A year has passed since the landmark 25-year strategic partnership between TAB New Zealand and Entain Australia began. Video / Jason Oxenham
Michael Guerin wrote his first nationally published racing articles while still in school and started writing about horse racing and the gambling industry for the Herald as a 20-year-old in 1990. He became the Herald’s Racing Editor in 1995 and covers the world’s biggest horse racing carnivals.
The code has appointed Queensland-based administrator Brad Steele as its new chief executive, starting on July 1.
Steele has been involved in harness racing for 40 years - most importantly as chairman of Albion Park in Brisbane for the last four years, where he worked with Racing Queensland to oversee improvements in the code in Queensland, which was struggling for relevance five years ago.
Now Steele will move to Christchurch hoping for the same sort of resurgence in New Zealand harness racing’s fortunes as the code continues to lose market share to New Zealand thoroughbred racing and the enormous beast that is the Australian thoroughbred industry.
Steele’s job will be a complex one but he appeals as a great appointment by HRNZ. He is a lover of harness racing but comes without the baggage of having worked on the NZ racing administrator-go-round or coming from directly inside the industry.
Top-level racing appointments in this country have, on too many occasions, fallen into two vastly different but equally underwhelming camps.
One is career chief executives from outside the industry who know nothing about racing, spend a year or two supposedly learning about it and then soon after leave without accomplishing anything.
The second problem group of administrators have been those who have always worked in the industry, get jobs they aren’t really qualified for because they are seen as “good guys (or women)” and spend much of their time trying to not upset the people who helped get them the role.
That costly and messy cycle has, thankfully, improved in the past five years, particularly at New Zealand Thoroughbred Racing (NZTR) and the biggest clubs within it, while former TAB chief executive Mike Tod was an excellent change agent who got the Entain deal over the line during his time.
Some of the most aggressive changes and open-minded leadership have seen the formation of new entities Auckland Thoroughbred Racing and Waikato Thoroughbred Racing and just recently RACE, which runs Trentham and Awapuni, employed a smart young chief executive in Brad Taylor to steer them into the future.
Steele sits in the sweet spot of knowing the harness racing code and having proven he can revitalise it but being removed enough from its NZ-based politics to make clearer and hopefully quicker decisions.
Brad Steele.
Considering his success in Queensland and the climate difference between there and Christchurch, it is a touch surprising HRNZ was able to secure him.
But buying a few new winter jackets is the least of the problems Steele faces.
While thoroughbred racing has leapt forward since the Entain deal was announced last year, the harness code has been largely stagnant.
That was not entirely its own fault after previous chief executive Gary Woodham fell ill and eventually retired and HRNZ went into something of an understandable holding pattern until Steele was confirmed last Friday.
Aside from falling market share and becoming less relevant on the national sporting landscape, with the exception of NZ Cup week and the Race by Grins night, harness racing has had very messy internal political problems.
There have been huge differences of opinion between some at HRNZ and the Auckland Trotting Club (ATC) over everything from the dates calendar to funding.
The ATC have of course done themselves no favours with a $120 million stuff-up in their apartment build, which again wasn’t their fault, but the at-times disastrous development came closer to closing harness racing forever in Auckland than most people will ever realise.
So Steele is taking over a code which, if not in crisis, is at least in disrepair and in need of a similar shot in the arm to what the gallops have had.
All is not lost though.
Harness racing in New Zealand is still a viable punting product, with wonderful horses and some incredible horsepeople, and it sits in a workable timeslot for broadcasting into Australia.
Entain, which now runs the TAB and effectively much of racing in this country, is keen on harness racing and sees it as “under-indexed”, which is a corporate way of saying “if we do this better we can make more money for everybody”.
Entain boss Dean Shannon is a harness man through and through and owns, among countless other horses, Race by Grins winner Merlin. He wants harness racing to succeed and will undoubtedly be pleased and possibly relieved by Steele’s appointment.
Entain/TAB are already moving to reinvigorate harness racing and have moved some Thursday meetings next month to Friday to focus punters on that traditional harness racing time-slot.
They will double down on that in the new season and soon relaunch Trackside coverage under a new “Friday Night Lights” banner to try and drive engagement and, put simply, be more entertaining.
The right people in the highest places want New Zealand harness racing and Steele to succeed.
This isn’t quite the last chance saloon for harness racing, as organisations like Addington are still strong and Cambridge has shown what can be created when chance favours the brave.
So harness racing isn’t going to die any time soon.
But with Steele’s appointment and Shannon’s support, if the code doesn’t start heading in the right direction in the next year you have to wonder if it ever will.
