Hyderabad Season Collapses; Racing Faces Breaking Point

 

By Sharan Kumar

 

Hyderabad’s winter racing season has effectively collapsed after glanders was confirmed, exposing once again how racing administrators seem determined to sabotage the sport through incompetence and inertia. With a mandatory three-month shutdown wiping out the entire season, the crisis highlights the archaic thinking and shocking lack of initiative among officials who have long outlived their relevance. As two premier racing centres falter, the sport is limping under the weight of its own mismanagement.

 

With glanders detected in two stabled horses, the unavoidable three-month quarantine and government denotification process has begun. Even under the best-case scenario, no further positives and a completely clean set of tests, the reopening date remains a full three months away. By then, February will have passed, the winter season will be beyond salvage, and Hyderabad’s scorching summers rule out any advancement of the monsoon programme. In practical terms, racing cannot resume before July.

 

A depressing scenario? Of course. But hardly surprising when the sport is run by administrators who have outlived their utility and imagination. Racing today is limping not because the sport lacks followers or talent, but because its custodians have run out of ideas decades ago and now run on inertia, ego, and committee-room drama.

 

Trainers, jockeys, riding boys, everyone dependent on the sport, will face the music. Owners will bleed money as their horses stand idle while training fees keep ticking like a tax meter. The club may toss a token lifeline, but everyone knows it won’t plug the flood.

 

The much-feared biological cloud has done exactly what the administrators refused to acknowledge; it toppled an entire season. And naturally, we are now being told that “finding the cause is futile.” Convenient. Especially when the controversial decision to bring non-thoroughbreds into the premises for a two-horse race bypassed every standard protocol. When several of those horses died, the club slipped behind its usual iron curtain. Hyderabad isn’t Bengaluru; you don’t get leaks. You barely get whispers. Professionals and committee members remain terrified to open their mouths, lest they find themselves exiled for daring to have an opinion.

 

The rot isn’t limited to Hyderabad. Chennai’s season was shut mid-way and is unlikely to resume anytime soon. A hostile government, zero relief from courts, and a racetrack dug up to plant saplings, yes, saplings, pretty much kill any remaining hope. Even if a miracle verdict arrives, repairing the track will take its own sweet time.

 

Post-COVID racing had staged a quiet but steady recovery. Race days may have reduced, horse populations may have dipped, but turnout and enthusiasm remained strong. And now, two premier clubs are staring at losing close to 50 race days. Financially, this is a hammer blow, especially with the back-breaking 40% sin tax. Racing clubs have consistently failed to drive home the fact that racing is a game of skill, not a moral crime. Cricket’s gambling ecosystem is a free-for-all circus, but racing is lectured and punished because “moral high ground” looks good in press conferences.

 

Yet clubs cannot claim innocence. They have done little to promote the sport, modernise its image, attract younger audiences, or remove the cobwebs of archaic functioning. Racing is still run like the 1960s, with the same kind of office bearers, some literally in office for decades. Enthusiasm cannot be expected when the guardians of the sport show none.

 

Meanwhile in Bengaluru, the BTC is busy with its own soap opera. A special general body meeting awaits, where the club will be pressured to vacate its historic premises, make peace with the government, and withdraw the Supreme Court case. Whether racing continues beyond November depends entirely on how this internal drama resolves.

 

Inside the BTC, the situation resembles a circus without a ringmaster. Officials are sacked because a committee member woke up with a dislike for someone. Dignity is optional; whims are mandatory. The quality of the committee has nosedived so badly that people with oversized egos and no real stake in racing are now in charge. They have no qualms about dragging the club and the sport through the mud if it serves their petty politics.

 

In the end, the crisis of Indian racing is not glanders, not hostile governments, not taxes.
The real disease afflicting the sport is administrative incompetence: chronic, untreated, and now dangerously contagious.

 

Until the powers-that-be are replaced with people who actually care about racing, the sport will continue to limp, crippled not by biology, but by bureaucracy, ego, and decades of shenanigans.

 

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