What's the most annoying element of thoroughbred racing?
Well, there's decent competition for that, but close to the top of the list is thinking you have won a race, only to find out you haven't.
Before live telecasts of racing on Trackside we relied on racecallers to give us an accurate call of a close finish and that worked reasonably well.
But with live telecasts we now make our own decisions on a finish and the accuracy of that depends on where the television camera is in relation to the actual finish line.
When Des Fredricks was in charge of Hawkes Bay Racing he went on a fact-finding tour of Japanese racing and was immediately impressed that in Japan it is mandatory for the television image to be in total alignment with the finish line, therefore with the photo finish.