Horse Racing: Greyville all shook up

How do you start trying to unravel the events at Greyville horse racecourse in Durban on Saturday, when an angry crowd caused a race meeting to be abandoned midway?

Are the virtues of respect for law, dignity and good behaviour so degraded in South African society that the mob gets its way? How can a strictly rules-based game like racing survive when this sort of thing happens?

After hearing threats that racehorses would be injured in the ruckus, operator Gold Circle called off the last five of 10 races. They included the Drill Hall Stakes, the WSB Guineas and the Fillies Guineas – three Grade 2 contests to highlight the launch of the KwaZulu-Natal champions season, the seasonal climax of South African racing that includes the Durban July.

Main defender

Trouble erupted when the horse Main Defender was scratched minutes before the start of Race 6, the famous Drill Hall Stakes.

This was due to blood tests showing the gelding to have levels of total carbon dioxide (TCO2) above the legal limit. (Prerace TCO2 or “milkshake” testing was introduced to local racing a few months back). Main Defender was the oddson favourite for the race and was an exotic bet banker for many punters – not to mention a heavily backed runner with bookmakers.

Outrage followed the scratching. Irate racegoers gathered in the Greyville parade ring and refused to allow horses to pass along the chute to the course. According to reports, trainers Mike de Kock, Tony Rivalland and Garth Puller, with prominent owner Suzette Viljoen and National Horseracing Authority (NHA) CEO Vee Moodley, tried to engage the disrupters and get them to disperse.

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Questions

But officials weren’t waiting around indefinitely for tempers to cool and called a disgraceful end to a promising day’s action. The three features will now be staged at Wednesday’s Greyville meeting with the support card recalled for rearranging.

Gold Circle vowed to “sanction those responsible”, which some say means banning orders. But these questions remain:

• Photos of the incident show police present with private security members. Why were the protest ringleaders not arrested for disrupting a lawful activity? Have our cops become so inured to shouting and thuggery that they’ve become bystanders?

• The relationship between the NHA, which conducted the TCO2 tests, and Tony Peter, trainer of Main Defender, has become a major problem that must be sorted out in the interests of racing. Reports in Sporting Post asserted that Peter’s stable connections were involved in Saturday’s incident. It is the third well-publicised friction point between the two parties. A disputed “positive” Lidocaine drug test from September 2023, has never been concluded; the scratching of Peter’s runners from November’s Summer Cup day after a “raid” on his stables and alleged scuffles, followed by assault charges, a R70 million defamation action, allegations of harassment, and the issuing of a lengthy NHA “charge sheet” on Christmas Eve, is unresolved months later; and now this. Who mediates between the two outside of a court is unclear. Usually, the NHA arbitrates on disputes, but here it is very much an interested party.

• A well-researched article by veteran racing writer Charl Pretorius reveals that the world’s equine scientists are far from convinced that “milkshaking” horses with a bicarbonate of soda and water solution – usually via a naso-gastric tube – before a race helps them perform better. It’s been part of racing lore for decades with the belief that it retards development of lactic acid in muscles and improves performance. But scientific experiments don’t back this up. TCO2 in the blood is prohibited by the International Horse Racing Federation although it isn’t binding on member countries and some don’t do pre-race testing for it.

• The most important argument in favour of “milkshake” testing is that TCO2 is a buffering agent that can hide the presence of other drugs in a horse’s blood such as anabolic steroids. So eliminating “milkshaking” will make other doping much harder – and everyone is united in working to reduce cheating.

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