An­dre E Bap­tiste

"Rain, rain go away, the chil­dren want to come out and play."

These words from the pop­u­lar chil­dren's nurs­ery rhyme seem to have been turned on its head by those re­spon­si­ble for the ad­min­is­tra­tion of rac­ing at the Ari­ma Race Club (ARC).

Day in, day out, once rain falls pri­or to a sched­uled race day, turf races are rou­tine­ly can­celled, deny­ing hors­es with a pref­er­ence for turf, any chance of rac­ing.

Many own­ers, (in­clud­ing my broth­er Nigel Mark and my­self who own two turf hors­es) in frus­tra­tion, give in to the dark side and race their hors­es on the un­like sur­face with pre­dictable con­se­quences.

Moth­er Na­ture is some­thing that none in rac­ing have any con­trol over, but it is when Moth­er Na­ture has lis­tened to the words of the Nurs­ery rhyme and yet, there is no turf rac­ing, that the fail­ures of the ad­min­is­tra­tors or more pre­cise­ly, their child-like ap­proach to their job, be­comes most ev­i­dent. One such oc­ca­sion was last Sat­ur­day when, in spite of two/three days of lim­it­ed rain, the turf track was deemed un­suit­able.

This jour­nal­ist had a con­ver­sa­tion with the Club's chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer, Christo­pher Ar­mond who sought to ex­plain that be­cause of the pri­or con­di­tion of the track, prop­er track main­te­nance was im­pos­si­ble and so the grass had not been cut and the sur­face had not dried out suf­fi­cient­ly to present safe con­di­tions for rid­ers. This grass, I was told, grows dif­fer­ent­ly than most on a turf sur­face. Safe­ty is para­mount in the minds of all con­cerned and so can nev­er be toyed with, but one is left to won­der why the sit­u­a­tion was left to come to this.

On clos­er ques­tion­ing, the CEO ex­plained that at­tempt to cut the grass had been stymied by the soft con­di­tions which re­sult­ed in the trac­tors and oth­er grass re­duc­tion large de­vices be­com­ing stuck in the mud. It seems to me that this was more like­ly a case of the au­thor­i­ties spin­ning their own top in mud. And hon­est­ly I be­lieve the per­sons re­spon­si­ble sold the CEO, a bunch of dunk.

Most prop­er­ty own­ers know that dur­ing the rainy sea­son, the use of au­to­mat­ed ve­hi­cles for cut­ting lawn grass is an ex­er­cise in fu­til­i­ty. As a re­sult, it is a case of hav­ing to re­vert to the more man­u­al meth­ods of weed whack­ers and lawn ma­chines if one want­ed to main­tain the ap­pear­ance of their prop­er­ty. It is a bit more labour in­ten­sive, but much pre­ferred to do noth­ing. The CEO plead­ed for the need for ad­di­tion­al cap­i­tal to un­der­take ren­o­va­tion of the track but it is un­like­ly that such fi­nanc­ing will be read­i­ly avail­able from the usu­al spon­sors, as the cost is over $1.5 mil­lion. As such the sit­u­a­tion is ex­pect­ed to re­main un­changed.

Man­age­ment re­quires the pos­ses­sion of nu­mer­ous skills and it is wide­ly known that hav­ing a ti­tle does not mean that one pos­sess­es man­age­ment skills.

The most im­por­tant of these skills is prob­lem solv­ing...every­one can man­age when there are no prob­lems; true man­age­ment is on­ly seen when there are prob­lems. Find­ing a means to run off a sched­uled race pro­gram when there are ob­sta­cles is the job that all of those em­ployed at the ARC were en­gaged to do. Look­ing for al­ter­na­tive ways of cut­ting grass when trac­tors can­not func­tion would seem a rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple prob­lem to solve. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, it seems a prob­lem be­yond the skills of the ARC man­age­ment team.

The ARC man­age­ment seems con­tent to let fate take its course, and giv­en that the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty is left to Stephen Jardim, the track man­ag­er, he has a lot to be ac­count­able for and should be ac­count­able too. I would love to read his per­for­mance eval­u­a­tion re­port, al­though to be fair, he spoke to me ear­li­er this year and stat­ed that the cur­rent turf sur­face and track is not suit­able for turf rac­ing in its cur­rent state.

The ques­tion that own­ers who pre­fer the turf must now ask them­selves is whether it makes sense to race these hors­es in Trinidad or ex­port them to neigh­bour­ing Bar­ba­dos. Any such de­ci­sion is sure to dam­age the lo­cal in­dus­try since it will fur­ther de­plete the coun­try's rac­ing stock. At the same time, they may have no choice since the ARC should take the wise de­ci­sion to dis­con­tin­ue sched­ul­ing turf rac­ing for the sec­ond half of the year, the rainy sea­son.

It would seem a wise de­ci­sion for the ARC man­age­ment to make since it would en­able such own­ers to make a de­ci­sion with re­spect to the train­ing regime for their hors­es. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, it ap­pears based on the ev­i­dence in front of us, that the ARC man­age­ment can­not be re­lied up­on for wise de­ci­sions. Own­ers there­fore will have to make ra­tio­nal de­ci­sions on their own.

The sit­u­a­tion with the man­age­ment of the turf track is symp­to­matic of the chal­lenges that have been fac­ing the rac­ing in­dus­try. Man­age­ment is re­ac­tive rather than proac­tive.

A prob­lem oc­curs with se­cu­ri­ty, the man­age­ment de­cides to beef up se­cu­ri­ty; a prob­lem oc­curs with the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of hors­es, the man­age­ment de­cides to en­sure that prop­er iden­ti­fi­ca­tion pro­ce­dures are in place; a prob­lem oc­curs with the in­tegri­ty of some ac­tiv­i­ty, man­age­ment de­cides to im­ple­ment re­forms.

One is left to ask the rhetor­i­cal ques­tion as to what holis­tic ap­proach is be­ing tak­en to the de­vel­op­ment of the in­dus­try. For ex­am­ple, how could spon­sor­ship of one of the two biggest days of rac­ing at Christ­mas time–Stew­ards Cup day on De­cem­ber 7–on­ly is arranged dur­ing the week of De­cem­ber 2? And as a re­sult, the ARC end­ed up with a pot­pour­ri of spon­sors–each race spon­sored by a dif­fer­ent in­di­vid­ual, prob­a­bly for nom­i­nal amounts and a tro­phy, and with a pal­try crowd.

When these ques­tions are raised, it is dif­fi­cult to con­clude whether the prob­lem lies at the board or ex­ec­u­tive lev­el. Some of the board mem­bers are ex­pe­ri­enced and se­nior pro­fes­sion­als, who in their pro­fes­sion­al ca­reers sure­ly dis­played much more acu­ity than is cur­rent­ly be­ing ev­i­denced at the ARC.

This sug­gests that the chal­lenge may lie at the ex­ec­u­tive lev­el and with per­sons to im­ple­ment the de­ci­sions of the CEO, in which case dif­fi­cult de­ci­sions will need to be made. He should re­assess many of his staff in these im­por­tant de­ci­sions and bite the bul­let oth­er­wise in the near fu­ture it will be his head on the chop­ping block, like so many CEO's be­fore him.

Again how­ev­er, in this coun­try of short mem­o­ries, these mat­ters will no doubt blow over as quick­ly as they blew in. All the while though, the words of the nurs­ery rhyme "rain, rain go away the chil­dren want to come out and play" will purr qui­et­ly since the big chil­dren con­tin­ue to play come rain or sun.

Let us watch for this Sat­ur­day, where there is a fea­ture race sched­uled for the turf and view the out­come. But I am not hop­ing for much sal­va­tion, oth­er than to ask all Whack­er men in T&T to ap­ply now to the ARC...they need you.

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