The first casualty of Sunday's opening day of racing was the naive hope the straight races might not be so afflicted by outside rail bias at this stage of the season.
The impact of ever more grass barrier trials at Sha Tin gets the blame for the strong bias, with the filling of divot holes afterwards causing the outside to drain faster than other untouched parts of the track.
In the 2004-05 season, there were 84 grass trials for the season down the straight at Sha Tin - and only 12 over 800m - but fast forward to 2013-14 and we endured 135, with the 800m heats more than tripling.
Only 11 trials had been run down that outside track so far in this season and some wondered if it might give us a fairer straight course than we had been used to by the end of last season.
Well, Virginia, that idea is deader than Greg Norman's logging career and prepare to be ground down again as this embarrassing course becomes a three-lane highway once more, perhaps by National Day.
Which brings us to our next question. Why is the National Day Cup now a 1,000m race?
The National Day Cup at 1,400m on October 1 had become something of a feature point in the season.
A race that, in many ways, marked the start of the season proper, as the best milers and stayers traditionally made their returns for the season. It was a race that fans could hang their hats on as a guide to what might lie ahead in the run-up to the Longines Hong Kong International Races.
Of course, our initial high indignation at it being switched to 1,000m took an ice bucket challenge with the realisation that the National Day Cup now is the old Sha Tin Sprint Trophy, renamed, and the race formerly known as the National Day Cup over 1,400m is now on the following Sunday, needlessly renamed as the Celebration Cup.
The possible clash of Amber Sky, Rad and Bundle Of Joy might rescue the straight race but just making the Sha Tin Sprint Trophy the Celebration Cup on October 5 must have been too obvious.
Why change one race when you can mess about with two? Continuity anyone?
No harm in watching jump-outs in full glory
Not sure where this fits into the scheme of things but worth noting.
One of our regular readers has informed On The Rails that, following elections at the Jockey Club’s annual general meeting last week, the local racing community has one more reason to celebrate the 130th anniversary of the club.
This is, according to our usually well-informed reader, the first time in that 130 years that the board of stewards has been without a single western member.
While we are on reader input, too, a big thank you to the Jockey Club for, during the summer break, bringing its website multimedia player up to a “world’s best” level, as requested in this space last season after we saw the quality of the Dubai replays.
Full marks for that, but with another request from a reader regarding content.
The club has added commentary to the daily trackwork videos – the worth of which is open for debate – but there remains something missing which definitely is important.
We don’t seem to get many sightings any more of horses jumping out of barriers and working, either for tests down the riverside or jump-outs on the all-weather. Those are of more value and no one extra has to be employed for them.
Track riders’ situation is simmering away
We were quite prepared for the prospect of pistols at dawn or all-out mutiny over the situation with trackwork riders at Sha Tin, after a few snippets leaked out about the preseason meeting between trainers and Jockey Club officials.
Things apparently got a mite heated at times but it seems the issue is both mountain and molehill, depending on who is discussing it, now we’ve had a chance to get some views across the board.
There was a view that a combination of insufficient numbers of work riders, narrowing track opening times and more stringent labour union policies were forcing the existing bunch of riders to hurry through the morning work too hastily.
However, it seems that this squeeze is being felt mostly by some of the fuller yards under trainers who prefer to use track riders and not jockeys for their gallops.
That means the available personnel to work their horses consists only of work riders, who are mostly employed by the Jockey Club and rationed out according to stable sizes.
The majority of trainers seem to be comfortable with the current arrangements and believe the job is getting done in a manner befitting the task, though we did note that even some of those positive trainers said they could see it getting more difficult if just one of their track riders suffered an injury.
So, sadly for this column, not the line in the sand, teeth-gritted stand-off we had been hoping for at this early stage of the season, but it is something which we’ve noticed simmering away for the past couple of years and we’ll keep watching this space.
