New era of horse racing dawns in VN

(28-02-2005)

Terry Hartney

The day began with a cigar and a horse which was trying to eat it.

The horse was called Pines Parade, a big bay mare which had come from Australia nearly six months ago as part of 39 other sleek thoroughbred racehorses to revolutionize the sport in Viet Nam.

Pines Parade poked its head over its newly built stall at the famous old French colonial era racetrack in HCM City called Phu Tho to start smelling and messing with my shirt pocket that housed two Sumatran cigars as a contingent of local media was being led on an inspection tour of the revamped racetrack and its horses.

It looked a very fine specimen this horse and it was very friendly, and I kept returning to its stall in between looking at the other horses.

The day ended with Pines Parade being the only winning horse I backed on the day, and with most people leaving the racetrack convinced international standard horse racing has a future in Viet Nam.

Even retired sports-loving Vietnamese Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet, one of the managing pioneers of economic change in Viet Nam over a decade ago, was there.

White-haired and a fit 79-year-old, he joined in the official celebrations as the remodeled Sai Gon Racing Club staged the first ever races for international thoroughbreds.

The little local ponies with their tiny boy jockeys were still in attendance, as they have been every weekend since 1989, manfully trying to beat each other in wildly run races on the dirt track.

But the big boys (actually many were mares like Pines Parade – someone suggested mares attracted a smaller export tax in Australia than stallions or geldings) were the draw card.

Yesterday they raced against each other in two special events, and generally were bettering the times run by the locals by an estimated 20 seconds (or 80 lengths) over the same distance.

It was a day of many firsts.

The thoroughbreds, a special breed bred for racing over at least five centuries in Europe then elsewhere in the world, trace their roots back to careful inbreeding between tall long-legged and long-necked Arabian horses that could run for miles in the sands of the Middle East and speedy muscled English forest ponies.

Their size is daunting to Phu Tho regular punters, and to the local jockeys and strappers too.

It is not that Viet Nam hasn’t seen bigger race horses in days gone by.

French colonialism saw a regular circuit, with racetracks being attended at all points of the country – Ha Noi, Da Nang, Da Lat as well as old Sai Gon.

There are two opposing legends that persist but are never substantiated that the special breed of racehorses the French used were taken back to Japan by occupying forces during the dying days of World War II – or were eaten by starving people suffering a war-induced famine in 1945.

Those horses were allegedly called Indochinoise and did contain some thoroughbred or Arabic blood mixed in with other local strains.

The main grandstand at Phu Tho, built by the French back in the 1930s in a long rambling art decor style near the heart of Cho Lon (or Chinatown), gives a hint of the splendor and glory that must have been race days in that era.

Now the old grandstand has been refurbished for the new era, with the new racing management company (called Thien Ma and headed up by Nguyen Ngoc My, an overseas Vietnamese from Australia who also established dog racing in nearby Vung Tau some years ago) pouring in millions of dollars in a big gamble to get Viet Nam’s horse racing industry up to international standard.

There is a new running rail that doesn’t threaten to kill horses if they crash into it, computerised betting, air-conditioned gambling lounges, a close circuit television system giving both live coverage and immediate replays of each race and a computerised result board and photo finish equipment.

And there are those giant horses from Australia.

Vietnamese jockeys are now being trained to handle the 500kg beasts and won’t be riding them for an estimated year.

"They have to be bigger and older to handle these racehorses," says the deputy director of the Sai Gon Racing Club, Hsu King Hoe from Malaysia.

The local jockeys are mainly school boys riding at a weekend.

"They need to be taught how to ride professionally – not to be whipping their horses from the start, and to learn how to balance themselves better, let alone having the techniques to negotiate the tricky bend here at Phu Tho" says an Australian horse owner from the Gold Coast who has been assisting the establishment of the new look racing setup.

Twelve foreign jockeys were flown in to ride the big thoroughbreds in two races over 1000m yesterday.

Two were women (females aren’t allowed to ride the ponies in Viet Nam under local law), Australia’s Lauren Abbott from Townsville and Julie Burridge, originally from England but now living in Singapore with trainer-husband Steven Burridge, himself a former Australian jockey.

Neither of the women jockeys tasted success in their two rides (although Burridge grabbed a second on Bonus Spin).

The honours went to the ever-smiling and tall "Popeye," otherwise formally known as Abdul Faizal from Malaysia, who was an instant hit with the crowds after coolly riding Silent Gift to victory in the first thoroughbred race ever to be run at Phu Tho.

And also to Macau’s leading apprentice Chan Pok Hung who rode the winner of the second thoroughbred contest – good old cigar sniffing Pines Parade – by stealing the lead from the outset and leaving everything else in its wake all the way to the winning post.

Maybe the mare thought that cigar was its reward at the end of the day in this most exotic of race days. — VNS