SA sports minister calls for ban on ‘barbaric’ jumps racing
LEON Bignell, South Australia’s minister for sport, has renewed calls for an end to jumps racing in the state after a fatal accident at Oakbank over the weekend.
A packed Easter Saturday crowd bore witness to an ugly fall involving Searaven and Wheeler Fortune in the Somerled Benchmark Hurdle.
While the former was unhurt, the latter gelding suffered significant injuries and had to be euthanised.
“It’s time for all the trainers and jockeys who are against jumps racing to speak up and have it banned,” Bignell told reporters on Sunday.
“It’s nothing short of disgusting. It’s just awful, it’s barbaric and it doesn’t belong in the 21st century.”
The minister added that failure to act now could have far-reaching consequences for the entire Australian thoroughbred racing industry.
“If the people who run horse racing in SA think this is a good look for racing, then they’ll oversee the death of the sport overall,” Bignell said.
Wheeler Fortune’s death was a convenient tragedy for protesters from the Coalition for the Protection of Racehorses, several of whom marched outside Oakbank on Saturday.
“We know that jumps racing cannot be made safe,” said Elio Celotto, a member of the anti-jumps group.
“We know that the number of falls are still as statistically high as they have [ever] been.
“We want the racing industry to come clean and show proper statistics about what happens not only to jumps horses, but all horses.”
Barney Gask, chairman of the Oakland Racing Club, said his organisation would address the matter and “work out how we can have that not happen again”, although he insisted Wheeler Fortune was the first horse to die in South Australian jumps racing since 2012.
The RSPCA has disputed that figure, however, claiming three other horses have met their demise during that period as a result of injuries suffered from hurdles and steeplechases.
Even so, jumps racing in South Australia continues to draw crowds that rival those of major meets in Melbourne and Sydney.
“We will get more people here than they had at Randwick last week with $10 million prize money on offer,” Thoroughbred Racing SA chairman Frances Nelson said.
“It’s very popular.”
Our thoughts on the SA jumps racing debate
Tragedies like these can never be dismissed out of hand, but it would be nice if those jumping at the opportunity to bleat their anti-racing agendas would get their facts in order first.
The protest groups say one thing, the RSPCA says another, and it becomes difficult to determine where rhetoric ends and the truth begins.
What we do know is this: data collected between August 2015 and July 2016 shows that of the 186,141 runners who participated in Australian thoroughbred racing that season, only 132 died.
That is 0.07 per cent of all race starters.
And before you start asking questions about fudged figures and conflicts of interest, those numbers come from the Coalition for the Protection of Racehorses – the very group protesting the jumps at Oakbank last weekend.
Furthermore, a South Australian parliamentary committee investigated the issue in 2016 and found there were no reasonable grounds upon which hurdle racing should be shut down.
That committee also advised that the matter should not be revisited for at least another three years, so the point is moot until 2019 in any case.