B R Sharan Kumar

Unsatisfactory and Incompetent Mean the Same Thing   By Sharan Kumar   Indian racing has a curious way of punishing offences. Not by what actually happened on the track, but by how imaginatively the Stipes/Stewards choose their words after the event. The recent suspensions arising from the rides on Bezalel and Fynbos offer a masterclass in how vocabulary can be stretched, twisted and finally detached from logic, all while maintaining a straight face.   At the heart of both enquiries lies the same uncomfortable conclusion. In both races, the Stewards were convinced that the horse in question was capable of winning. In both cases, they explicitly stopped short of accusing the jockey of preventing the horse from running on its merit. And yet, in both instances, the jockey was punished because the ride was deemed to have cost the horse the race. That shared reality should have led to similar findings and comparable punishments. Instead, we were served two different labels a...

  Glanders has moved beyond a single source By Sharan Kumar   What began as a contained outbreak linked to a single stud farm has now widened, exposing serious gaps in tracing, accountability and response. Until recently, all positive cases could be traced back to one facility in Coimbatore, offering a fragile sense of control. That comfort has now vanished. Horses from another stud farm are reportedly showing symptoms, throwing the narrative into disarray and underlining how far the infection may already have travelled. With fresh positives across multiple centres, repeat samples from unexpected quarters and no clear transmission trail, Indian racing faces a hard reality: the crisis is no longer about isolated cases, but a systemic failure in containment and oversight.   With two more horses testing positive at Hyderabad, hopes of racing resuming there before the regular monsoon season in July now appear remote. Hyderabad, in fact, has recorded the highest number of gla...

Contain the Disease or Contain the Sport?   By Sharan Kumar   Glanders brought Brazilian racing to a moment of reckoning, but not to a standstill. When the disease re-emerged there in 1999 after a thirty-year absence, there was no nationwide blackout, no "lost years," and no mass internment of healthy animals. Instead, authorities treated it as a biosecurity puzzle to be solved with a scalpel.   In Southern India today, the response has been a sledgehammer. While Brazil isolated infected premises and cleared healthy ones to compete, the Indian circuit, Bangalore, Mysore, and Hyderabad, has been frozen in a state of administrative rigor mortis. This raises a haunting question for the industry: Is the sport being killed by a microbe, or by a lack of institutional courage?   The Brazilian Blueprint: Precision over Panic   When Glanders reappeared in the Brazilian Northeast, the Ministério da Agricultura did not treat the horse as the enemy. They immediately implem...

  Glanders, Panic and the Price of Paralysis   By Sharan Kumar   Horse racing across parts of Southern India is at a standstill. Bangalore, Mysore and Hyderabad are shut and, by official design, will remain so for at least three months , pending completion of mandated testing cycles for glanders. What must be stated upfront, however, is that Indian racing as a whole has not shut down . Racing continues without disruption at Mumbai, Kolkata and Delhi , with the only major restriction being the ban on movement of horses from affected southern centres .   That distinction matters.   The immediate question troubling owners, trainers, jockeys and stable staff in the south is not whether caution is required, but whether racing must really wait until May, when the Bangalore summer season is scheduled to begin, or whether it can resume earlier under controlled conditions.   Hyderabad, because of its scorching summer, cannot realistically start e...

  Long Shots Wreak Mayhem on Punters By Sharan Kumar Punters expect favourites to win. Fair enough. It doesn’t happen all the time, nor should it. Racing is not a public service. But when proven form horses suddenly play truant, that’s when the punter begins to feel less unlucky and more cheated.   If favourites were winning simply because they attracted money, the betting ring would double up as a mint. Sadly for gullible punters, horse racing does not recognise crowd funding as a performance-enhancing substance. The comforting belief that a heavily backed runner must automatically be the “best horse” keeps sending many straight to the wrong end of the stick, where optimism is abundant and returns are strictly optional.   In an era bloated with lower-class races, where form is about as reliable as a weather forecast, upsets are no longer exceptions. They are standard issue. Yet every race day, the same ritual unfolds. Money pours in on reputations, yester...

Baychimo Bursts the Bubble in 2000 Guineas   By Sharan Kumar   Sunday’s Mumbai card was a gentle reminder that favourites do not, in fact, come with a secret turbo button stitched under the saddle. The popular belief that a short-priced runner can simply “change gear” at will was left sprawled on the turf, as punters who chased reputations rather than realities paid a familiar price.   Ten races promised a carnival. One favourite winning turned it into a wake. After the lone obliging early on, it was mayhem with a betting slip, as favourites discovered that pedigree, hype and celebrity jockeys do not automatically translate into forward motion when the bell rings.   The day’s centrepiece, the Indian 2000 Guineas, was supposed to be at the mercy of Pune Derby hero Zacharias. Instead, it became a lesson in humility, with Baychimo gatecrashing the party. Despite a scrappy start and settling at the tail, Baychimo was unleashed wide in the straight, mowing them down with ...