Based on an update from informed sources and anecdotal evidence, the list of deliverables agreed in the International Monetary Fund-dictated lease agreement of 2016 between Supreme Ventures Racing & Entertainment Limited (SVREL) and the Government of Jamaica to operate the Caymanas horse racing plant has not gone apace, and this is in year 10 of the operations.

As far as I am aware, the Project Monitoring Committee to which SVREL presents quarterly and other reports is functional. However, no amount of pressure by this body can be legitimately applied to SVREL to perform up to the agreed standard. This will be so as long as the promoting company is hamstrung, through no fault of its own, operating with a seriously flawed racing product as the bizarrely complicated claiming system has proven to be.

Naturally, the operatives of the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association (TOBA) and the United Racehorse Trainers Association of Jamaica (URTAJ) continue to express concern over the dissatisfaction with the prize money level, and the dissatisfaction is at an all-time high. Maintenance of the racing plant as it relates to the collection of garbage and the equine swimming pool, as well as a stable area, with the security features as stated in the Jamaica Racing Commission (JRC) Racing Rules is unaffordable.

Frankly, my position is that as long as TOBA and URTAJ are happy to condemn SVREL to operate in the gaming market space with a complicated claiming racing product, there is no basis for making any demands. However, the cult-like support for the continuation of this counterproductive profit-immune policy is unsurprising since there is an unsubstantiated insistence that SVREL is profitable and should do more.

The audited SVREL financial statements dated December 31, 2024 in the bottom line at closing indicated a loss of $385,837 million. Six months later, Gary Peart, executive chairman of Supreme Ventures Limited, parent company of SVREL, in a presentation to the shareholders, announced a loss of $400 million. Objectively, these facts of a financial nature are exceedingly stubborn things to defy and deny by TOBA and URTAJ.

Historically, truth be told, following the 1959 gift of a modern racing plant at Caymanas Park equipped with an electromechanical totalisator offering four betting options (win, place, quiniela, double event), a bookmaking industry operating with appropriate levies and taxes payable operating over 500 points of sales, horse racing flourished in Jamaica for the next three decades.

However, operating a digital platform now with 13 wagering options and over 100 off-track stations operational, adequate profitability has been elusive. This is so with a racing product incapable of growth commensurate with the expansion of the population. Unlike in jurisdictions where handicap racing exists, there is no interest from women in the claiming system model, with its complicated designation of races, which, in and of itself, is a deterrent and outright turn-off.

In 1960, the first full year of the operation of the newly minted Caymanas facility, there were 29 race days. By 1992, it expanded to 84 with 115 runners across 11 to 12 races daily. The racing product model was presented with the British Horseracing Authority’s (BHA) handicapping methodology of classification of a thoroughbred horse population. This exercise equalises the form of horses to the drive wagering by ensuring that horses of similar ability compete together.

Misguided conspiracy theorists rallied against handicapping and bookmaking, transitioning the sport from a vibrant, mass-appealing event into a niche market. This was made possible by the January 17, 1993 unfortunate adoption of the complicated 1930 claiming system of North America. Since then I have been positing that claim tags are not problematic, but the artificial classification of the horse population producing huge numbers of odds-on favourites is.

These conspiracists, with no empirical data informing confirmation, successfully persuaded the Jamaica Racing Commission (JRC) Board that a racing product, which flourished for 30 years at an impressive average growth of 10 per cent, lacked integrity. Further, the owning and trading of thoroughbreds in the claiming system could be an economically viable commercial activity.

It is undeniable that the then board lacked the requisite knowledge to reject this idiotic notion outright. The then chief operative handicapper, Leslie McCrae, along with heavily vested owners and breeders such as Pat Rousseau and Howard Hamilton, both with tenures as the promoters’ board chairmen, warned that a claiming system would be detrimental to the promotion of racing generally and, in particular, the breeding industry, but this went unheeded.

Incidentally, this writer was familiar with the superiority of BHA handicapping methodology over the American aberrant claiming system and, in a live broadcast, endorsed the position of these gentlemen; the rest, of course, is history. Truthfully though, nowadays I find the perverse satisfaction with my “I-told-you-so” posture of over 32 years less ‘enjoyable’, and here is why. In the money-losing Jamaican horse racing industry, facts and outcomes are ignored continuously.

Based on the current downward trajectory of the industry, the dates when the promotion of horse racing will end as a commercially viable business activity will be easily predictable. Horse racing in the United States, Jamaica, and, in fact, in the Pan-American region, from Canada in the north down to Chile, farthest south, and all jurisdictions in between is facing an existential threat.

Effective October 2025 the regulatory US Jockey Club has established a rating system, which is effectively the handicapping of the horse population, and for all I know, it may be too little too late. The hard fact is that in this hemisphere with the serious knowledge deficit of the promoters, the horse racing product, delivered in the claiming system, cannot compete with other major players in the global multi-billion-dollars ports gaming industry.