The claiming system was established on two false premises: firstly, that a racing product enjoying spectacular growth in the market, by any metric, lacked integrity, and secondly, that trading in race horses in a claiming system could be a viable economic activity. No matter how much the stakeholders wish it otherwise, the local racing industry, with a racing product delivered in a complicated, inequitable,and seriously flawed claiming system, faces an existential threat.

In 1960, the first full year of the Caymanas plant operations, there were 29 race meetings, and under a handicap system, supported by a genuinely knowledgeable cohort of the Jockey Club Of Jamaica operatives, including a mathematically skilled panel of handicappers at the regulation and promotional level in tandem, future growth was therefore a given.

Furthermore, by 1965, there was a vibrant bookmaking industry with over 600 points of sale islandwide. Those enlightened bookies even made significant investments in the ownership of thoroughbreds, and by 1992, there were 84 race days,each with an average of 115 starters divided into 11 or 12races per programme.Cumulatively, this was 300 per cent growth in races at an average of 10 per cent annually over the first three decades under a handicap system driving competitive wagering.

This is what the counterproductive claiming system has operated with over the recent past. In 2024, the 755 races had 389 odds-on favourites and the 754 races in 2025 had 366. By the way, in 2021, the 87 race days had 856 races, in 2022, the 88 had 856, in 2023, the 84 had 802, and in 2024, the 79 had 754. Four years on, the 102 races fewer than in 2021 is now irretrievable. These figures confirm that field size average remains below 10 per race.

Speaking of short-priced bets, in the first three years of operation (2017-20), SVREL programmed 2,229 races, and 1,098 favourites were odds-on. Additionally, in another 216 of those races,the most fancied starter was only at even money. Since 1993, there has been a steady decline in the growth of all aspects of the industry which became an established annual pattern of the last 33 years.

Here is what is misunderstood at nearly all levels of regulation and promotion. The promoting company offers two types of bets: win, with 12 options, and one for place. However, the 12 win-betting options range from quinielas and all bets in between, up to and including the pick nine. Therefore, as it relates to the provable negative impact of odds-on favourites, the question to ask is…what is so difficult about this to understand?

There can be no question that each race with an odds-on favourite underperforms as a sales unit. This has at least a 20 per cent negative impact on profitability. A simple exercise of comparing sales on similar races with and without odds-on favourites will confirm this fact. As I have been positing for the last 33 years, the claiming system is also incapable of expanding the market commensurate with the population grow thin the potential gaming market.

Since October 2025, the US Jockey has moved to a classification of its horse population, which is effectively a handicap system to increase field size and drive competitive wagering. This has been available to the local industry for over 15 years with no response, as they simply reject the premise that, in the interest of viability,a claiming condition system in a handicap model can coexist to comply with the 1977 JRC Rule #33.

Despite the incontrovertible and inescapable facts presented in these columns over the last twelve years and the Financial Statements going back 33 years confirming accumulated losses by the former promoting company CTL, as well as the current SVREL, the stakeholders remain unconvinced that the profit-immune claiming system racing product should be operational in perpetuity.

Good luck with that, as I have no basis to be confident there will be a response from TOBA and or URTAJ as the members continue to entertain the misconception that ownership of thoroughbred horses is a business investment in which there is an entitlement to profitability.Truth be told, SVL/SVREL, the preferred bidder of the two received in 2016, has performed a crucial and admirable financial survival balancing act with an unviable racing product for the nine years of its existence from 2017.