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OPPOSING THE PARIMUTUEL MACHINES Sharp Arraignment of the System oy One of Eng ¬ lands Leading Writers Sportsman is keenly opposed to niutuel betting as applied to English racing and writing his rea ¬ sons recently makes this arraignment of the system systemI I have never been opposed to the public gambling if they want to gamble and if they want to do so over roulette baccarat or little horses by all means let them do so such practices do not prevent the people of France from being much more rigidly frugal than we are but what I do object to Is that certain highplaced and opulent people should seek to exploit the gambling instincts of the poor for the pretended benefit of racing and horse breeding by the introduction of the totalisator or gambling machine which so far as horses go does nothing but harm Mr Leonard Brassey in his Jockey Club speech seems to have favored a concentration of suburban meetings witli a view to the totalisator but that idea simplifies itself in what I have often suggested namely racing every Sunday afternoon in Hyde Park There of course you could run totalisators and pay all the rates of London but horse breeding would not profit a little bit The same horses would run week by week over the same course and people would have no interest whatever in them save as mere counters on the board The fact is that the concentration of racing near a big town coupled with the totalisator is ai death blow to sport and horse breeding Money may be made out of the gambling instincts of the neighboring populace but no one cares two straws about the horses I have seen quite enough of racing at Pal mero the Buenos Aires course to satisfy me on that point The same horses run over the same track every Sunday and Thursday They are with few exceptions twined there and for aill the gen ¬ uine interest taken in them they might just as well be little horses spinning around a machine This plan of racing may result in large sums for the municipal authorities and the Jockey Club of Buenos Aires but it most certainly does not conduce to good sport or good racing If the making of money be all that is aimed at it would be simpler to have a whole lot of little horses here there and everywhere in Buenos Aires with a state levy on each spin The people would be just ais inter ¬ ested in the little horse as in the racing of real horses which to all intents and purposes are unreal I do not believe for one moment that under Argentine conditions as controlled by the totalisa ¬ tor there has even been a single horse bred with pretensions to rank in the same class as a good one here and that is because the totalisator condemns them to racing always on the same course where they are also trained and where they naturally get sick of life Yet so far ais I can understand him Leonard Brassey would welcome a similar concen ¬ tration of racing near London In point of fact it is the variety of racing that has kept the vitality of our horses so fresh as it i Kven ait New ¬ market it is the variety of the gallops that enables trainers to humor horses that would otherwise turn shifty
