Kelvin 'N

The biggest day in horse rac­ing in Trinidad and To­ba­go is just five weeks away. On De­cem­ber 3, this coun­try will be put on the glob­al stage, a place where our rac­ing should have been for some time.The new faces of the horse rac­ing ad­min­is­tra­tion are be­gin­ning to take shape and there can be lit­tle doubt that ex­pec­ta­tions from the new lead­ers are high.The tri­umvi­rate of the T&T Rac­ing Au­thor­i­ty, (TTRA) chair­man, Derek Chin, the Ari­ma Race Club (ARC) pres­i­dent, Wen­dell Kan­ga­loo and the chair­man of the Bet­ting Levy Board Ka­ma Ma­haraj, look like­ly to put this coun­try in the lime­light come De­cem­ber.Ex­pec­ta­tions are high, with the in­dus­try prob­a­bly at its most crit­i­cal junc­ture and the Caribbean Na­tions Rac­ing Chal­lenge is the in­jec­tion which is need­ed by the rac­ing in­dus­try.

These three gen­tle­men, and their sup­port struc­tures, which in­clude Christo­pher Ar­mond, prob­a­bly the most knowl­edge­able rac­ing ad­min­is­tra­tor in the re­gion, now hold the fate of the in­dus­try in their hands.They will show­case our coun­try and our rac­ing to the world and let all and sundry know there is good rac­ing in our twin-is­land state.Those of us who were around for the Cla­si­co del Caribe in 1998, will re­mem­ber what a great day at the races it was, but on this oc­ca­sion the stakes are even high­er.The mar­ket­ing strate­gies are dif­fer­ent and we now have two com­pa­nies in­volved in pro­ject­ing our coun­try's im­age to the glob­al com­mu­ni­ty. The com­pa­nies com­mit­ted to this cause are TVG and SIS.

Be­tween these two top com­pa­nies, our coun­try and rac­ing will be seen by some 400 mil­lion view­er in the Caribbean, North Amer­i­can, South Amer­i­ca and Eu­rope. One can­not ask for more.Such is the strength of man­age­ment, ad­ver­tis­ing, and Sports Tourism.It is ex­pect­ed that with the valu­able purs­es on of­fer and with many races car­ry­ing purs­es in ex­cess over US$100,000, train­ers and own­ers will bring in top over­seas based rid­ers, the likes of Julien Lep­aroux, Richard Hugh­es and Unit­ed States-based Ja­maicans Allen Maragh and his nephew, Ra­jiv, John Valasquez, our own Emile Ram­sam­my, along with Patrick Hus­bands, to en­ter­tain the large crowd which is ex­pect­ed to throng to the cen­tralised fa­cil­i­ty.In ad­di­tion, Hall of Famer Gary Stevens is the lat­est star to join the ac­cep­tance list for the Caribbean Na­tions Rac­ing Chal­lenge at San­ta Rosa Park, Ari­ma.

In the sport of horse rac­ing, Stevens is as big a star as there is, and the Amer­i­can has agreed to de­liv­er the fea­ture ad­dress dur­ing the ban­quet the night be­fore what is be­ing hailed as the great­est day in the his­to­ry of sport in the Caribbean.Once you have top class rac­ing, lead­ing rid­ers from the world over will come to our coun­try. With top jock­eys will come the in­ter­na­tion­al press and this au­gurs well for our tourism in­dus­try.Top train­ers in the Unit­ed States and Eng­land are ex­pect­ed to come to our shores as will the top own­ers from Bar­ba­dos, Ja­maica, Mar­tinique and St Kitts.At present there are some 70 Caribbean hors­es are be­ing point­ed by their train­ers to San­ta Rosa Park, Ari­ma, where they will meet the best of our rac­ing stock.The rac­ing fra­ter­ni­ty is look­ing for re­sults with bait­ed breath and if there ever was a team who could turn rac­ing around and put us on the map in­ter­na­tion­al­ly, it is this 'tri­umvi­rate.'They will suc­ceed in mak­ing T&T proud on De­cem­ber 3, as we need sus­tain­able re­sults.