Handicappers’ MR reports are scrapped

The big changeover was accompanied by talk about “integrity, fairness, understanding, transparency, compassion and representivity”. So, imagine the dismay of punters when they learnt this week that the interesting and useful NHA handicappers’ weekly reports on merit rating calculations were being discontinued – by “executive decision”. No further comment.

Breaking this news, Sporting Post said: “The weekly article has created both engagement and criticism and it is very disappointing to hear that in an age of a striving for transparency and information, and efforts to sell horseracing as ‘the brain game’, that it has been scrapped.” The SP explained that the handicappers’ report was introduced by then newly appointed NHA CEO Vee Moodley in 2019 as an “explanatory/educational tool for stakeholders, outlining selection of line-horses and rationale behind decisions made by the handicappers”. The MR analysis certainly made for cerebral engagement and many a talking point in the racing world. Without wanting to get into the boring old argument about which group of people are the most important in racing, it’s worth noting that the betting public was not represented among the Concerned Stakeholders who defenestrated the NHA’s mahogany row a few months ago.

Those stakeholders were owners, trainers, jockeys, breeders and the country’s two racing operators. One of those stakeholder representatives referred to the NHA old guard as “… allegedly incompetent, vindictive and negligent … and with zero … accountability”. But the new NHA executive, having got rid of all the nastiness, appears to have lapsed into the sort of opaque officiousness it railed against.

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Could last week’s unusual handicappers’ MR report, sharply criticising owners’ and trainers’ successful appeals against their Gauteng Guineas MR adjudications, have ruffled feathers? Is there a feeling that disagreements on racing matters should be hushed up? What about transparency? Public dissemination of information about handicapping isn’t an international norm, but it was a uniquely South African feature admired by some foreign racing people.

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