In recent days, the Jockey Club has revealed that dead-heats will have a new status when it comes to the winning or losing of championships - but has it been done in a half-baked fashion?
When Tony Cruz took Dennis Yip Chor-hong right to the wire last year in the trainers' title, the matter arose as a potential spoiler of an otherwise thrilling denouement.
In the final analysis, dead-heats did not decide the title, although there was an awkward hour there when Cruz's dead-heat victory during the season was counting as a whole victory to level him up with Yip.
Had they finished that way, Cruz's greater tally of minor placings were going to carry him home as the title winner, despite having fewer outright wins than first.
At that time, we called on the club to ditch the minor placings as the tiebreaker factor and to use "whole" wins as the first place to look for a separation, and that is what the club has done. If two jockeys or trainers finish equal now, and one has a dead-heat counting as a whole win in their score and the other does not, then the dead-heat will count only as what it is - half a win.
But the key to that change is that the two must finish on level scores, with the half win counting as a whole, before it comes into play.
When Zac Purton dead-heated in the opener on Sunday with Archippus, that was his second dead-heat win for the season - but they are sitting there in his tally as two whole wins.
So, should he finish level in the championship, he might lose by a whole win under the new policy depending on the record of the joint leader - but his rivals have to win an extra race even to get on level terms and bring that into play.
So, this is a half measure for half wins - a necessary one for the tiebreak, but still a half measure. In every other way, a dead-heat is half a result - half the prize money (or near enough) for owners, trainers and jockeys, half a dividend for punters. It's a half everywhere, but in the win tally.
Maybe going the whole hog with dead-heats to call them half a win will sit in the same towering in-tray at Sports Road, which contains the proposal to go all the way with the metric system as well.
Hong Kong racing deals in metres of distance on the track, not furlongs, but still with pounds of weight in the saddle.
