Mike Dillon: Too close for comfort finishes belong in past

What's the most annoying element of thoroughbred racing?

Well, there's decent competition for that, but close to the top of the list is thinking you have won a race, only to find out you haven't.

Before live telecasts of racing on Trackside we relied on racecallers to give us an accurate call of a close finish and that worked reasonably well.

But with live telecasts we now make our own decisions on a finish and the accuracy of that depends on where the television camera is in relation to the actual finish line.

When Des Fredricks was in charge of Hawkes Bay Racing he went on a fact-finding tour of Japanese racing and was immediately impressed that in Japan it is mandatory for the television image to be in total alignment with the finish line, therefore with the photo finish.

Fredricks came home and aligned the television with the finish line.

Sadly, not all racetracks followed the tip. Yesterday at Rotorua it was impossible to tell in Race 8 whether the leader Blackjack Man had held out the finish out wide by Our King Sway. He had, but you waited for the result on the TAB screen three or four minutes later to find out.

Rotorua can be an awkward angle to work out. But it's no worse than Ruakaka and Te Aroha, both of which have thrown curve ball results for punters this season in any number of races. Many New Zealand tracks are at fault for the same problem.

At the previous Ruakaka meeting before Saturday, Britt Ekland looked certain to have won the major sprint. Rider Sam Spratt was certain she'd won and so was just about everyone else on the angle shown on television. She hadn't.

Winning at racing can be difficult and frustrating, it doesn't need the addition of thinking you've won when you haven't.

It's called keeping the customers happy.