Cape has 8 races Saturday - 66 runners(less now with all those scratchings) - Gauteng 9 races 116 runners - Why bother - give them 1 meeting per week - Gauteng could have added 3 races and then had 2 Jackpots 2 Bipots etc and Phumelela would have saved major money by not staging a Cape Meeting -
I have lived in Cape Town all my life. If I am foolish enough to mention racing in a social situation one of two things happen :
The polite people ask in falsely sympathetic tones:
Isn't racing struggling?
The less polite people respond as follows :
They reach for the Dettol & flyspray and excuse themselves.
Fact is - supposedly 'respectable' Cape Town people wouldn't touch racing with a barge pole other than to perhaps attend the Queen's Plate or Met. But strictly for the party.
Racing, regrettably, never fails to re-inforce its perceived grubby reputation by regularly throwing up 'colourful characters' (ie gangsters) who merely confirm what Cape Town people think they already know. Markus Jooste being just the latest example but certainly not the last. (There goes credibility for the next decade.....)
If a Cape Town person should accidentally trip over Tellytrack and be sufficiently bored to actually watch it they may well have their prejudices confirmed when they observe some dubious looking 'connections' of a horse from a place they have never heard of called the Vaal gloating as to how they 'kept quiet' about their runner and willfully defrauded the public.
The bottom line is that Cape Town people don't particularly like talking about money or the making thereof. This is actually a complete crock because they enjoy the fruits of big money as much as anyone might.
Which is why a decent property in a larney Cape Town neighbourhood will set you back from between R50 million to as much as R250 million. Which might buy you half of a suburb elsewhere in this country.
So Cape Town probably does not deserve to host racing in any shape or form. Frustratingly for critics of the area nobody would even notice if it left and a lot of the locals would probably whisper : Thank goodness those ghastly types have left town and gone back to wherever they came from.
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