubters into the ranks of racing royalty. How did Gai Waterhouse do it? By Trent Dalton Gai Waterhouse. Picture: Harold David * From The Weekend Australian Magazine August 25, 2018 * 18 minute read 8 Eggs, soft and scrambled with avocado and sprinkled with parmesan cheese and memories of her dad. She recalls cold winter dawns at Randwick back when 63-year-old Gai Waterhouse was five-year-old Gai Smith wrapped in the warm arms of her legendary trainer father Tommy J. Smith and they were sitting on a cream-coloured pony named Cornflakes riding out to the centre of the track to watch the horses work circles. She'd watch her father watching those horses and every morning she'd come closer to understanding what Tommy was trying to find in all those sprinters and stayers. After enough cold mornings she realised that, more than a horse's speed and power and rhythm, he was trying to find a horse's essence. That mysterious element found deep within it that would reveal to Tommy why and how it would be first past the post on any given track; what the horse would need from Tommy in order for it to be the best that it could be. And Gai watched her father watching those horses long enough that she -eventually realised the elusive essence could not actually be seen to be found; it had to be felt. On their way home, Tommy and Gai would cut through Centennial Park and each morning they'd inspect the duck nests fringing the park pond and every morning, without fail, young Gai would somehow manage to find a duck egg that they'd take home and cook for breakfast. Tommy would beam so wide with these miraculous -morning discoveries and Gai would laugh with joy because she knew - she felt it deep inside her heart - exactly what Tommy J. Smith needed from her, his only child, to be the best that he could be. She had found her father's essence. Tommy J. Smith with daughter Gai Waterhouse in 1995. Picture: Nathan Edwards There's another part to that duck egg memory - something deeper, something life-changing - but our eggs are going cold and these eggs, -prepared by her in-house cook, Fernanda, are the best in the world. "The world," Gai stresses, loud enough for Fernanda to hear at the kitchen sink of this sprawling top-floor apartment overlooking Balmoral Beach on Sydney's lower north shore. Two grand sulphur-crested cockatoos land near a rosemary bush on the apartment balcony, their yellow plumage like some wild hat Gai Waterhouse might slay all those younger, less brave, less original, fashion wannabes with on race day. The Lady Trainer and her plumage, a rainbow of a woman, perched in the stands, -binoculars in one hand, hope and 30 years' hard work in the other, clenched tightly to will another beloved horse - athletes, she calls them - on to victory. Gifted Poet, her first winner in 1992. Te Akau Nick, her first Group 1 winner that same year. Dear mighty Fiorente, Melbourne Cup -winner, 2013. (She ran her samurai eyes over that horse on the morning of that hallowed day and uttered just one word: "Wins".) Dear courageous Pharaoh, the horse with arthritic joints that was called every lame name under the Sydney sun before Gai found his essence and turned him into the champion thoroughbred who won back-to-back Doncasters in '94 and '95. That's her thing, turning the stable roughies - the outliers, the -outcasts - into warriors with a mother's love. And they fight to repay her kindness. She loved them like family. Grand Armee. Desert War. Dance Hero. All Our Mob. All Gai's mob. She's third on the all-time list of winning Group 1 trainers; 136 Group 1 wins and counting. Some 3827 total career wins and counting. More than $245 million in race winnings in this century alone. It's the kind of record that puts her up there with her old man and not that far behind that other god of racing, Bart Cummings. "She's better than me," the great Tommy J. Smith -confided to Gai's bookmaker father-in-law, Bill Waterhouse, not long before Tommy died. But they still underestimate her because surely a woman who looks like a Hitchcock muse could never train so many gutsy winners; all those doubters and knockers and tall-poppy choppers who can't quite believe a queen could ever -conquer the sport of kings. "Those pests," she chuckles at the cockatoos. She sprinkles salt over her eggs. "This is black salt from Hawaii," she says, passing the salt and pepper. "It's Hawaiian black volcanic salt. Really nice." She studies your eyes and your lips in conversation. This comes across as a deep seriousness until you realise it's more a deep concentration. She's a good listener who can barely hear. "I lost my hearing about 30 years ago from a fall from a horse," she says. Communicating is a maddening struggle she buries daily beneath deep wells of grace and deportment-school manners. "I lip-read very well. You make do in life and get through and just make sure you can have a happy life. One of those things I've found is that my eyes have been my ears and I can be very intuitive in seeing things, especially with people. It's body language. It's quite funny. I've had to develop other senses." She shifts her head about randomly, left and right. A sense thing. A body language thing, sensing that the journalist sitting across from her is struggling to see properly because blinding morning sunshine is flooding through her balcony doors. "I'm acting as your buffer from the sun," she says. A genuine Gai Waterhouse eclipse. A man saunters from the main bedroom into the living room in his boxer shorts and a sloppy joe. "My husband, Rob," Gai introduces, and a thousand New Idea headlines from the 1980s flood your head like that Balmoral sunshine. The great courtship of Tommy J. Smith's only child and Bill Waterhouse's son. The great union of two famous Australian racing families. TJ's Girl In Wedding Stakes! Will Gai follow in Tommy Smith's footsteps? Rob takes his seat at the breakfast table. "Show him what you get every morning," Gai says, with a wry smile. Rob Waterhouse has the voice of a cheerful librarian who deeply values the human right of quiet but doesn't mind the odd flurry of whispered gossip. He presents his regular breakfast prepared by Fernanda. It's a fruit and nut face occupying the whole plate - berries for eyes, almonds for eyebrows, a glob of natural yoghurt for a nose and a banana for a smile. Gai and Rob Waterhouse. Picture: Keith McInnes The man adores his wife. He keeps photos of her on his work desk in the living room, despite the fact his desk is directly opposite and within arm's reach of his wife's. It's not at all difficult to visualise a morning when Rob approached Fernanda on the quiet and asked her to create a portrait of his wife out of healthy breakfast choices. "If I've been a good boy, I get that," he says, his finger tracing the upward curve of the smiling banana. "But if I've been very naughty the banana has been turned upside down with a scowl." Gai drops her head in embarrassment. Rob howls with laughter. "He never gets the upside down banana," Gai says. Fernanda calls from the kitchen sink: "He's a very lucky man!" Rob raises his -eyebrows in a kind of warning. "If the banana's scowling," he says, grimly. "Look out." Rob's gags are always multi-layered. Two or three layers down in the moody banana gag is the fact that this businessman and former bookmaker has a preternatural gift for landing fruit-face-first in the quicksand of controversy that almost always sees Gai pulled in with him. Both Rob and his father Bill were accused of having prior knowledge of the Fine Cotton horse substitution scam of 1984 and "warned off" racecourses around the world, instantly crippling Rob's bookmaking career. It was possibly the toughest period of their 38-year marriage; a time, Gai says, that would have ended a union built on weaker foundations. "But we flow along," she says. "We're best friends aren't we?" Rob asks, -spooning up the plate's right eyeball of berries. "Yeah," Gai says. "Very much so." It's their empty-nest years but the nest is never empty. Daughter Kate, her league legend husband Luke Ricketson and their two girls share the apartment below. Son Tom, a bookmaker, lives with his wife and two kids just a short walk along Balmoral Beach. "When we became empty-nesters I was delighted to become the most important person in Gai's life again but I've since dropped down to about number eight," Rob surmises, selflessly placing himself on the importance ladder behind Gai's beloved King-Charles-spaniel-poodle cross, Bello. Rob turns his head away with two hacking coughs from a developing cold. "There was no love for Rob this morning because he was coughing and spluttering all night," Gai says. "I was very cross with him." But it's hard to stay cross at a -husband who's busy building you a statue of yourself in the most glorious moment of your working life. The working miniature model for the statue sits on Rob's desk amid a pile of horse trade papers and notebooks. It's Gai in her mint green -Melbourne Cup 2013 dress, wrapped in a pearl necklace, joyously holding the cup aloft. Trainer Gai Waterhouse after winning the 2013 Melbourne Cup. Picture: Colleen Petch "In 100 years' time all they will know me for is the Melbourne Cup," she says. They won't recall every detail of her journey to it. How she started her working life in acting, landing theatre work in London, a stint on Dr Who. "It was December 1977, and I woke up one morning and I thought, 'No, I want to go back to Mum and Dad, I want to go back to Australia'," she says. "I closed that acting door and came home." Her uncle Dick had passed away and she knew there was an opportunity to come back and work in the family business. "But I don't think Dad or anyone imagined that I'd work in the business as a trainer. I think they thought I'd come in as a PR girl or something but I used to go in the morning and clock the horses for Dad and watch them. I really enjoyed being in the stables. The more I enjoyed it, the more I wanted to be there. Then it became a bit of a difficult time with my uncle Ernie, who was the stable manager at the time. I think he saw me as a threat whereas all I wanted to do was learn and be part of their team." It was the first flash of a theme that would define Gai Waterhouse's career: the glamorous, intelligent woman having to fight for her place inside a world of not-so-glamorous but fiercely intelligent men. "It was terrible," she says. "It got terribly sour to the point where we couldn't stand the sight of each other. It got to the point where if I said it was black, Ernie would say it was white . and Dad, of course, totally supported Ernie because they'd worked together longer and that was his brother. I put in for my trainer's licence and Ernie erupted. "I'd driven Dad mad to give me a little stable of 10 boxes and I said, 'Just let me train out of there, you can do what you like with the rest of the -stables'. And that was the final straw in the relationship and Ernie erupted publicly and there was a split. He and his son, Sterling, went off and took out licences and Dad was terribly hurt. He just couldn't believe this could happen and he saw me as the wedge that caused it. He said, 'I can't believe you've broken the family up'. And I said, 'I haven't, Dad', and I said, 'But this has happened and we just have to work through it. I'm here to help'." Classic Gai Waterhouse. The eternal optimist. There is nothing - no glass ceiling, no fear, no death of a beloved rock of a father - that can't be fixed by waking at 2.15am every day, going down to the stables in the freezing pre-dawn and working, working, working toward the winner's circle. A filly from the Waterhouse stable recently ran last in a key race, passed the post 20 lengths behind the entire field. "Gosh, she ran well," Gai said, trackside, to her loyal and gifted co-trainer Adrian Bott. "Her action was great and she really got into things for a while there." Adrian turned to her and said: "That's the most positive spin I've ever heard, Gai, on the worst run I've ever seen!" Rob's not sure exactly where the Melbourne Cup statue will eventually stand - "Maybe the -Victoria Racing Club can hang hats from it or something", Gai says - but he hopes those who pass it might consider for a moment the cost of Gai's success; the hills she had to climb in her muddy black gumboots. "Gai has never had the support of the upper echelons of racing," Rob says, matter-of-factly. "The major studs, the larger -stables, Gai has missed out on [support from] nearly all of those people. It's a." - he chooses his words carefully - "surprise to me that she hasn't had more support from the racing establishment." They turn to each other, silently contemplating the underlying reason for this. Gai's reluctant to say it but Rob isn't. "I think being a woman," he says. "And I think it's also because she generates so much publicity. They're resentful of it." There were times when she felt it was "impossible" to find her place in racing. "It had been really impossible and it has been a lot of times since then, hoping that you might get an owner to give you a horse to train and a lot of times it will go to someone else," she says. "So it's constant." Rob has another coughing fit and Gai winces but somehow returns with positivity and love. "I'm glad you're coughing all that up," she says. Rob nods, finds more momentum in his thoughts. "When Gai got her trainer's licence there were five other sons or daughters of trainers who got their licence," he says. "All very prominent. It would be no exaggeration to say you were regarded as the least likely to succeed, and almost as a joke, compared with the others." Gai shrugs her shoulders, nods. "Everyone else had better credentials and, of course, they've all fallen by the wayside," Rob says. "People forget how hard it is training horses. The attrition rate is very high and it's soul-destroying. Gai is the only one of them - and there were six - who managed to not only survive but thrive." And, yet, he says, there remains an influential element of the racing establishment that still refuses to believe Gai has been the chief architect of her own success. "I think it is an extraordinary thing, especially from people who you would think would know better than that. Big names, they sort of don't see Gai, her record, her strike rate, her great success, it sort of is always." "Someone else," Gai says. "It's always someone else behind it." Early riser: Gai Waterhouse training. Picture: Kate Geraghty "They can't come to terms with Gai looking so glamorous and actually doing the work," Rob says. "But, of course, Gai's up before all the other trainers are." He coughs again; Gai reels back in her seat, less compassionate than last time. "It's remarkable," he continues. "The more success you have, people can be resentful. I'm not sure you've had much repeat business from many of the -Melbourne Cup-winning owners have you, Gai?" "Oh, a few of them," she reasons. Gai's growing frustrated by the thread of this conversation. "I don't know," she continues. "There are always a few loyal people and it's nice. I love loyalty." Rob explodes in another coughing fit, the straw breaking the back of Gai's patience. "Oh, go away cough drop!" she bellows. It's the ugliest purse ever made. Mauve-coloured, apple-shaped, the size of a basketball with clasps at the top, resting on Gai's coffee table. Her fashion sense, she says, was born from her own inherent creativity and femininity. "The actress in me," she says. Her beloved dad loved good clothes as much as she did. But he loved them because, as a child beset by poverty and struggle in the NSW -Riverina, his family could barely afford shoes let alone a sharp grey wool racing suit. "Where do women get to dress up?" she asks. "We don't dress up at home anymore. We go around in daggy clothes. The office, you wear the same old thing, maybe even a uniform or. ewwwwwww, black! Where do you dress up? Weddings don't happen all the time. The one place a woman can dress up and really feel feminine, really have fun as a woman, that's -coming to the races." She leans forward on her sofa, opens the oversized pumpkin of a purse on her coffee table. And you realise nothing is quite as it seems with this woman. It's not a purse at all. It's a cosy for a -teapot containing her beloved -ginger morning tea. "Isn't that a hoot!" she says, slapping her thigh. "A girlfriend from England bought it for me. I thought to myself, 'That is the ugliest purse I have ever seen in my life - how could she possibly buy me something so ugly?' Then, of course, she opened it like a clam and there's this teapot." Classic Gai Waterhouse. Assume she's going one way and she'll dart the other. You think she's hard as nails talking about how disciplined she is in the stables - not a haystack, not a horse hair, out of place - then she talks candidly about the crushing loss of her mum, Valerie (she died in 2008, a decade after Tommy) or her nerves on that fateful Melbourne Cup day in 2013, and you think she's brittle as butterscotch. "I don't know if I can go to the races today," she confessed to Rob over breakfast that Melbourne Cup morning. "What are you talking about?" scoffed Rob. "I can't let all the little people down," she said. "What are you talking about?" Rob said. She was talking about the literal little people, a series of short and kind old men on the gates of Flemington racetrack who had been saying to her all week, "It's your Cup this year, Gai, it's your Cup!" She'd been seeing their faces when she tossed and turned in her sleep. She saw, in her busy mind, the disappointment on their faces as she exited Flemington a big-time, well-known, fashionable loser and, make no mistake, the worst part about being a horse trainer is that most mornings you drive to the track thinking you're heading to a wedding and most nights you drive home having attended a funeral. "Some of those people like me and some care about me and I couldn't bear to let them down," she says. So that's what she thinks about when she contemplates winning the Holy Grail of -Australian racing. Not redemption. Not legacy. Just a series of short old blokes in hats, smiling so wide they might burst. In one breath over a warm ginger tea she'll declare the importance of equality for women in the workplace; remind you how her regular -nickname, "The First Lady of Racing", is essentially an insult suggesting her success came by -virtue of a ring; then drop a gentle clanger like this: "Look, it's probably a bit of an old-fashioned idea, but I think women nowadays have a really tough time being happy. I think they so want everything that they forget sometimes you've just got to take a deep breath and say, 'Welllll.' " She shrugs. She believes women have parts of it all in 2018 - love, work and family - and appear "dissatisfied" with the sum of those parts. She's good with male horse owners because she's grown up around them, knows what they want and need from her, knows their essence. She doesn't employ staff based on gender, only effort. She often hires foreigners on work visas - she struggles to find young Australians willing to work hard for her in the early morning stables because life's "just a bit too good in Australia", she says. "It's unbelievable. Nowhere in the world would you find higher wages, nowhere in the world would you find better working conditions." We settle into the sofa, flipping through a series of old photos. A 1975 black and white shot for her acting portfolio where she looks like some knockout cross between Ingrid Bergman and one of Charlie's Angels. She giggles, embarrassed by the shot. "One of the Indian chaps who works for us saw that shot once," she says, adopting an Indian accent. "He said, 'Ohhh, soooo beautiful, so beautiful'. Then he looked from the photograph up to my face and said, 'What has -happened?' " She leans back, howling. Picture: Harold David Later, Gai has her face up close to an oil -paintingon her wall, staring at the image of another girlfriend from England, Her Majesty The Queen. It's a scene at a racetrack depicted by -Australian narrative painter Garry Shead. The work tells the story of the profound period in Gai's life in 2012 when the Queen sent her a -difficult horse to train, "a -barrier rogue" named Carlton House. Gai turned the horse from a feisty troublemaker to an impressive placegetter with the help of several people in the painting - renowned horse whisperer Monty Roberts, the Queen herself, the Queen's racing manager John Warren, Rob, Tom and Kate. She smiles at the way Shead has captured Tom and Kate as joyous, unencumbered kids. She's reminded how much easier it is training barrier rogue horses than it is raising kids. She's thinking about time. She's thinking about the past you can't get back. Her dad always told her not to live in it, the past and all its regrets and even its glories. "Life's very tricky for everyone," she says. "It's no easier if you've got money. Life's a battle for everyone. You've got to work hard to make sure everything works. "The track demands a huge amount from you and it's very important to get the balance. The -balance makes life enjoyable. What are they going to put on the tomb? Part of me might hope they'll say, 'Gai Waterhouse was the most intuitive trainer', but they won't. Really and truly what I hope it would say is, 'Good woman, an all-rounder, she did have a lot of time for her husband, she did have a lot of time for her family and, just as importantly, had a lot of time for those horses'." Everything working in harmony. Family, work, life and you. It was Tommy J. Smith who taught her that, the man in Garry Shead's painting -floating as an angel above the whole track scene, -racing hat on his head, eyes fixed firmly down on the great mysterious essence of his life, the girl who always found the duck eggs. One morning beside the banks of the -Centennial Park pond, Gai - by then a little older - discovered the secret behind her uncanny knack of finding all those delicious duck eggs. She accidentally bumped into her dad and an egg cracked in the pocket of his coat. And the truth was even more beautiful than the fantasy. Every single morning, before he thought about the horses or the weather or the track, Tommy J. Smith thought about -pocketing an egg from the kitchen fridge for his daughter. She never found another duck egg after that. She never needed to. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From seanmac4321 at gmail.com Sun Aug 26 06:25:39 2018 From: seanmac4321 at gmail.com (sean mclaren) Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2018 06:25:39 +1000 Subject: [AusRace] Paywalled, so I'm likely breaching copyright (=right to copy?) but am certainly too old and grumpy to give a toss. In-Reply-To: <000201d43ca9$0a24a3e0$1e6deba0$@ozemail.com.au> References: <000201d43ca9$0a24a3e0$1e6deba0$@ozemail.com.au> Message-ID: Thanks Len I thoroughly enjoyed it. Read it twice. Lol. On 26 Aug 2018 05:24, "L.B.Loveday" wrote: Secret behind Gai?s success She?s risen above the doubters into the ranks of racing royalty. How did Gai Waterhouse do it? By Trent Dalton Gai Waterhouse. Picture: Harold David - From *The Weekend Australian Magazine* August 25, 2018 - 18 minute read 8 Eggs, soft and scrambled with avocado and sprinkled with parmesan cheese and memories of her dad. She recalls cold winter dawns at Randwick back when 63-year-old Gai Waterhouse was five-year-old Gai Smith wrapped in the warm arms of her legendary trainer father Tommy J. Smith and they were sitting on a cream-coloured pony named Cornflakes riding out to the centre of the track to watch the horses work circles. She?d watch her father watching those horses and every morning she?d come closer to understanding what Tommy was trying to find in all those sprinters and stayers. After enough cold mornings she realised that, more than a horse?s speed and power and rhythm, he was trying to find a horse?s *essence*. That mysterious element found deep within it that would reveal to Tommy why and how it would be first past the post on any given track; what the horse would need from Tommy in order for it to be the best that it could be. And Gai watched her father watching those horses long enough that she ?eventually realised the elusive essence could not actually be seen to be found; it had to be felt. On their way home, Tommy and Gai would cut through Centennial Park and each morning they?d inspect the duck nests fringing the park pond and every morning, without fail, young Gai would somehow manage to find a duck egg that they?d take home and cook for breakfast. Tommy would beam so wide with these miraculous ?morning discoveries and Gai would laugh with joy because she knew ? she felt it deep inside her heart ? exactly what Tommy J. Smith needed from her, his only child, to be the best that he could be. She had found her father?s essence. Tommy J. Smith with daughter Gai Waterhouse in 1995. Picture: Nathan Edwards There?s another part to that duck egg memory ? something deeper, something life-changing ? but our eggs are going cold and these eggs, ?prepared by her in-house cook, Fernanda, are the best in the world. ?The *world*,? Gai stresses, loud enough for Fernanda to hear at the kitchen sink of this sprawling top-floor apartment overlooking Balmoral Beach on Sydney?s lower north shore. Two grand sulphur-crested cockatoos land near a rosemary bush on the apartment balcony, their yellow plumage like some wild hat Gai Waterhouse might slay all those younger, less brave, less original, fashion wannabes with on race day. The Lady Trainer and her plumage, a rainbow of a woman, perched in the stands, ?binoculars in one hand, hope and 30 years? hard work in the other, clenched tightly to will another beloved horse ? athletes, she calls them ? on to victory. Gifted Poet, her first winner in 1992. Te Akau Nick, her first Group 1 winner that same year. Dear mighty Fiorente, Melbourne Cup ?winner, 2013. (She ran her samurai eyes over that horse on the morning of that hallowed day and uttered just one word: ?Wins?.) Dear courageous Pharaoh, the horse with arthritic joints that was called every lame name under the Sydney sun before Gai found his essence and turned him into the champion thoroughbred who won back-to-back Doncasters in ?94 and ?95. That?s her thing, turning the stable roughies ? the outliers, the ?outcasts ? into warriors with a mother?s love. And they fight to repay her kindness. She loved them like family. Grand Armee. Desert War. Dance Hero. All Our Mob. All Gai?s mob. She?s third on the all-time list of winning Group 1 trainers; 136 Group 1 wins and counting. Some 3827 total career wins and counting. More than $245 million in race winnings in this century alone. It?s the kind of record that puts her up there with her old man and not that far behind that other god of racing, Bart Cummings. ?She?s better than me,? the great Tommy J. Smith ?confided to Gai?s bookmaker father-in-law, Bill Waterhouse, not long before Tommy died. But they still underestimate her because surely a woman who looks like a Hitchcock muse could never train so many gutsy winners; all those doubters and knockers and tall-poppy choppers who can?t quite believe a queen could ever ?conquer the sport of kings. *?Those pests,? she chuckles at the cockatoos. *She sprinkles salt over her eggs. ?This is black salt from Hawaii,? she says, passing the salt and pepper. ?It?s Hawaiian black volcanic salt. Really nice.? She studies your eyes and your lips in conversation. This comes across as a deep seriousness until you realise it?s more a deep concentration. She?s a good listener who can barely hear. ?I lost my hearing about 30 years ago from a fall from a horse,? she says. Communicating is a maddening struggle she buries daily beneath deep wells of grace and deportment-school manners. ?I lip-read very well. You make do in life and get through and just make sure you can have a happy life. One of those things I?ve found is that my eyes have been my ears and I can be very intuitive in seeing things, especially with people. It?s body language. It?s quite funny. I?ve had to develop other senses.? She shifts her head about randomly, left and right. A sense thing. A body language thing, sensing that the journalist sitting across from her is struggling to see properly because blinding morning sunshine is flooding through her balcony doors. ?I?m acting as your buffer from the sun,? she says. A genuine Gai Waterhouse eclipse. A man saunters from the main bedroom into the living room in his boxer shorts and a sloppy joe. ?My husband, Rob,? Gai introduces, and a thousand *New Idea* headlines from the 1980s flood your head like that Balmoral sunshine. The great courtship of Tommy J. Smith?s only child and Bill Waterhouse?s son. The great union of two famous Australian racing families. *TJ?s Girl In Wedding Stakes!* *Will Gai follow in Tommy Smith?s footsteps?* Rob takes his seat at the breakfast table. ?Show him what you get every morning,? Gai says, with a wry smile. Rob Waterhouse has the voice of a cheerful librarian who deeply values the human right of quiet but doesn?t mind the odd flurry of whispered gossip. He presents his regular breakfast prepared by Fernanda. It?s a fruit and nut face occupying the whole plate ? berries for eyes, almonds for eyebrows, a glob of natural yoghurt for a nose and a banana for a smile. Gai and Rob Waterhouse. Picture: Keith McInnes The man adores his wife. He keeps photos of her on his work desk in the living room, despite the fact his desk is directly opposite and within arm?s reach of his wife?s. It?s not at all difficult to visualise a morning when Rob approached Fernanda on the quiet and asked her to create a portrait of his wife out of healthy breakfast choices. ?If I?ve been a good boy, I get that,? he says, his finger tracing the upward curve of the smiling banana. ?But if I?ve been very naughty the banana has been turned upside down with a scowl.? Gai drops her head in embarrassment. Rob howls with laughter. ?He never gets the upside down banana,? Gai says. Fernanda calls from the kitchen sink: ?He?s a very lucky man!? Rob raises his ?eyebrows in a kind of warning. ?If the banana?s scowling,? he says, grimly. ?Look out.? Rob?s gags are always multi-layered. Two or three layers down in the moody banana gag is the fact that this businessman and former bookmaker has a preternatural gift for landing fruit-face-first in the quicksand of controversy that almost always sees Gai pulled in with him. Both Rob and his father Bill were accused of having prior knowledge of the Fine Cotton horse substitution scam of 1984 and ?warned off? racecourses around the world, instantly crippling Rob?s bookmaking career. It was possibly the toughest period of their 38-year marriage; a time, Gai says, that would have ended a union built on weaker foundations. ?But we flow along,? she says. ?We?re best friends aren?t we?? Rob asks, ?spooning up the plate?s right eyeball of berries. ?Yeah,? Gai says. ?Very much so.? It?s their empty-nest years but the nest is never empty. Daughter Kate, her league legend husband Luke Ricketson and their two girls share the apartment below. Son Tom, a bookmaker, lives with his wife and two kids just a short walk along Balmoral Beach. ?When we became empty-nesters I was delighted to become the most important person in Gai?s life again but I?ve since dropped down to about number eight,? Rob surmises, selflessly placing himself on the importance ladder behind Gai?s beloved King-Charles-spaniel-poodle cross, Bello. Rob turns his head away with two hacking coughs from a developing cold. ?There was no love for Rob this morning because he was coughing and spluttering all night,? Gai says. ?I was very cross with him.? But it?s hard to stay cross at a ?husband who?s busy building you a statue of yourself in the most glorious moment of your working life. The working miniature model for the statue sits on Rob?s desk amid a pile of horse trade papers and notebooks. It?s Gai in her mint green ?Melbourne Cup 2013 dress, wrapped in a pearl necklace, joyously holding the cup aloft. Trainer Gai Waterhouse after winning the 2013 Melbourne Cup. Picture: Colleen Petch ?In 100 years? time all they will know me for is the Melbourne Cup,? she says. They won?t recall every detail of her journey to it. How she started her working life in acting, landing theatre work in London, a stint on *Dr Who*. ?It was December 1977, and I woke up one morning and I thought, ?No, I want to go back to Mum and Dad, I want to go back to Australia?,? she says. ?I closed that acting door and came home.? Her uncle Dick had passed away and she knew there was an opportunity to come back and work in the family business. ?But I don?t think Dad or anyone imagined that I?d work in the business as a trainer. I think they thought I?d come in as a PR girl or something but I used to go in the morning and clock the horses for Dad and watch them. I really enjoyed being in the stables. The more I enjoyed it, the more I wanted to be there. Then it became a bit of a difficult time with my uncle Ernie, who was the stable manager at the time. I think he saw me as a threat whereas all I wanted to do was learn and be part of their team.? It was the first flash of a theme that would define Gai Waterhouse?s career: the glamorous, intelligent woman having to fight for her place inside a world of not-so-glamorous but fiercely intelligent men. ?It was terrible,? she says. ?It got terribly sour to the point where we couldn?t stand the sight of each other. It got to the point where if I said it was black, Ernie would say it was white ? and Dad, of course, totally supported Ernie because they?d worked together longer and that was his brother. I put in for my trainer?s licence and Ernie erupted. ?I?d driven Dad mad to give me a little stable of 10 boxes and I said, ?Just let me train out of there, you can do what you like with the rest of the ?stables?. And that was the final straw in the relationship and Ernie erupted publicly and there was a split. He and his son, Sterling, went off and took out licences and Dad was terribly hurt. He just couldn?t believe this could happen and he saw me as the wedge that caused it. He said, ?I can?t believe you?ve broken the family up?. And I said, ?I haven?t, Dad?, and I said, ?But this has happened and we just have to work through it. I?m here to help?.? Classic Gai Waterhouse. The eternal optimist. There is nothing ? no glass ceiling, no fear, no death of a beloved rock of a father ? that can?t be fixed by waking at 2.15am every day, going down to the stables in the freezing pre-dawn and working, working, working toward the winner?s circle. A filly from the Waterhouse stable recently ran last in a key race, passed the post 20 lengths behind the entire field. ?Gosh, she ran well,? Gai said, trackside, to her loyal and gifted co-trainer Adrian Bott. ?Her action was great and she really got into things for a while there.? Adrian turned to her and said: ?That?s the most positive spin I?ve ever heard, Gai, on the worst run I?ve ever seen!? Rob?s not sure exactly where the Melbourne Cup statue will eventually stand ? ?Maybe the ?Victoria Racing Club can hang hats from it or something?, Gai says ? but he hopes those who pass it might consider for a moment the cost of Gai?s success; the hills she had to climb in her muddy black gumboots. ?Gai has never had the support of the upper echelons of racing,? Rob says, matter-of-factly. ?The major studs, the larger ?stables, Gai has missed out on [support from] nearly all of those people. It?s a?? ? he chooses his words carefully ? ?surprise to me that she hasn?t had more support from the racing establishment.? They turn to each other, silently contemplating the underlying reason for this. Gai?s reluctant to say it but Rob isn?t. ?I think being a woman,? he says. ?And I think it?s also because she generates so much publicity. They?re resentful of it.? There were times when she felt it was ?impossible? to find her place in racing. ?It had been really impossible and it has been a lot of times since then, hoping that you might get an owner to give you a horse to train and a lot of times it will go to someone else,? she says. ?So it?s constant.? Rob has another coughing fit and Gai winces but somehow returns with positivity and love. ?I?m glad you?re coughing all that up,? she says. Rob nods, finds more momentum in his thoughts. ?When Gai got her trainer?s licence there were five other sons or daughters of trainers who got their licence,? he says. ?All very prominent. It would be no exaggeration to say you were regarded as the least likely to succeed, and almost as a joke, compared with the others.? Gai shrugs her shoulders, nods. ?Everyone else had better credentials and, of course, they?ve all fallen by the wayside,? Rob says. ?People forget how hard it is training horses. The attrition rate is very high and it?s soul-destroying. Gai is the only one of them ? and there were six ? who managed to not only survive but thrive.? And, yet, he says, there remains an influential element of the racing establishment that still refuses to believe Gai has been the chief architect of her own success. ?I think it is an extraordinary thing, especially from people who you would think would know better than that. Big names, they sort of don?t see Gai, her record, her strike rate, her great success, it sort of is always?? ?Someone else,? Gai says. ?It?s always someone else behind it.? Early riser: Gai Waterhouse training. Picture: Kate Geraghty ?They can?t come to terms with Gai looking so glamorous and actually doing the work,? Rob says. ?But, of course, Gai?s up before all the other trainers are.? He coughs again; Gai reels back in her seat, less compassionate than last time. ?It?s remarkable,? he continues. ?The more success you have, people can be resentful. I?m not sure you?ve had much repeat business from many of the ?Melbourne Cup-winning owners have you, Gai?? ?Oh, a few of them,? she reasons. Gai?s growing frustrated by the thread of this conversation. ?I don?t know,? she continues. ?There are always a few loyal people and it?s nice. I love loyalty.? Rob explodes in another coughing fit, the straw breaking the back of Gai?s patience. ?Oh, go away cough drop!? she bellows. *It?s the ugliest purse ever made. Mauve-*coloured, apple-shaped, the size of a basketball with clasps at the top, resting on Gai?s coffee table. Her fashion sense, she says, was born from her own inherent creativity and femininity. ?The actress in me,? she says. Her beloved dad loved good clothes as much as she did. But he loved them because, as a child beset by poverty and struggle in the NSW ?Riverina, his family could barely afford shoes let alone a sharp grey wool racing suit. ?Where do women get to dress up?? she asks. ?We don?t dress up at home anymore. We go around in daggy clothes. The office, you wear the same old thing, maybe even a uniform or? *ewwwwwww*, black! Where do you dress up? Weddings don?t happen all the time. The one place a woman can dress up and really feel feminine, really have fun as a woman, that?s ?coming to the races.? She leans forward on her sofa, opens the oversized pumpkin of a purse on her coffee table. And you realise nothing is quite as it seems with this woman. It?s not a purse at all. It?s a cosy for a ?teapot containing her beloved ?ginger morning tea. ?Isn?t that a hoot!? she says, slapping her thigh. ?A girlfriend from England bought it for me. I thought to myself, ?That is the ugliest purse I have ever seen in my life ? how could she possibly buy me something so ugly?? Then, of course, she opened it like a clam and there?s this teapot.? Classic Gai Waterhouse. Assume she?s going one way and she?ll dart the other. You think she?s hard as nails talking about how disciplined she is in the stables ? not a haystack, not a horse hair, out of place ? then she talks candidly about the crushing loss of her mum, Valerie (she died in 2008, a decade after Tommy) or her nerves on that fateful Melbourne Cup day in 2013, and you think she?s brittle as butterscotch. ?I don?t know if I can go to the races today,? she confessed to Rob over breakfast that Melbourne Cup morning. ?What are you talking about?? scoffed Rob. ?I can?t let all the little people down,? she said. ?What are you talking about?? Rob said. She was talking about the literal little people, a series of short and kind old men on the gates of Flemington racetrack who had been saying to her all week, ?It?s your Cup this year, Gai, it?s your Cup!? She?d been seeing their faces when she tossed and turned in her sleep. She saw, in her busy mind, the disappointment on their faces as she exited Flemington a big-time, well-known, fashionable loser and, make no mistake, the worst part about being a horse trainer is that most mornings you drive to the track thinking you?re heading to a wedding and most nights you drive home having attended a funeral. ?Some of those people like me and some care about me and I couldn?t bear to let them down,? she says. So that?s what she thinks about when she contemplates winning the Holy Grail of ?Australian racing. Not redemption. Not legacy. Just a series of short old blokes in hats, smiling so wide they might burst. In one breath over a warm ginger tea she?ll declare the importance of equality for women in the workplace; remind you how her regular ?nickname, ?The First Lady of Racing?, is essentially an insult suggesting her success came by ?virtue of a ring; then drop a gentle clanger like this: ?Look, it?s probably a bit of an old-fashioned idea, but I think women nowadays have a really tough time being happy. I think they so want everything that they forget sometimes you?ve just got to take a deep breath and say, ?*Welllll?? *? She shrugs. She believes women have parts of it all in 2018 ? love, work and family ? and appear ?dissatisfied? with the sum of those parts. She?s good with male horse owners because she?s grown up around them, knows what they want and need from her, knows their essence. She doesn?t employ staff based on gender, only effort. She often hires foreigners on work visas ? she struggles to find young Australians willing to work hard for her in the early morning stables because life?s ?just a bit too good in Australia?, she says. ?It?s unbelievable. Nowhere in the world would you find higher wages, nowhere in the world would you find better working conditions.? We settle into the sofa, flipping through a series of old photos. A 1975 black and white shot for her acting portfolio where she looks like some knockout cross between Ingrid Bergman and one of Charlie?s Angels. She giggles, embarrassed by the shot. ?One of the Indian chaps who works for us saw that shot once,? she says, adopting an Indian accent. ?He said, ?Ohhh, soooo beautiful, so beautiful?. Then he looked from the photograph up to my face and said, ?What has ?happened?? ? She leans back, howling. Picture: Harold David *Later, Gai has her face up close to an oil *?paintingon her wall, staring at the image of another girlfriend from England, Her Majesty The Queen. It?s a scene at a racetrack depicted by ?Australian narrative painter Garry Shead. The work tells the story of the profound period in Gai?s life in 2012 when the Queen sent her a ?difficult horse to train, ?a ?barrier rogue? named Carlton House. Gai turned the horse from a feisty troublemaker to an impressive placegetter with the help of several people in the painting ? renowned horse whisperer Monty Roberts, the Queen herself, the Queen?s racing manager John Warren, Rob, Tom and Kate. She smiles at the way Shead has captured Tom and Kate as joyous, unencumbered kids. She?s reminded how much easier it is training barrier rogue horses than it is raising kids. She?s thinking about time. She?s thinking about the past you can?t get back. Her dad always told her not to live in it, the past and all its regrets and even its glories. ?Life?s very tricky for everyone,? she says. ?It?s no easier if you?ve got money. Life?s a battle for everyone. You?ve got to work hard to make sure everything works. ?The track demands a huge amount from you and it?s very important to get the balance. The ?balance makes life enjoyable. What are they going to put on the tomb? Part of me might hope they?ll say, ?Gai Waterhouse was the most intuitive trainer?, but they won?t. Really and truly what I hope it would say is, ?Good woman, an all-rounder, she did have a lot of time for her husband, she did have a lot of time for her family and, just as importantly, had a lot of time for those horses?.? Everything working in harmony. Family, work, life and you. It was Tommy J. Smith who taught her that, the man in Garry Shead?s painting ?floating as an angel above the whole track scene, ?racing hat on his head, eyes fixed firmly down on the great mysterious essence of his life, the girl who always found the duck eggs. One morning beside the banks of the ?Centennial Park pond, Gai ? by then a little older ? discovered the secret behind her uncanny knack of finding all those delicious duck eggs. She accidentally bumped into her dad and an egg cracked in the pocket of his coat. And the truth was even more beautiful than the fantasy. Every single morning, before he thought about the horses or the weather or the track, Tommy J. Smith thought about ?pocketing an egg from the kitchen fridge for his daughter. She never found another duck egg after that. She never needed to. _______________________________________________ Racing mailing list Racing at ausrace.com http://ausrace.com/mailman/listinfo/racing_ausrace.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mikemcbain at tpg.com.au Sun Aug 26 09:33:04 2018 From: mikemcbain at tpg.com.au (mikemcbain at tpg.com.au) Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2018 09:33:04 +1000 Subject: [AusRace] Paywalled, so I'm likely breaching copyright (=right to copy?) but am certainly too old and grumpy to give a toss. In-Reply-To: <000201d43ca9$0a24a3e0$1e6deba0$@ozemail.com.au> References: <000201d43ca9$0a24a3e0$1e6deba0$@ozemail.com.au> Message-ID: <002101d43ccb$f8cbcb00$ea636100$@tpg.com.au> Thanks Len, We don't all wear hats and we are not all in Melbourne or Sydney but we can always manage a smile when Gai has a win as we did when Tommy cheered one home. Can hardly wait for Father's Day to add this book to my collection of Smith-Waterhouse books - videos - memories. Mike. Secret behind Gai's success She's risen above the doubters into the ranks of racing royalty. How did Gai Waterhouse do it? By Trent Dalton -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lloveday at ozemail.com.au Sun Aug 26 09:52:15 2018 From: lloveday at ozemail.com.au (L.B.Loveday) Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2018 09:52:15 +1000 Subject: [AusRace] Paywalled, so I'm likely breaching copyright (=right to copy?) but am certainly too old and grumpy to give a toss. In-Reply-To: <002101d43ccb$f8cbcb00$ea636100$@tpg.com.au> References: <000201d43ca9$0a24a3e0$1e6deba0$@ozemail.com.au> <002101d43ccb$f8cbcb00$ea636100$@tpg.com.au> Message-ID: <002001d43cce$a8105840$f83108c0$@ozemail.com.au> If ever a daughter was "a chip off the old block", it's Gai. From: Racing On Behalf Of mikemcbain at tpg.com.au Sent: Sunday, 26 August 2018 9:33 AM To: 'AusRace Racing Discussion List' Subject: Re: [AusRace] Paywalled, so I'm likely breaching copyright (=right to copy?) but am certainly too old and grumpy to give a toss. Thanks Len, We don't all wear hats and we are not all in Melbourne or Sydney but we can always manage a smile when Gai has a win as we did when Tommy cheered one home. Can hardly wait for Father's Day to add this book to my collection of Smith-Waterhouse books - videos - memories. Mike. Secret behind Gai's success She's risen above the doubters into the ranks of racing royalty. How did Gai Waterhouse do it? By Trent Dalton -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lloveday at ozemail.com.au Sun Aug 26 17:15:33 2018 From: lloveday at ozemail.com.au (L.B.Loveday) Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2018 17:15:33 +1000 Subject: [AusRace] They never let up re crops, do they? Message-ID: <001201d43d0c$95dd30b0$c1979210$@ozemail.com.au> Rex Jory is well into his 70's and somewhat senile. Does the idiot think Gai et alia are "physically and psychologically cruel" to their horses? It's time for whips to be banished to the Sulo bin of history, Rex Jory writes Rex Jory, The Advertiser an hour ago Subscriber only * * Top SA harness racing driver Dani Hill opposes proposed whip ban WHEN Winx won the Winx Stakes at Randwick nine days ago, jockey Hugh Bowman sat in the saddle as still as a garden gnome and guided the great horse across the line. No histrionics and barely a flurry with the whip. Behind Winx most jockeys were whipping their horses in a futile attempt to catch the champ. But Winx was too good. No matter how many times a jockey whips a tiring horse, it won't necessarily go any faster. It's time the whip was banned from horse racing in Australia. Whips should be banished to the Sulo bin of history. The perception, and there's little doubt the reality, of whipping a horse is that it is physically and psychologically cruel. Racehorse owners, trainers and jockeys would not use whips if they didn't hurt or frighten horses and presumably make them run longer, if not faster. Winx is the greatest asset Australian racing has had, perhaps since Phar Lap raced in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The mighty mare pulls big crowds to racetracks whenever she runs, and commands enormous television audiences. And it is here that racing is doing itself a grave disservice. In contemporary Australia, it is no longer acceptable to whip horses. A jockey cracks the whip. Picture: Mal Fairclough/AAP To a casual observer of horse racing, inflicting cruelty, or perceived cruelty, on a horse is obnoxious. So, when people with only a passing interest in racing turn on their televisions to watch Winx - to watch history - they are forced to digest blatant and legitimised cruelty. Home televisions, with their huge screens (not to mention the commercial screens in hotels and other venues), pick up every detail of sporting events including horse racing. Many people - and on Saturday afternoons this would include children - would be revolted to see horses being whipped in the final 100m of a race. Casual viewers, perhaps potential converts to racing, will be repulsed and sickened by the spectacle. For racing, desperate to increase on-course crowds, the whip creates an appalling image, a public relations disaster. Why can't racing authorities recognise this? But in the end, the debate is about the horses, not the image of the racing industry. The industry, as you would expect, believes whips don't hurt horses. It's a scarcely credible position, rather like the cigarette industry saying smoking doesn't damage your health. If we accept, for the moment, that whipping does not hurt horses, why have them? There's an argument that whips add to the pageantry and tradition of racing. Okay, carry whips but make them from sponge rubber. In 1991 a Senate committee inquiring into Animal Welfare said it "cannot condone the use of the whip to inflict pain on a horse for no other purpose than to make the horse run faster in what is essentially a sporting event. "Competent riding of a horse using only hands and heels to urge the horse on should provide just as an exciting race and may encourage more emphasis on improving horsemanship. The Committee would like to see the use of whips as a means of making a horse run faster eliminated from horse racing." Horses are fun, joyful creatures - and don't deserve whips No state government or racing body in Australia took up the Senate's recommendation. The RSPCA website says: "The whipping of race horses is our most public form of violence towards animals. If horses were whipped in the same way, away from the track, it would be a prosecutable animal cruelty offence." It adds: "2011 research found 98 per cent of horses were being whipped without it influencing the race outcome." A decade ago padding was added to whips, jockeys were banned from raising the whip hand above their shoulder and whips could only be used in the last 100m of a race. Hey, wait on. If whips don't hurt why pad them? Why limit the swinging arc? As the Melbourne Spring carnival approaches, with saturation television coverage, the racing industry is facing a potential public relations nightmare. The simple solution: ban whips from horse racing. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.png Type: image/png Size: 82 bytes Desc: not available URL: From RaceStats at hotmail.com Sun Aug 26 21:47:37 2018 From: RaceStats at hotmail.com (Race Stats) Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2018 11:47:37 +0000 Subject: [AusRace] They never let up re crops, do they? In-Reply-To: <001201d43d0c$95dd30b0$c1979210$@ozemail.com.au> References: <001201d43d0c$95dd30b0$c1979210$@ozemail.com.au> Message-ID: Len, Has he been medically diagnosed as senile? Didn't think so. He never stated that Gai et al are physically and psychologically cruel to their horses, he said that whipping a horse to try and improve its performance by running longer or faster has no place in racing and would be considered cruel if done outside of an actual race. I totally agree. When riding horses, I carry a whip purely for safety purposes and so should jockeys. A horse can feel a fly on it's rear, so to even suggest that a horse doesn't feel pain from a whip, makes no sense at all. Smart horses dump the jockey after the line, some not so smart, tear suspensory ligaments, have heart attacks, bleed, and quite a few die post-race. If it's not cruel to the horse, why do many stand flat footed at the gates (forgetting Chautauqua). Why have the rules been tightened on the type of whip, the number of strikes, where the horse can be struck, and harness racing considering a complete ban. Working with ex racehorses, I see firsthand both the physical and mental damage the use of a whip other than for jockey safety can cause. Mostly the damage is irreparable. Lindsay From: Racing [mailto:racing-bounces at ausrace.com] On Behalf Of L.B.Loveday Sent: Sunday, 26 August 2018 5:16 PM To: 'AusRace Racing Discussion List' Subject: [AusRace] They never let up re crops, do they? Rex Jory is well into his 70's and somewhat senile. Does the idiot think Gai et alia are "physically and psychologically cruel" to their horses? It's time for whips to be banished to the Sulo bin of history, Rex Jory writes Rex Jory, The Advertiser an hour ago Subscriber only * * Top SA harness racing driver Dani Hill opposes proposed whip ban WHEN Winx won the Winx Stakes at Randwick nine days ago, jockey Hugh Bowman sat in the saddle as still as a garden gnome and guided the great horse across the line. No histrionics and barely a flurry with the whip. Behind Winx most jockeys were whipping their horses in a futile attempt to catch the champ. But Winx was too good. No matter how many times a jockey whips a tiring horse, it won't necessarily go any faster. It's time the whip was banned from horse racing in Australia. Whips should be banished to the Sulo bin of history. The perception, and there's little doubt the reality, of whipping a horse is that it is physically and psychologically cruel. Racehorse owners, trainers and jockeys would not use whips if they didn't hurt or frighten horses and presumably make them run longer, if not faster. Winx is the greatest asset Australian racing has had, perhaps since Phar Lap raced in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The mighty mare pulls big crowds to racetracks whenever she runs, and commands enormous television audiences. And it is here that racing is doing itself a grave disservice. In contemporary Australia, it is no longer acceptable to whip horses. A jockey cracks the whip. Picture: Mal Fairclough/AAP To a casual observer of horse racing, inflicting cruelty, or perceived cruelty, on a horse is obnoxious. So, when people with only a passing interest in racing turn on their televisions to watch Winx - to watch history - they are forced to digest blatant and legitimised cruelty. Home televisions, with their huge screens (not to mention the commercial screens in hotels and other venues), pick up every detail of sporting events including horse racing. Many people - and on Saturday afternoons this would include children - would be revolted to see horses being whipped in the final 100m of a race. Casual viewers, perhaps potential converts to racing, will be repulsed and sickened by the spectacle. For racing, desperate to increase on-course crowds, the whip creates an appalling image, a public relations disaster. Why can't racing authorities recognise this? But in the end, the debate is about the horses, not the image of the racing industry. The industry, as you would expect, believes whips don't hurt horses. It's a scarcely credible position, rather like the cigarette industry saying smoking doesn't damage your health. If we accept, for the moment, that whipping does not hurt horses, why have them? There's an argument that whips add to the pageantry and tradition of racing. Okay, carry whips but make them from sponge rubber. In 1991 a Senate committee inquiring into Animal Welfare said it "cannot condone the use of the whip to inflict pain on a horse for no other purpose than to make the horse run faster in what is essentially a sporting event. "Competent riding of a horse using only hands and heels to urge the horse on should provide just as an exciting race and may encourage more emphasis on improving horsemanship. The Committee would like to see the use of whips as a means of making a horse run faster eliminated from horse racing." Horses are fun, joyful creatures - and don't deserve whips No state government or racing body in Australia took up the Senate's recommendation. The RSPCA website says: "The whipping of race horses is our most public form of violence towards animals. If horses were whipped in the same way, away from the track, it would be a prosecutable animal cruelty offence." It adds: "2011 research found 98 per cent of horses were being whipped without it influencing the race outcome." A decade ago padding was added to whips, jockeys were banned from raising the whip hand above their shoulder and whips could only be used in the last 100m of a race. Hey, wait on. If whips don't hurt why pad them? Why limit the swinging arc? As the Melbourne Spring carnival approaches, with saturation television coverage, the racing industry is facing a potential public relations nightmare. The simple solution: ban whips from horse racing. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.png Type: image/png Size: 82 bytes Desc: image001.png URL: