Many of you experienced the outage to our eWin platform during Sunday’s race meeting, along with some issues on Saturday night for football. Each year, we accept more than a half billion racing bets through established accounts, and eWin serves as the input method for nearly 80 million of them. As you can imagine, our technological infrastructure to handle this volume is significant. The eWin platform accounts for almost 1 million transactions per Sunday race meeting, and last Sunday, there were approximately 333,000 processed.
There is no doubting that this weekend’s disruption was highly unacceptable. A full investigation is underway and we are taking all steps necessary to tackle the issue. We apologize for the great inconvenience this caused.
As for the weekend of overseas racing, American Pharoah and Golden Horn - the two horses currently sitting at the top of World’s Best Racehorse Rankings – both made their swansongs in the Breeders’ Cup meeting last Saturday. It was astonishing to see American Pharoah, the sweetheart of American dirt racing fans, bow out in such a dominating and breathtaking fashion with his six-and-a-half length victory in the Breeders’ Cup Classic. But it was less rosy for Golden Horn as he had to settle for second in the Breeders’ Cup Turf, narrowly beaten by Ryan Moore-ridden Found, who likely enjoyed the softer going more than Golden Horn.
And for me, the most interesting winner that evening was Mongolian Saturday in the Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint. Trained by Enebish Ganbat, a native Mongolian based in America for the last five years, it was great to see the celebrations of he and the owners in their traditional outfits. Mongolian Saturday holds an entry for the Hong Kong Sprint and they have mentioned the LONGINES Hong Kong Sprint as a strong possibility. It will be a great added flair if this group joins us in December should all materialize between now and then.
Having ridden G1 winners in the Breeders’ Cup meeting on Friday and Saturday, as well as in France on Sunday, Ryan Moore is seeking for his 4th G1 win in five days and three continents, when he partners Snow Sky in the race that stops a nation, the G1 Melbourne Cup in Australia today. We enjoyed the simulcast action last weekend headlined by the Mackinnon Stakes and Victoria Derby, where many HKIR nominees performed, and also the Tenno Sho Autumn on Sunday. The connections of Mackinnon winner Gailo Chop have expressed serious interest in racing at Sha Tin in December, along with Tenno Sho second Staphanos.
As for today’s Melbourne Cup, I am quite excited to see how this race unfolds, and the five Hong Kong-based jockeys with mounts, all with solid chances to win what, to many, seems a wide open race.
Flemington Racecourse Manager Mick Goodie has moved the rail out 2 metres in an attempt to eliminate the fast lane that occurred during Derby Day. After the track inspection last night, concerns have been raised and during Derby Day the track had a lot if issues with. It seems there is a track bias with all winners coming along the rail and despite the rail move, this is likely to be the case again today with a large part of the track tipped to be slow.
Currently the track is rated 4 with a chance it may be upgraded to 3 later in the day, but from about 10 to 14 meters off the rail there is a slow lane and therefore jockeys are expected to stay with their horses closer to the rail. It will it make more difficult to find running space coming from the back.
Zac Purton will likely stick to the instruction given last time on his ride Fame Game, who is the favourite to stick to the inside rail and ride for luck. He is a win and place chance for me but I have some reservations about him. Bondi Beach, ridden by Brett Prebble, is an interesting candidate for me to win the race with his running style. Meanwhile Trip To Paris was impressive in his last start but likely has to come from the back of the field which is not easy. Our Ivanhowe was running on strongly in the Caulfield Cup and his fitness has improved, and it would be another German bred horse winning the race.
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