For those who are seeing sports betting as the big competition for racing going forward, a small news item over a month ago suggests there is another player on the distant horizon.
It might seem a little bizarre if you're over 25 but computer gaming is a ready-made competitor, not just acceptable to younger people but something they have experienced in a first hand way by playing the games themselves.
One of the ongoing obstacles for horse racing is that the more we urbanise, the further we leave behind those eras when everyone rode horses for transport or work, and eras that followed when people kept horses for recreation, and the harder it becomes for people to identify with them as sport.
From this growing disconnect with the animals in a working or everyday capacity come the animal welfare debates affecting racing in many traditional jurisdictions. Animals are seen only as pets by many younger people.
Cartoon racing - computer-generated animated races beamed into betting shops in Britain and Australia, and who knows where else, for the purposes of betting - have been a growing magnet for gambling dollars. Heck, you talk to someone who plays them and they'll even tell you about horses which were unlucky or looking for a longer race. Yes, cartoons.
Well, e-gaming is somewhere in between real and cartoon.
Yes, it's real, played by real teenagers, so skill/talent is a large contributor to the result. On the other hand, it is a computer game so it looks like a computer game, not reality.
Anyway, these e-games are big and getting bigger. For national and world championships, entire football stadia are filled with fans watching on big screens while the players do battle before them and many more watching live webcasts from anywhere in the world.
Expert commentators talk over the action, outlining all the plays and nuances and, if you close your eyes, you might be listening to a Super Bowl or a Champions League final.
If this was a blog, we might embed a URL to link you to the epic 2014 world championship final but we'll go semi-Luddite instead and suggest you find it at twitch.tv.
Now, this is a racing column, not a computer gaming column, so why are we here?
Well, at the end of April, a Seattle-based company stated its intention to enable legal gambling on the outcomes of professional level "e-sports".
The company, Unikrn, has joined partnership with none other than TABCorp in Australia to facilitate that aim and any other countries which permit that kind of gambling.
TABCorp, ironically, was originally set up 50 years ago by seed money from Australian horse-racing clubs as an off-course betting organisation to combat illegal bookmaking and to act as a funding mechanism for racing. It is now prospering greatly from cartoon racing and is clearly looking to its future. TABCorp is pretty one-dimensional - it is not investing in this for any reason but to offer new gambling opportunities.
And, hey, e-sports even have that early, wild west whiff of match-fixing that other sports enjoy and which so many people believe once characterised racing.
In March last year, a Korean teenager, a member of a team in the "League Of Legends", attempted suicide by jumping from a building. He was apparently wrestling with other personal problems as well, but the incident highlighted his revelations that the team's manager had put the team together to lose games rather than win.
The manager was desperate for money and somehow had found friendly illegal bookies willing to take sizeable bets on e-sports tournaments and threatened violence and public exposure if his players didn't play to instructions.
Obviously, illegal bookies aren't as clever as they once were. (Phone rings. Bookie Bob. Yes, it's Harry, I want to back the Green Phoenix to annex the frozen heart of the Glupid's Ring and claim seven red turrets before the first dragon appears. Sure. What could go wrong? The line's three turrets.)
And for kids, to whom phones and tablets are virtually an extension of themselves quite early in life now, e-sports will carry that first-person experience that can draw them to the professional mode of the games as spectators or players, or even bettors. They'll know the implications of every move - enough to feel like they can back a winner.
Horse racing? Seems too complicated.
Champions & Chater Cup was good – just not great
The Standard Chartered Champions & Chater Cup serves up a mixed bag year by year, influenced by pace, by weather, and gave us a great arm wrestle on Sunday but hardly a vintage edition going forward with plans for overseas targets.
A thriller, yes. Half a length across the first five should have been even less had Harbour Master not been held up in the straight and the race even had that touch of argy bargy in the back play between Nash Rawiller and Tommy Berry.
Was there an argument that Berry was unlucky to get a six-day ban? It was a vigorous pursuit of competitiveness, even if it seemed a tactically odd move by Berry, but it never appeared to carry the dangerous or even potentially dangerous aspects which usually flavour improper riding incidents.
The race itself produced lesser performances than some past editions and certainly was a lesser race than the one Blazing Speed won a year ago. Helene Super Star virtually won by default as the one who didn’t go around another horse until he had to negotiate only the speed bump of Same World at the top of the straight and even then he had Khaya running block.
Rather than denigrating the horse, let’s call it a perfect ride from Douglas Whyte but, despite all these favours, Helene Super Star scrambled home and that tells you a lot about the race. Helene Happy Star and Blazing Speed failed to run to their best after over-racing and still finished close.
Doubtless Helene Super Star now lands the Champion Stayer award, but when talk of the Caulfield Cup came up afterwards, we had to raise the eyebrows more than a little. Even take away the difficulties involved in preparing Hong Kong horses for any race in the Australian spring, the performance we saw on Sunday just wouldn’t be good enough.
