Great place for all the family
If someone says to you 'Jockey Club', what image immediately springs to mind? Horses, or gambling? Many people may associate it foremost with gambling, with horses playing the supporting role, rather than seeing it as primarily a horse racing enterprise, with gambling as an accompaniment.
If so, that would help explain the anti-gambling lobby's apparently successful campaign to stop the club experimenting further with family days, when children would be admitted to the racecourse.
There is an analogy with alcohol. No one uses the fact that alcohol is available in restaurants as grounds for excluding children, since drinking is not the prime activity; but we may support rules which keep children out of bars, where drinking is the main focus.
Even so, would a day at the races really influence a child to become a reckless gambler once past its 18th birthday?
I recall from childhood the occasional family day out at the races in Britain. These were memorable experiences - the excitement of the race; getting close to the horses; the spectacle of colour; the noise of pounding hooves; the crescendo of the crowd as the finish loomed; and, yes, the inimitable bookmakers, all over the place (betting was by no means confined to a discreet area at the rear), shouting the odds, gesticulating in their peculiar semaphore, and exchanging huge wads of money at lightning speed.
Years later, my wife and I would take our children to the races, and they showed equal delight. Yet, if I interpret current anti-gambling propaganda correctly, it is a miracle that neither I nor my children have turned into gambling addicts.
Except for a school trip to the Kadoorie Farm, a family stroll past the orangutans and a few other species in the zoological gardens, or a chance encounter with a feral cow on Lantau or a macaque in the Kowloon hills, the average Hong Kong child probably has no close-up contact with any animals other than domestic pets.
The opportunity to witness truly competitive sport is equally limited. The Jockey Club can offer an affordable experience which combines the two, and potentially much more. But, alas, access for children is denied.
Gambling to excess is a sure road to ruin. It can have desperate social consequences. And the casinos of Las Vegas, or Macau, present some of the saddest vistas of humanity to be found anywhere.
Like it or not, Hong Kong's children are already quite heavily exposed to gambling: they see the punters hovering outside Jockey Club premises, train passengers immersed in the racing press, and interminable television coverage of race meetings where, for much of the time, half the screen is taken up by the display of betting odds.
Would attendance at race meetings really make matters worse? I would have thought that children are just as likely to be put off the idea of gambling by the glum faces of the majority of punters by the end of the afternoon, as they are to be tempted to it by the few happy ones.
The most likely outcome, however, is that they would simply be excited by the spectacle and the races, and totally indifferent towards the betting - in which, anyway, they would not be allowed to participate.
Even if a risk of subsequent addiction could be proven, I would expect it to be so slight as to be greatly outweighed by the potential benefit to family life, and to the less formal side of a child's education.
This includes a nice day out in the fresh (or, sadly nowadays, not so fresh) air, discovering something about animals, watching hard-fought races, and perhaps enjoying other facilities for children which the Jockey Club would, no doubt, want to provide if it could count on regular family attendance.
Let us hope that the proposal has not been completely buried.
Tony Latter is a visiting professor at the University of Hong Kong
