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Sports correspondent & historian with |
When the country’s punters place their bets on the Melbourne Cup, which is held on the first Tuesday in November, they are part of a changing journey dating back over a century.
Progressing from hand-documented bets to the multi-digital betting platforms of today, this journey continues to unfold.
The advent of organised horse racing in New Zealand in the 1840s was accompanied by the arrival of bookmakers on the growing number of racecourses in the country.
Early bookmakers were considered an unsavoury group with sharp practices – cheating – being common occurrences.
The introduction of an elementary form of the totalisator or tote, took place around 1870, where the bets were scratched out by hand.
The Auckland Racing Club was the first to operate a mechanical totalisator in 1913, with a machine then described as the largest mechanical calculating machine ever built.
The building-sized contraption made up of gears, cables and pulleys, was powered by gravity with concrete blocks pulling down the cables, similar to the mechanism of a grandfather clock.
A consequence of the introduction of the new-fangled tote was the banning of bookmakers on the country's racecourses.
With betting only allowed on course, and bookmakers gone, a wave of illegal off-course bookies sprung up throughout New Zealand.
A momentous advance was the arrival of the TAB – the Totalisator Agency Board - in 1952, which brought legalized off-course betting, with the first two branches established in Fielding and Dannevirke.
In order to channel the taxes into the government coffers, illegal SP bookmakers, became the target of numerous police raids and subsequent prosecution.
In spite of the police raids, nearly every pub and billiard hall in New Zealand had an illegal bookie on the premises, during the 1950s through to the 1970s.
Handwritten tickets, the closing of bets an hour and a half before each race, and no payout of winning dividends until the next day were the norm; until the introduction of computerised betting terminals in the mid-1970s.
Betting figures soared, with twenty minute race closing-time and same day payouts. Powered by the introduction of quinellas, trifectas and first-fours and later sports betting and fixed odds, punters had a multitude of ways to lose their money.
Trackside TV, which was introduced in 1992, changed the way Kiwi punters placed their bets.
With today's wall-to-wall Trackside TV coverage there is no incentive for people to go to races. You can literally fire a shotgun and not hit anyone on course, on all but feature race days.
Telephone betting for the off-course punters has gone, to be replaced by on-line punting on a variety of different devices, the favoured way of placing a bet. Full houses at today's TABs are distant memories, except for Melbourne Cup day.
Where do I think that racing and sports betting is headed in the future? Greyhound racing in New Zealand is likely to be banned in the next decade unless they can reduce the severe injury rate to the dogs.
Whips will be eliminated from racing just like spurs were a half-century ago. Steeplechase and hurdle race in our country will also be history.
The biggest change is likely to be a huge increase in sports betting to the detriment of thoroughbred racing. Sports will get deadly serious about the money they receive from betting agencies, and will ramp up anti-doping controls and integrity units to protect the investment of all the parties that share in the pie.
