I have seen it roughly 30 times, but each year it astonishes me, writes Jonny Turner.
The Melbourne Cup is just simply bizarre. But in the most beautiful way — an Australian horse race that stops New Zealanders in their tracks.
Kiwis who do not have a real interest in racing move mountains to get to their local TAB or social function. Sure, for some it is just a sideshow for their wanting to dress up, be seen in the right social circles or to have a few too many drinks.
But of all of the special days in world sport, it’s the Melbourne Cup that completely mind-blowing.
Could you imagine Kiwis spending millions of dollars, getting dressed, up boozed up and punted up on, say, the first day of an Aussie Boxing Day cricket test? It’s arguably a more relevant cultural event.
I would argue there would be more people at a Wingatui meeting than almost any Volts game, but in terms of national interest, surely cricket would win. Racing does not hold the day-to-day cultural relevance it once did. Getting dressed up to socialise at your local racecourse used to happen regularlyNow, racing can lure big crowds along for the big days, but certainly not your average weekend.
That makes the Melbourne Cup even more remarkable. Grown adults with jobs will take the day off work and completely forget their responsibilities to ply themselves with alcohol and gambling on a Tuesday.
It’s brilliant, it’s bizarre, it’s amazing.
Effectively, racing has its own golden goose that lays its annual golden egg on the first Tuesday in November.
With all of this wonderment, readers of this column will no doubt be waiting for balance to that. It was not hard to find.
How could it be? The shambolic lurks in many corners of the New Zealand racing industry.
Shambolic is the only way to describe the TAB website on Tuesday.
Offers of free credits — a story in itself for another column — lured punters to sign up and bet with the TAB online.The only problem when they got there was that the site had crashed for the second year in a row.
A positive spin could be put on this. So many punters, so big and popular is the Melbourne Cup that the TAB’s website just could not handle the demand.
But because it’s 2017, I tend to think that is a load of nonsense. I tend to think it’s a shambles that hardy punters and once a year enthusiasts could not get their bets on in the hour leading up to the big race.
And what is of most concern to me is that this disaster that happened last year has not been rectified.
I am not an IT expert, but I do know that having a website in this day and age that can handle thousands of clicks for a big event is an essential business tool, not something just to hope for.
So, come on TAB, sort it out. It’s probably not specifically the TAB’s fault — it is not in the website business. But it should have sacked whoever designed it last year after the thousands it cost the racing industry. The good news is that with a new state-of-the-art fixed-odds platform coming soon surely a new website is not far away. Let’s hope that for the multimillion-dollar deal that was done for it, they threw in a decent one.
Happy trails.
