Modernisation cannot wait

Melville

WITH the 2001 Classic series behind us it is odds on that the politics of the sport will once again be the focus of attention as the two main contenders, Awesome Power and Millimetre, managed to grab most of headlines whilst the futurities were in progress.

Howard Hamilton, businessman and racehorse owner/breeder extraordinare has, without too much fanfare, assumed chairman of the Caymanas Track Ltd (CTL) board and before long one expects to see his influence in the direction, policies and programmes going forward as I am sure he is very aware of where we need to go.

CTL, the sole promoter of live racing in Jamaica, under the chairmanship of Danny Melville for just over a decade has done a good job in terms of marketing the sport as well as providing competitive racing thus gaining the confidence of the betting public and the returns have been excellent.

The critical area where the Melville led CTL was not able to deliver was that of modernisation. Except for some upgrading of stable facilities the promoting company was unable to undertake the badly needed exercise of marking the grandstand into something that would be appropriate in the 21st century.

Whatever was achieved in the Melville era in terms of development of the Caymanas racing plant was done out of cash flow. Certainly it is highly unusual in this type of industry for capital development to be funded in this way. As a consequent it was a decade-long bits and pieces exercise which did not address the problem.

Obviously one of the main tasks of the new board is to identify the funding to make modernisation of Caymanas Park a reality. In the current economic climate that may not be easy although the company has a highly demonstrable cash-flow protection. The fact of the matter is that big money is needed to tackle the infrastructural problems of the racing plant.

At every opportunity the chairman of the previous Board made the point the government revenue-take from the betting dollar was too high as the eight percent here was certainly not the case in most of the other racing jurisdictions and five percent was the international average. Clearly any reduction here will put the promoting company in a much stronger cash-flow position the question though is whether or not the government is in any position to make any revenue concession. My guess is that it is not in a position to do so at the moment, perhaps never.

As I understand it, one of the problems facing the new board is the matter of receivables. Apparently there have been operators of OTBs who fail to make timely remittances on a regular basis. Rightly what ought to prevail in a business which is only successful if all transactions is cash there should be zero tolerance. This particular problem is not insurmountable as there are checks and balances in place.

Another problem the previous board faced was the regularity with which the transmission of signals to the rural areas hardly met the standard requirements, thus creating frustration for agents and punters. However the most important recent development is the work being done to make satellite up-link a reality which is the ultimate solution to the transmission problems.

The new board has a challenging task in terms of ensuring modernisation and further development of the racing product. Certainly there is enough expertise and experience available to make the industry move forward at the required pace.

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