His unflappable voice was instantly recognisable to a generation of racegoers. After more than half a century in the judges box Dick Hunt made his final call at the Levin Racing Club meeting at Ōtaki last weekend.
Anyone with anything to do with racing in the lower North Island would know the voice intimately. It was Dick Hunt’s job to confirm the result of every race. In a close finish, his decision was eagerly anticipated by owners, trainers and punters alike. Fortunes were at stake.
Matter-of-fact and bereft of emotion, each decision arrived as soon as discernible. Blasted across the public address system, it would start with the winner, run through the first five placings, give the margins between each horse at the finish, and finish with the time taken for the race.
The photo finish of the 2023 Phil's Electrical and Gipsy Caravans Levin Ryder Stakes.
Incredibly, the feature race of day at the Levin meeting on Saturday was one of those tight races. It was a thrilling finish with horses wide across the track at the post. Nobody on course or at home was sure who had won, not even the jockeys themselves, and awaited Hunt’s decision.
It can seem like an age ... Hunt took his time. Robert Wellwood, the trainer of the eventual winner Itza Charmdeel, admitted he was relieved to hear Hunt’s call go his way.
Winning jockey Sam Weatherley and Itza Charmdeel's co-trainer Robert Wellwood.
“I’ve watched the replay a few times on television now and I’m still not sure he got there,” he had said.
Hunt was a perfectionist with an eye for detail, a trait that would serve him well in a job that demanded accuracy with zero room for error. He said he never made a mistake. There was no room for mistakes.
“No, I never got it wrong. I was very diligent. Sometimes people would wonder why I took so long, but I am a bit of a perfectionist,” he said.
These days Hunt had modern technology at his disposal that allowed him to examine magnified pixels of an image to determine the winner, leaving absolutely no room for doubt. If there is still doubt at that very edge of that technology, the result must be confirmed as a dead heat.
It’s a far cry from his early days in the judges box when the photo negatives of a race finish were taken in a room immediately above him, developed, and sent downstairs via a pipe chute.
“They had to dip them in the liquid and count to 20. If you left it too long it would start to fade and you’d have to ask for another photo. Horses could be coming into the birdcage for the next race,” he said.
“I had a magnifying glass, so what you saw through that on the print was as big as it was going to get ... there’s rarely a dead heat now.”
Some clubs in those days would put a copy of the photo of a close finish in a glass cabinet outside the secretaries office to end all correspondence. It was the era preceding Trackside television, where all races were broadcast via radio.
Dick Hunt’s first official meeting as head judge was at Foxton in August, 1978, although he started much earlier as an assistance judge to Keith Hatch in 1972 - some 58 years ago.
Race sponsors Phil Matenga and Dave Croot help fit the winning rug on Phils Electrical and Gipsy Caravans Levin Ryder Stakes winner Itza Charmdeel.
During that time he had overseen an estimated 36,000 races at meetings from Gisborne to Trentham, including courses that no longer stage race meetings, like Levin, Foxton and Feilding.
“I enjoyed Levin. You were so close to the action. Some of those early Levin Classic days were something else. There’d be 10,000 people there,” he said.
Some mornings required Hunt to wake at 4am to travel to Gisborne, often not making it home until 2 the following morning. In any season he could travel more than 50,000km.
“I suppose if you enjoy what you are doing the travelling doesn’t matter,” he said.
Hunt initially worked in the industry as a form compiler and journalist, providing written analysis of each horse’s performance for racing publications like Turf Digest and Friday Flash. In those early days, without the aid of video technology, that analysis was done on the fly from written notes during the running of the race, like “slow away, looped field turn, strong finish”.
“You only saw the race once,” he said.
Dick Hunt. Photo / Peter Rubery - Race Images
The advent of video allowed Hunt the luxury to rewind and replay each race multiple times as soon as he got home from the races, allowing for a far more accurate analysis of each runner. Included was any relevant information from the stipendiary steward’s report, like whether a horse lost a shoe during the race.
When the head office for the racebook publication Turf Digest moved from Avalon to Auckland in 1988, he became a correspondent for the weekly Friday Flash racing newspaper, which ceased operation in 2006.
“It just wasn’t selling enough, and to get a copy to Westport it had to be flown to Wellington, then Christchurch, then bus to Hokitika, and taxi from there,” he said.
In the early days he kept meticulous scrapbooks of the results from every meeting in New Zealand. They’re still in boxes piled high in his garage. But he stopped doing it a few years ago.
He had a soft spot for the harness racing industry and was judge at many harness venues in the lower North Island including the now defunct Hutt Park Raceway. He had also adjudicated greyhound racing.
Hunt had seen many top horses, both gallopers and trotters. Front of mind was champion trotter Blossom Lady - which won 43 races - in full flight at Hutt Park, while he would never forget the day Castletown won his third Wellington Cup in 1994.
Castletown. Photo / Peter Rubery - Race Images
“There were 20,000 people there. Jonah Lomu was there, so were Rod Stewart and Rachel Hunter ... they were seated just in front of me. There was a noise and an atmosphere that I will never forget,” he said.
He was also privy to seeing the careers of champion jockeys progress, the likes of Lance O’Sullivan, Noel Harris, Hayden Tinsley and Opie Bosson. He said they were all master riders and tacticians.
“They never seemed to ask a horse for its best until it was really needed and then seemed to be able to get the best out of a horse over the last 50 metres,” he said.
Hunt, 78, said after almost 60 years it was just time to let someone else have a go.
And he can retire having experienced the raceday equivalent of a golfing hole-in-one - a triple dead-heat.
“Every judge wants a triple dead-heat on their resume,” he said
It came in the listed Levin Stakes at the Ōtaki-Māori racecourse in 2019, when it proved impossible to separate Rock’n’Affair, Sweepstake and Satu Lagi. Hunt took an age to make his decision, searching every pixel of the magnified photo to find a reason why it wasn’t a triple dead-heat.
He kept looking, examining, and re-examining. Eventually chief stipendiary steward John Oatham knocked on his door to find out what the hold up was. Hunt told Oatham that he couldn’t find a reason to separate the three horses.
“He said it’s a triple dead-heat then. Just call it,” he said.
