The following article was first published by the Trinidad Express.
AFTER more than 100 years of thrilling generations of fans throughout Trinidad and Tobago, the sport of horse racing could soon come to a halt, the Arima Race Club (ARC) beset by mounting debt and a dwindling horse population, with several owners calling it quits with little or no prize money being paid due to the ARC’s perilous financial state.
Racing is also struggling to survive against loosely-regulated competition in the form of casinos, privately-owned betting shops, and every bar and recreation club outfitted with a roulette wheel and slot machines.
Officials of Arima Race Club, the promoter of local racing, and the majority of stakeholders and horsemen are generally optimistic that the situation can be sorted out, but they insist that archaic legislation and inane restrictions are hobbling all attempts to turn it around and make racing a self-sustaining entity.
In a two-part report compiled in the days leading up to and after the ARC’s Easter Monday race card on April 10 at Santa Rosa Park, Arima, some of the main players in racing spoke about its many ills—a few admittedly self-inflicted— and what has to be done to revive an industry that is also a major employer at the grassroots level.
“WE need support otherwise the industry is going to die. It’s on its last legs, no two ways about it,” exclaimed Arima Race Club management committee member and owner-breeder Kama Maharaj on April 12, two days after the ARC’s Easter Monday card at Santa Rosa Park, only the third day of racing in 2023, with 59 horses down to run in seven races.
“In three months we would not be able to fill a race card,” stated Maharaj, who used to have as many as 30 horses in training and is now down to one, Nuclear War, which suffered an injury on the holiday programme, further reducing the 60-odd race-ready horses in the Santa Rosa paddock.
“In racing, if you don’t have owners you don’t have a business and every week it gets worse and worse,” he added.
To stop the rot, Maharaj, of Sacha Cosmetics fame, said the ARC needs a grant or loan of $10 million.
“We need something to keep us going for a while, we need something now to help us pay debts and raise stakes to encourage owners, to make sure it does not die. Every problem could be solved but that is urgent…we need an immediate infusion of cash.”
Among the hurdles that the ARC faces is that the club does not hold the title to the land the racetrack, grandstand, stables, administrative offices and car park sit on, Maharaj backtracking to when racing was centralised at Arima in 1994 and the club needed a $30 million loan, “but did not have the wherewithal” to secure the financial assistance.
“The bank could give the Betting Levy Board (BLB) the loan,” Maharaj explained, so the ARC put its assets in trust to the BLB to secure the loan, which he stressed was repaid by the club “without missing a single payment”. The immediate need now is to get the property, amounting to 147 acres, back in the name of the Arima Race Club.
“We have a $150-million asset unencumbered but cannot use it to secure a loan,” said Maharaj, adding that the ARC management committee has plans to establish an entertainment centre on the northern side of the racing complex which would make Santa Rosa Park the “Mecca of the Caribbean”, with casino betting bolstering the club’s finances, which would be put back into racing.
But that plan also requires further legislative changes which would permit the ARC to upgrade its business model. Before that can happen, “the Government is taking many years” to transfer the ARC’s property from the BLB, said Maharaj.
“They’re listening but it’s time consuming…they’re working on it.
“That is the unfortunate situation racing found itself in. We need to get all the land transferred to the Arima Race Club to revive racing. Once they do it, we could put up the entertainment centre so the club would have other income which would revive racing.”
Asked if he is optimistic that it can be saved, Maharaj replied: “Absolutely!”
But while the ARC awaits the return of its property, “We need something short-term. People love the industry, they would come back in it.
“Every racetrack in the world gets assistance,” he pointed out, whether it’s in the form of a casino which operates along with the racing product or a financial subvention from the State.
Referring again to the Betting Levy Board, which was set up as a means to support racing with the taxes it collected from the private betting shops, Maharaj said: “We have the BLB with no teeth…bookmakers pay what they like.”
And the BLB’s porous position has been further compromised as there were more than 20 betting shops when the Board was established in the 1990s but those are now down to less than a handful, severely limiting the BLB’s ability to assist the ARC.
“We get no support,” lamented Maharaj. “People expect us to be the only track in the world to survive without support in the history of horse racing. It’s not like the days when racing was more than 90 per cent of gambling in the country, now it’s five per cent, even two per cent.
“We need a subvention now otherwise a 125-year-old industry will just die very, very soon. And if it stops it won’t start back. We won’t be able to pay security so we’ll have to remove the horses” from the Santa Rosa paddock, with many of them ending up in Guyana which has benefitted from the ARC’s malaise with T&T-bred horses bolstering that country’s racing stock in recent years.
“We have done our part to not shut it down but we’re at the end of our tether. That’s it…that’s it,” said Maharaj.
For years, multiple champion trainer John O’Brien has been insisting that the playing field for local horse racing as opposed to its gambling competitors in T&T is not level, to the detriment of the Arima Race Club.
As an example, O’Brien referred to the ten per cent betting tax which punters have to pay if they wager with the ARC and its offtrack betting outlets (OTBs) on any foreign racing, which is also carried by the private betting shops, or “pools”.
“That ten per cent tax is the biggest worldwide! They need to change that and change it drastically…the pools don’t pay it, it’s arbitrary for pools,” he said, adding that the legislation under which racing operates has to be modernised, including the BLB Act and the Trinidad and Tobago Racing Authority (TTRA) Act, clearing the way for electronic betting and racing on a Sunday, among other ancient rules and regulations which stymie the ARC’s ability to function in the 21st century.
On what should be an immediate adjustment to help get local racing back on its feet, “to start with the size of the boards,” said O’Brien, pointing to the government-appointed members of the BLB and TTRA. “They are cumbersome and expensive,” he stated, with the combined BLB and TTRA board fees amounting to $900,000 per annum. “Reduce it to one board, saving $650,000 to $700,000 a year to go back into racing.”
Of legislative changes, he said: “Both acts are silent on electronic betting or Sunday racing. We were told ‘no, the Act does not allow’. Ridiculous! Casinos open 24/7. E-betting is the wave of the future and we cannot expand our business when they do not allow us to open on a Sunday.”
Another silly bugbear is the ARC is “not allowed to have bars in the OTBs. Why?” when there’s betting on various casino games in bars throughout T&T.
“We are really not competing on a level playing field,” O’Brien repeated his age-old grouse, adding that with regard to the pools’ tax payments to the Betting Levy Board, “There’s no way of ensuring compliance because there are no teeth in the Act. It’s obviously failed legislation.
“The Betting Levy Board maintains the TTRA and helps to support local racing,” said O’Brien, who is also a member of the ARC management committee, but there’s “less and less money” from the BLB for the promoter, going from as much as $28 million a year to about $3 million.
In 2019, the figure was $12 million but that was down to $1.2 million in 2022. In fact, O’Brien said the Betting Levy Board still owes the ARC $4.2 million for stakes.
On the threadbare number of horses in training, O’Brien holds out hope that can be turned around, having seen his string at Santa Rosa go from a high of 56 horses down to 18, and from employing more than 20 grooms to seven at present.
“If prize money is increased people will find horses,” he said, from Jamaica and the United States in the first instance, with the ARC also planning to import horses from Venezuela, but not before an antiquated restriction is amended to allow horses into Trinidad from South America.
“Horses will come once things are put in place to pay prize money,” O’Brien assured. “If it is not put in place we will close…it will come to a grinding halt and then it will be harder to resuscitate…to start from zero.”
A ray of light amidst the darkness for the Arima Race Club and the racing industry is the Gambling (Gaming and Betting) Control Commission, which will implement legislative changes to allow the ARC to modernise its business model.
But while the ARC needs immediate assistance, O’Brien said the Gambling Control Commission, whose board members were appointed since March 2022, is “very unlikely” to be up and running “until the last quarter” of this year. “Meanwhile, we are starving. Whether we can survive until then is another story,” he said on April 13.
At Santa Rosa Park a few days before, when asked if racing can struggle on until the Gambling Control Commission is in operation, O’Brien replied without hesitation: “No.”
And what will happen then? “There will be squatters living all over the track,” he said rather glumly. “All stables will be turned into rooms with the Arima Race Club not in business.”
