Punters often pay price for betting
THE taxi driver had never heard of Red Rum, the hero of the Aintree Grand National who died last week at the grand old age of 30.
In fact, he was hard pressed to name a single horse to have raced in Hong Kong and that was despite having been a regular at the track for more than 10 years. If there was a Bacardi & Blackcurrent with the qualities of Red Rum, he did not have the foggiest.
'It's all numbers in Hong Kong racing - and when the right numbers don't come up you are in big trouble,' he said in such perfect English that his university education was plainly obvious.
And this particular cabbie was talking from bitter experience. The numbers did not come up for him at Happy Valley and Sha Tin or, for that matter, the casinos of Macau. He lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, a well-paid job, his Kornhill flat and for an agonising couple of months, his wife and children.
'Chinese like to make easy money so they gamble and in Hong Kong it's so easy to gamble,' said the former heavy gambler who has not placed a bet in six years.
'Did you know that five people in Hong Kong have committed suicide in the last month because they could not pay back gambling debts?' he asked matter-of-factly. 'The loan sharks don't just threaten the person who owes the money, they say they will go after their family - that's what frightens people into taking their own lives.' This close encounter with the realities of betting put the world of horse racing into perspective.
Like thousands of others, I had a wager on Red Rum in his five successive Grand Nationals and felt pretty good about taking my slice of an estimated HK$36 million from the bookmakers on the three occasions when he won.
There was no thought for the punters who had ignored the obvious attributes of 'Rummy' and staked their money on another horse or, for that matter, the horses that were killed during the toughest steeplechase in the world.
But, looking back, those winnings were blood money. While Red Rum had the uncanny ability to sidestep trouble at Aintree, many a less talented horse has perished in the pursuit of Grand National glory.
Horses with no hope of winning were entered into the race to satisfy the egos of owners anxious to be armed with the 'I had a horse in the National, you know' one-liner for the cocktail party circuit.
The welfare of the horses that race in Hong Kong is well-looked after by the Jockey Club; but what about the welfare of the public? While racing here is becoming more of a sporting spectacle as the standard of imported horse flesh improves, it's still very much a vehicle for gambling. The passing of River Verdon, probably Hong Kong's best known horse, will rate just a few paragraphs more than the stories about betting-related suicides.
That's something to think about when you are choosing those numbers for Wednesday's Triple Trio.
