Baaeed Toys With Them At York

The current best horse in the world, Baaeed (Sea The Stars), stamped himself as a great at York today in the Group 1 Juddmonte International.

Picture: Got The Greenlight looking in magnificent condition at Camargue Stud (Camargue Stud Facebook).

Cape Mares Travel To Got The Greenlight

Great Trek II

Picture: Deauville Legend and Daniel Muscutt land the Great Voltigeur Stakes at York. (Skysports.com).

Daniel Muscutt Career-best Victory On The Knavesmire

Skysports.com

Deauville Legend took the Group Three Bahrain Trophy last month but looks to have improved again, winning the Great Voltigeur at Group Two level under Daniel Muscutt, the son of Summerveld-based trainer Peter Muscutt.

But when it appeared two furlongs out, the three-year-old – took control with relative ease, eventually winning by just under three lengths, with Secret State in second and El Bodegon a further length-and-a-half back in third.

Unfortunately he is ineligible for the St. Leger, being a gelding.

Daniel has improved into a genuine Group race-rider and is getting full books in the everyday meetings.

Picture: Michelle Rix, manager of the Cape Stingers, will be hoping her team books their place in the final on Friday night (GTH). 

Global Team Horse Racing’s Friday Night Extravaganzas Delight!

Horse racing action thrills Durban fans at the second event of the GTH series

• The Cape Stingers upstage the Gauteng Gijimaz on night two of SA’s new Global Team Horse Racing series (GTH)
• KwaZulu Royals to ride against the Cape Stingers at Hollywoodbets Greyville this coming Friday
• Three teams competing for R3.5-million in new series’ prize money
• Just one more meeting to go before September 2’s spectacular series finale

CROWDS of Durban locals and families lined the track at Hollywoodbets Greyville on Friday evening to cheer on the Gauteng Gijimaz and the Cape Stingers in a gripping second night of South Africa’s new Global Team Horse Racing series (GTH).

Team KwaZulu Royals remain in the top spot on the series’ leader board after Friday’s race meeting.

Live races will be held at Hollywoodbets Greyville racecourse on Friday evenings for another two weeks.

This Friday, August 19, the KwaZulu Royals take on the Cape Stingers to. Gates open from 17h00. Races start at 18h00 and are due to finish by 20h30.

Scoring

GTH is a brand new style of thoroughbred horse racing in South Africa.

Points are awarded on a sliding scale with eight races every week. For a win, teams earn 23 points. Second place is worth 18 points. The third and fourth runners in each race earn 15 and 12 team points respectively. Those who run from 5th position to last place earn between 10 and 5 points each.

Points are halved for Races 1 and 2, one race per meeting earns double points, and scores are doubled in Race 8. At the end of each evening, a team win scores 2 points; a draw 1 point and a loss is worth 0 points.

The two teams with the most points by the end of the series will compete for the 2022 GTH series title. A dramatic series finale is scheduled for Friday, September 2, 2022.

(There is no mention of the tie-breaking method, but presumably it will go on number of points accumulated in the two contests each team takes part in – Ed)

Highlights from night two

Following night two of the series last Friday, Neil Tovey’s horse, Bella Siccome came first with jockey Sean Veale in Race 8 securing the Cape Stingers the top spot in the competition to date. Sean Veale was also awarded Night Rider for the night. 

Friday’s winning team won by 30 points overall, beating the Gauteng Gijimaz‘s 415 points. The leader board heading into week three this Friday evening is as follows:

KwaZulu Royals – 2 points

Cape Stingers – 2 points

Gauteng Gijimaz – 0 points

GTH Marketing Manager, Angus Campbell, said the race events have been full of excitement. “It has been a thrill to watch. The race goers love the format and many have said that this is the most fun they’ve had at the racecourse in years! We’ve attracted some top local jockeys and trainers to the field, and the horses have put on some exhilarating performances,” he said.

GTH hopes to grow the sport of horse racing in South Africa by treating a new generation of fans to a more action-filled, condensed racing experience.

“It’s not only about seeing your horse cross the line first in only one race. It’s a build-up,” Campbell added.

Jockeys are also having to work together to get their teams into poll position, as opposed to competing individually one race at a time.

Riding for the Cape Stingers, Gabrielle Pieterse was excited about the new format and felt confident in his team and team captain. “GTH is a great idea, this format of team horse racing is a good initiative to bring the public’s eye to the sport!” He went on to ride the fastest time with Passage of Power at a whopping 73km/h.

Excited and confident for her team’s first event, Cape Stingers Manager Michelle Rix, added: “It’s a different atmosphere on course, discussing tactics with owners in the parade ring is different, it’s not the usual, “Don’t get caught wide”, “Come off the fence”, or “Get early gate speed”, it’s a different format! Our horses are leaving for the race and we’re already having to discuss the next race.  GTH is great for racing and for people who don’t understand racing”.

Tickets are available online at TIXSA  and at the gate. General access is R100. Children under 14 years go free.

GTH race meetings are also being broadcast live on DSTV’s Action channel (209) and on YouTube.

GTH has partnered with the Riverside Hotel where they will be running respective competitions for a VIP experience for the 2^nd of September. Follow GTHRacingZA and Riverside Hotel social media pages for more info. 

For more information about the series, visit https://www.gthracing.co.za.

Picture: What A Winter gelding One Too Many, trained by Kumaran Naidoo and ridden by Kabelo Matsunyane, won on the Hollywoodbets Greyville poly on Monday.

The latter provided proof that the former Equus Champion Sprinter is versatile as a sire and they run over all distances.

He even had a runner in the Gold Cup.

What A Winter finished in fifth place on the national log last season.

He had 92 individual winners of 155 races and six stakes winners of seven races.

Among his horses to follow this season are the Eric Sands-trained Hithemhardsunshine and the Peter Muscutt-trained sprinter Isivunguvungu.

Picture: A Tic-tac man always had to make himself visible. (picfair.com)

Men in White Gloves: The Rise and Demise of The Tic-Tac Man

On a personal note I recall on my first visit to an England racecourse in the early 1990s coming across what I believed to be an eccentric clown of sorts, standing on a box and waving his hands about, and I expected there to possibly be a hat nearby for audience donations. I soon gathered that was far from the truth and the man was in fact an integral player in the on course bookmaker communication network.

There were a vast number of bookmakers on course in those days and they were at great risk of being caught napping by a massive bet somewhere in the ring.

The risk was a punter noticing such a bet being placed and running to an unsuspecting bookmaker and placing a big bet at way over the market odds.

The tic-tac men’s chief job was to prevent that from happening and their signals relayed all of the relevant information from one side of the ring to the other at lightning speed.

The risk of punters understanding their signals was also a reality,  but they had a way around that too – their signals ultimately became like a secret code understood only by paid up bookmakers.

However, there was much more to tic-tac men than communication – they were also intermediary bookmakers and that was apparently how they made a decent living.

The fascinating article below looks in detail at the incredibly honourable relationship between the tic-tac men and bookmakers and laments another skill and racecourse allure buried by technology.

Roy Brindley (gambling.com)

If you are under the age of 35 it is odds-on that you have never seen a Tic-Tac man in action.

Conversely, if you are over 40 and went to watch horse racing from the age you could legally smoke a cigarette, it is inevitable you would have marveled at men wearing white gloves, often acting with the urgency of a Formula 1 mechanic during a wheel change, frantically relaying prices from one set of bookmakers to another.

That’s right, until the end of the 1990s, Tic-Tac men were an integral part of any on-course bookmaker’s armoury. As important as the chalk, satchel and wooden box to stand on. But this was the decade where the profession died a slow death as traditionalists clung on to something precious to them and technology did what it does best – it took over.

The slow demise was in stark contrast to the London Stock Exchange which, on October 27, 1986, witnessed the ‘Big Bang’. This was the day the entire shooting gallery went computerised meaning open-outcry and signal trading came to an immediate end and electronic screen-based trading took over. “My word is my bond” remains the motto of the London Stock Exchange but with a computerised system deemed infallible, the phrase bears no worth or relevance.

A 60’s Innovation That Should Have Changed The Genre

The fact that Tic-Tacs were such a vital part of on-course bookmaking for so long is actually remarkable. They probably felt like dinosaurs waiting for an asteroid to land on them from the evening of April 6th 1964.

This was the day a British Movietone newsreel reported, using footage from Southend greyhound stadium, “New tactics for Tic-Tac men – their old established semaphore system has now become transistorised, thanks to the initiative of the bookmaking firm of Henry Graham of Leigh-on-Sea.

“They’ve just been given licences to use walkie-talkie radio to pass on the betting information. A radio link-up minimizes the risk of mistakes which can occur in a crowded betting ring. The wavelength they use prevents outsiders picking up information or jamming the sets. The two-way sets cost a hundred pounds each.”

Maybe it was the cost – at the time a brand new car cost £500 – but this first, and what should have been firmest nail in the Tic-Tac’s coffin, failed to close the lid on Tic-Tacs and they remained an on-course commodity for at least another 25 years.

What appear to be such an obvious closed case, like email replacing the fax-machine or CDs substituting cassette tapes, was not clear cut at all. That’s because on-course Tic-Tacs did a lot more than simply communicate the odds available between one betting ring and another. As veteran bookmaker and former BBC Horse Racing betting guru Gary Wiltshire explains:

“The Tic-Tacs would normally be positioned near the rails because the rails bookmakers, despite not being allowed to display their odds, were the biggest players. The big punters and owners used to bet exclusively with the rails bookmakers. That’s how it worked, then there were the Tattersalls Ring and finally the Silver Ring. It got its name because originally bookmakers had to pay just a piece of silver to get in,” the larger-than-life Wiltshire explains.

To clarify this, the ‘rails’ would separate the Members Enclosure from the Tattersalls Ring (which Stateside might be referred to as the ‘clubhouse’) while the Silver Ring would be the English equivalent of the U.S. ‘grandstand’.

“In my day all bookmakers could read Tic-Tac, you had to,” says Wiltshire. “It was the first thing I taught my son, aged 14, when he came to help me at the racecourse. On course bookmaking was a hand-me-down profession and Tic-Tac was also handed down from generation to generation. It was a fantastic thing, like a secret code.”

So, away from a complex type of coding akin to sign-language, how did Tic-Tacs work and why were they so important?

“They were the beating heart of the ring, vital, something all bookmakers needed and we all paid a Tic-Tac,” says Wiltshire. “At the start of the meeting we would all pay one of the three or so Tic-Tacs for a ‘twist card’ – this was a coloured piece of cardboard which would have race-card numbers in ‘twisted code’ on it. Thereafter we would know which numbered horse our Tic-Tac was referring to when relaying odds. When they appeared to signal odds on the one horse it was actually the current price on number three for example, and Tic-Tac’ed odds on the racecard’s number two might actually refer to horse number 9.

“This way there was room for more than one Tic-Tac and each one would have their own client bookies and no one could read their betting prices for free during a meeting. That said, their services only cost us a fiver apiece. This would give you a complete picture of the odds elsewhere on the racecourse. But where they came into their own was by letting the books know if one of the big firms, Ladbrokes or Hills say, were firming up the favourite, vital information.”

A Licenced Profession?

In May 2015 the government’s Regulatory Policy Committee, ‘given the disappearance of Tic-Tacs from racecourses’, agreed with the Gambling Commission that licence requirements for Tic-Tacs ‘no longer served any regulatory purpose’. It will surprise many that Tic-Tacs ever were or ever needed to be licenced but, as the associated document, something of an obituary, explained it was for good reason. It stated:

“Tic-tacs is a term used to describe self-employed on-course bet brokers who facilitate the negotiation and agreement of bets between on-course bookmakers. Tic-Tacs were required to hold a betting intermediary operating licence. These licence conditions prevented Tic-Tacs from acting as a bookmaker or facilitating betting between members of the public.”

“With the developing use of technology at racecourses (principally online betting exchanges and electronic points of sale), online bookmakers are now able to make and accept bets between themselves by automated means without the use of tic-tacs.”

“At the time of the removal of the licence requirement, the commission was not aware of any active non-remote betting intermediaries acting as tic-tacs on racecourses. Consequently, no businesses were assessed to be directly affected by the change.”

Really?

Fully licenced betting intermediary operating bet brokers, really?

“Oh yeah, Tic-Tacs were really bookmakers, bookies who had the best pitches,” says Wiltshire. “If one of the layers had a big position and needed to lay some off or hedge the Tic-Tac was the man to do it for them.”

So were mistakes ever made? In a chain that saw you ask a Tic-Tac, by coded message, to place a credit bet on your behalf with another bookmaker, who is now a third party, there is surely plenty that could go wrong. Wrong price, wrong horse or greyhound, wrong stake? You were, after all, using a coded system that involved twisted numbers and frantic gesturing of seemingly every body part other than the hips, knees and feet.

“Firstly, mistakes happened next to never, I cannot recall a major incident of a mistaken bet ever. And any discrepancy of any kind would happen, what, once every thousand or so races. In Tic-Tacs you were dealing with the most honourable people imaginable. Don’t forget in these times there were no printed betting tickets, your receipt was a cardboard ticket with just a few identification numbers on it.

“But the chain stopped with the Tic-Tac. You would ask him the price, he would reply 4’s, you would ask for a ‘monkey’ at that price and, with folded arms, that was the transaction complete. You would have no idea who that bet had been placed with and, in turn, they had no idea from which bookie that bet had originated.”

And the surprises keep on coming.

Wiltshire adds: “At the end of the meeting you would meet-up with your Tic-Tac and agree on your closing figure. If the bets you had sent out all lost you would owe him. If they showed a profit you would be owed and the weigh-in would normally take place the following day once those that owed the Tic-Tac had settled-up. Like I say, they were very honourable people and the fivers they collected pre-racing was a pittance compared to the sum of money that went through their hands during most meetings.”

“They were great times,” reflects Wiltshire, who still enjoys the moniker ‘the Belly from the Telly’ due to his time on the BBC Racing and SKY Greyhounds. “But the radios (those using radios to relay prices and hedge also had to be licenced – and users were instructed which frequencies and channels they could use) slowly caught up. Then there were the computers, then the betting exchanges landed and now there is no need or place for Tic-Tacs on a racecourse.

Loathed to ask about ‘Dettori Day’ at Ascot when his determination to lay a massively under-priced Fujiyama Crest cost him the guts of £1 million – something which is covered in his book Winning it Back – I enquire if Tic-Tacs were still an integral part of on-course bookmaking at the time, September 1996. He replies: “Indeed they were, in fact that day at the close of play I had to settle-up my Tic-Tac, Rocky Roberto, with thirty-five grand!”

Roberto would go on to become a traditional bookmaker trading on course as ‘Kelross’ but he does not entirely blame computerisation for the loss of his first profession. In a 2017 interview for Star Sports he said: “The Tic-Tac finished up with the buying and selling of pitches when the NJPC (The National Joint Pitch Council) came in – all the new bookmakers that bought the pitches near enough to the man never took a Tic-Tac card, they didn’t really understand it or how it worked. Most of our old customers were the ones that sold.”

Extinction Beckons

Whatever circumstance was the biggest contributory factor to the downfall of the Tic-Tac men and the language they spoke, the fact remains this magical signalling mechanism is dying out like the giant tortoises on the Galápagos Islands.

The late John McCririck would use some very straight forward Tic-Tac when reporting from the betting ring for Channel 4 Racing. This kept people intrigued and the art-form in a state of bradycardia. But the channel dropped the pundit in 2012 and apart from the odd curiosity piece, the televisual airwaves no longer feature any form of Tic-Tac. It means the extinction of this decades-old language is all but inevitable.

The Legacy

But a lasting legacy does remain with gambling slang, a close associate of Tic-Tac, still making up a small part of modern-day culture. The two were inexorably linked after all, and here’s how and why.

In Tic-Tac even-money is represented by the index finger on each hand being moved up and down vertically and alternately. It actually represents the motion of conventional balancing scales levelling out evenly.

Its corresponding betting phrase is ‘levels’ (you devils) and that’s a phrase which many use in common language. Of course terms such as ‘pony’, ‘monkey’, ‘beeswax’ and ‘ton’ can often be heard at poker tables. They all originated in betting rings. A ‘bag’ (of sand) is more common in everyday language. It may be attributed to cockney rhyming slang, but it too could be primarily derived from on-course bookmaking.

Picture: Bingin Beach (Elusive Fort), trained by Gavin van Zyl, was Tristan Godden’s first winner of the new season at Hollywoodbets Scottsville on Sunday. 

Muscutt/Godden Double

Peter Muscutt finished joint second on last season’s KZN Trainers log with 48 winners, the same as the 2020/2021 champion Garth Puller, and he opened his account this season with a double today on the Hollywoodbets Greyville poly.

It was a halcyon day for the Muscutt family as Peter’s son Daniel rode a Group 2 winner at York.

Both of his poly winners today were ridden by Tristan Godden.

In the second race over 1600m the hard-knocking Act Of War gelding Wave Warrior won at odds of 2/1, beating the 17/10 favourite Captain Catman by a comfortable 1,50 lengths.

Later, Godden extracted a strong finish from the What A Winter filly Ethiopian Queen to catch the favourite Magicalee and win by 0,80 lengths.

Godden has had three winners this season now at 10.34%.

Today’s Question

How did the Great Voltigeur Stakes get its name?

Picture: A clue

Today’s Question Answer

Dante in 1945 was the last winner of the Derby bred in Northern England and that was not even a proper Derby, because in wartime years it was run at Newmarket and called the “New Derby”.

However, the north were at one time dominant. Between 1835 and 1957 Yorkshire stables won the Derby nine times. John Scott, who trained at Whitehall Stables Malton, won it five times in that period and the St. Leger no fewer than sixteen times.

Voltigeur (Voltaire) was bred in Hartlepool by Robert Stephenson but did not attract a bid of even 100 guineas despite his reserve being 350 guineas.

The Earl Of Zetland’s private trainer Robert Hill tried to persuade the former to buy him, but he refused.

However, he changed his mind the following spring and bought him for 1000 guineas with a further 500 guineas promised if he won the Derby.

He won his only race as a two-year-old and Yorkshire money poured on to him for the 1850 Derby throughout the winter.

However, on the eve of the Derby The Earl Of Zetland was on the point pf scratching him because forfeits of 400 pounds were due from the colt’s nominator.

However, when the news reached his estate, Aske Hall, the staff were horrified and a deputation was despatched to the Earl’s brother-in-law, who was then successful in explaining the implications of the scratching.

The forfeits were duly paid.

Voltigeur ran and ridden by Job Marson beat his 23 rivals by a comfortable length.

Voltigeur was hampered in the St. Leger, forcing him to hit the font too soon and he was caught on the line by 20/1 shot Russborough.

A dead-heat was declared and as was the custom the two raced in a heat two hours later, which was won narrowly by Voltigeur.

Two days later the hardy colt  beat the Flying Dutchman by half-a-length in the Doncaster Cup, despite jockey Nat Flatman having dropped his whip passing the stands.

It was The Flying Dutchman’s first and only defeat and led to one of the most famous races of the 19th century, the match race between Voltigeur and The Flying Dutchman for 1000 pounds a side over two miles at York in May 1851.

The Flying Dutchman won a desperate struggle in heavy ground to win by a length.

Voltigeur would stand happily for hours in his box with the stable cat perched on his back.

He enjoyed considerable success at stud and was grandsire of St. Simon.

Picture: “The Flyer” beats “Volti” in the great match race (wikipedia – painting by JF Herring).