Brad Steele has had a successful but all-too-brief tenure at the head of Harness Racing New Zealand.
As is too often the case in harness racing, the good was soon followed by the bad last weekend.
Last Friday night at Cambridge did what so few racing nights actually do and lived up to its name, the Night Of Champions.
The occasion was wonderful but the performances of the two megastars of the meeting, Leap To Fame and Keayang Zahara were jaw-dropping, in Leap To Fame’s case one of the greatest ever seen here.
Special and spectacular, it was a good night to be part of harness racing.
Soon after came the news that Harness Racing New Zealand (HRNZ) chief executive Brad Steele has resigned and will leave next week.
This is not good.
Racing administrators come and go and often it matters less than it should.
But Steele was not a man New Zealand harness racing can afford to lose – and definitely not now.
His reasons are his own and a Queenslander moving to Christchurch probably always had a certain shelf life, so he goes home to be with his family.
It happens with most Australians who move to New Zealand to work in racing, they eventually go home.
Who can blame them?
Australia, and Australian racing, is bigger, warmer, richer.
As Kiwis, we may be chemically linked to the Southern Alps or the green patchwork of Waikato farmland but if you aren’t, then constantly fighting battles in a foreign land gets exhausting.
And that is what racing administration as its highest level is. Constantly fighting battles.
Every trainer, every club, sees themselves as a separate business and while they may actually want what is best for the industry, in the words of the great Guns N’ Roses: “You can have anything you want, but you better not take it from me.”
Steele arrived in New Zealand without domestic baggage and tried to cut through a century of tradition with a sword not yet dulled by a thousand tedious conversations.
He likes to think big and under his tenure, the slot races at Addington on Show Day were born and a changed-up Cup week thrived, even as New Zealand Galloping Cup day siphoned away some of the crowds of yesteryear.
A renewed interest in harness racing from the TAB/Entain, who have senior executives sympathetic to the smaller code, has helped create a revival, although, oddly, turnover on last Friday’s magic meeting was significantly down.
Steele and his team have also seen a slight but still surprising increase in breeding numbers, even though HRNZ has also found how hard it is to regularly get people to actually go the races, as Friday nights are now crammed with social options, phone addiction and live footy.
But, undoubtedly, Steele’s time in New Zealand has been a success.
Now he is leaving, at a time when harness racing, in fact both codes, are going to need real leadership.
While New Zealand racing is still high on the sugar rush of the Entain deal, some very interesting times lie ahead.
The infrastructure issues, which for harness racing threaten the survival of the entire code in the North Island, are less the elephant in the room but a herd of elephants running around the house.
Harness racing’s gains have been incremental but the financial challenges that lie ahead are enormous.
And that is before the Entain guaranteed minimum returns to the industry run out in a couple of years and everybody has to earn their crust.
The TAB Racing Advisory Committee report to Minister of Racing Winston Peters is likely to shape much of the next decade of a racing industry which, away from a few beacons of light like Auckland Thoroughbred Racing, faces dramatic challenges.
The industry is set for enormous change, far more than most yet realise, and it needs leaders: leaders with the humility to listen but the experience to know what noise to block out.
Steele seemed to have that about him and he is well regarded by the most powerful people in New Zealand racing.
Now he is leaving – and that leaves questions.
With potentially enormous changes to the way New Zealand racing is run on the way, HRNZ may have to tread water with interim leadership until that pathway becomes clearer.
But while they do that, the interest on Alexandra Park’s crippling debt compounds, Cambridge faces its own serious issues and the code’s turnover momentum may be stalling.
Nobody can blame Steele for wanting to go home to be with his family.
And he deserves the code’s thanks and New Zealand racing’s future consideration if the right role exists.
But the timing of his departure could hardly be worse.
Michael Guerin wrote his first nationally published racing articles while still in school and started writing about horse racing and the gambling industry for the Herald as a 20-year-old in 1990. He became the Herald’s Racing Editor in 1995 and covers the world’s biggest horse racing carnivals.