Howard HamiltonI HAVE recently been writing about the impressions I formed while traveling abroad. They say one man's meat is another man's poison, and many readers may not have made the vacation choices I made by visiting a number of well known racetracks in the United States. However, my choices do serve to make a point for racing's viability as a tourist attraction.
It surprised me recently that I had to use the valuable inches of this column to point out to those who may not have caught on: Racing is not called the Sport of Kings for nothing. The many thousands of well-heeled racing fans that I saw flocking to the track at Saratoga, New York, for example could fill our national stadium.
The interest of many of those spectators was fuelled not so much by a desire to place a bet as in the quality of the animals on display or the desire to be part of a fashionable event at an elegant and well-run facility. In other words: They were there for the fun of it.
On the "other side of the pond", as the Americans like to put it, one sees similar displays of aristocratic elegance at Epsom Downs and Ascot, where Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II sets the tone.
It is for this reason that I have been so incensed and frustrated by a relentless determination by the powers that be in Jamaica to reduce this once lucrative industry to the level of the lowest common denominator.
Here, old nags gallop week in week out from year to year, as if trying to flee the nightmare existence they must lead. Some as old as 12 years old are dragged out and flogged to performance each week by owners, who have long abandoned dreams that they will ever win and dream instead only of finding a buyer naive enough to buy the horse.
Those who criticise gaming and betting activities criticise the tendency for poor people to be attracted to play in the hopes of making more money with money they can ill afford to lose. However, those involved in the industry share those concerns and would prefer to see incentives and standards in place that would restore the glitter in which the industry once bathed and attract, once again, the level of investment and participation that were the norm in times gone by.
Take the recent attendance at Del Mar in California, for example, where live concerts have been added to the entertainment mix attracting more than 37,000 people on opening day.
General Manager, Joe Harper said that on Saturday (Aug. 17), he had 31,000 on track. "I'd love to think they all came for the racing," he said, "but I think the Violent Femmes, the (musical) group in the infield, had something to do with it.
"Del Mar's gotten to be kind of the place to be, and the party atmosphere is part of it. But Saratoga's having a good year, too, as are some of the other tracks," he said.
Now there's an idea for our hotel-centric tourism wizards to ponder. Why not consider our race track as an element in the tourism product. Indeed, why not work with the industry to locate and build a state of the art complex on the South Coast for this purpose, mindful of the fact that the entertainment need not be confined to horse racing.
We await the publication of the long-in-gestation National Tourism Development Plan, with the hope that it breaks new ground. It is clear that we have flogged the life out of music festivals, shrimp festivals, bussu festivals, yam festivals, jerk festivals and you-name-it-festivals. These events do generate economic activity to communities around Jamaica, but they do so by attracting Jamaicans.
The point of tourism promotion ought to be to attract visitors to the country to spend foreign exchange. To use horse racing to do so, if done well, could unleash huge dividends, not only in increased spending by visitors, but also in the televised coverage of races for showing at sites abroad, pretty much as is the case when we are successful in attracting a major golf tournament to Jamaica.
A little horse sense -- for what it is worth.
Howard L. Hamilton is a former chairman of Caymanas Track Ltd. and current President of the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association Ltd. He is also a major shareholder of Markham Betting .He may be contacted at hhamiltncwjamaica.com.
