Sunday racing can fill void

Is it a case of also poor marketing of the product?

Do enough owners know about the events in time to plan their schedule? Also who decides the frequency of a certain type of racing?

For example if you have purchased an importation, how regularly are there races for your charge (who may gave cost upwards of $120,000, as against a locally bred two-year-old maiden that cost between $40,000 to $60,000.

Is it time for Sunday racing to bring out the crowds and to increase interest in racing? In Trinidad and Tobago, Sunday Racing is again at the forefront of racing in the 21st century with poor fields such as Saturday as a prime example.

Let’s be honest and admit that Sunday afternoon is a desert, straddling weekend euphoria and Monday exertion. When hands are idle, hearts are vulnerable and minds play devil’s advocate. This is when regrets come home to roost.

Why not find some means of entertainment?

Horse racing and its corollary of providing fun and entertainment for many appears the only vitamin.

But there are those "dogmatic" individuals, who fail to fully comprehend that Sunday afternoon is the dog-end of the week. Your mouth tastes of dust and your stomach is mixed with gravy and juice. Most people just want to get out or if they stay in, just sleep.

Things in your house look at you beseeching attention— tax returns, letters from bank managers, a cupboard purchased from a local furniture outlet, a month ago, a neat oblong across the living room carpet. Looking in your cupboard— the vacuum cleaner screams for you to repair it. Nature abhors a vacuum! Why should you pretend any interest?

The protagonists, who idly spend time and money on recycled videotapes, and wasteful old gossip with neighbours (about other neighbours), will cry out about gambling woes.

However none seem able to answer whether gambling blues is any worse than other everyday depressions such as "Waking Up Blues", "Filling Car With Petrol Blues," "Slim-fast blues," "Dead Phone Blues."

The latter is specifically the bleakness that enters your heart when you are trying to phone someone in a government institution and you are transferred around the building from one person to another and eventually abandoned somewhere in a lift shaft where all you can hear is a distant cling-clang of empty space, which you know, if you go on listening will go on forever.

Historically, those that claim to know, say Trinidad and Tobago has been known as a country which has allowed others to be leaders, and instead acted as paperweights, but now clearly is the time to move forward.

There should at all times be racing on weekends? We must not continue to make a nationwide mess of this.

The realists among us will say, that next we will hear talk of Good Friday and Christmas Day racing, with Sunday mornings broadcasts of religious programmes such as Ben Hur featuring hair-raising racing round the notorious tight Roman circuit, which has proved a popular favourite with many Christian backers, but not apparently with many others.

When I questioned "Jags" about why it appears that it is the old sections of racing that are averse to Sunday racing, Martina in her own immutable way, said "Watch what you say about us folks, remember we are worth a fortune, with silver in our hair, gold in our teeth, stones in our kidneys, lead in our feet and gas in our stomachs!"

Sunday afternoons some will say need racing because if allowed to fester on the mind are times when regrets come home to roost (repeated for the unconscious) when as Cyril Conolly said "Bombs are made."

DeQuincy turned to opium and Kafka despaired that Monday would never come. Many of us wish that were true, or that we could meet Kim Bassinger on the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway, then and only then will racing take a backseat, as probably will Kim eventually.

In terms of the recent racing what we are witnessing is more of the same poor rides aided by poor tactics, some of which are emanated from trainers and owners looking for long odds.

It is noticeable that even during all this guessing in local racing, the number of people at races continues to increase.

If Sunday racing is allowed to manifest itself in Trinidad and Tobago it will help to fill a void in our sporting community and also to allow the public a chance to have fun somewhere other than the beach.

In Guyana, their bookmakers currently accept betting on Sunday racing from the United States and Europe. Is it that we as a people are so backward in our thinking that we cannot accept the need to change and improve?

We need the administrators in the sport to take the bull by the horns and get Sunday racing to become a reality. Who knows maybe even the general reporting on racing in the media can improve away from innuendos and lies and deal with fact.

Where there is Sunday racing, there may be hope for our suffering society. At least Sunday because of novelty would have had better attendance than the first Saturday after a Friday lime day.

Next week, we look at why the notes to the stewards say nothing about the non-appearance of the Jack Debideen trained pair of Border Dispute and Flying Millie in the parade ring for the Trinidad Derby on race day 29 ( September 24, 2005).

While for Day 30 of racing (October 8), there are at least two occasions where detailed mention is made of the non-appearances of certain horses in the parade ring for which the trainer was fined all of $100.

It is interesting that this sort of information was never seen before on a stewards note in recent times, but has dramatically arisen because of our querying the fairness of the Trinidad Derby and preferential treatment to some owners.

In this case both of the Debideen trained three-year-olds are owned by the Dulal-Whiteway family ( Bernard and Graeme). If anyone mentions that permission was granted, then we need evidence of it as well as why it was not reported in the stewards’ note that permission was granted.

It seems that it was a Monday Blues Day at Santa Rosa Park on Derby Day, hopefully not blue notes though. But next Sunday, all will be revealed.

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