You can lead a horse to slaughter

Thousands of punters turn up to Sha Tin where gambling is legal. Picture / REUTERS

It is the Chinese year of the rooster and not the horse - at least not at the Beijing racetrack. About 600 healthy thoroughbreds are reported to have been slaughtered in the past month in China's capital as a consequence of the official reluctance by the Communist Party to tolerate gambling.

The cull is unprecedented even in the harsh world of horse racing. It has caused outrage among horse lovers and comes as the huge punt taken by Hong Kong businessman Yun Pung Cheng, the man behind Tongshun racetrack in Beijing, appears to have hit the buffers.

Tongshun seemed to have it all; the state-of-the-art facility, laboratories and a huge breeding operation, developed by a man whose factories in China and Vietnam spew out the sort of promotional toys you might find tipping out of a cereal box.

It is thought Cheng, known as "The Boss", might have put as much as US$100 million ($144 million) into establishing the racing and breeding empire, all on one single, do or die, premise: That one day the hardline rulers of the Communist Party would bow to the inevitable and allow a billion Chinese to indulge in their passion for gambling.

Gambling is legal in Hong Kong, now part of China, and Cheng imagined an untapped betting pool 10 times the size of the former British colony. Betting turnover in there last year reached HK$62.7 billion ($11.6 billion) and average crowds at the Happy Valley (18,100) and Sha Tin (29,000) tracks represented undreamed of figures in other racing fraternities around the world.

But while Tongshun has its benefactor, infrastructure and promise, it does not offer real betting. And to coin a phrase, racing without wagering is like chow without mein.

Every racing enterprise has its losers, but not normally 600 of them, all paying with their lives - which happened when the economic tumbleweed started blowing.

Beijing racetrack is now closed, with the lingering promise that it might open up again in 18 to 24 months' time. For the ones who have had a lethal injection, there will not be another day.

It is all rotten public relations for a country preparing to stage the 2008 Olympics, with equestrian events to be held in Hong Kong because China cannot offer adequate quarantine provision. Binoculars other than those in the grandstands will be trained on the Chinese authorities.

John Smales, the chief executive of the International League for the Protection of Horses, said: "It is sickening to think of very healthy thoroughbreds being put down because the Chinese policy on racing is, frankly, in a muddle.

"The Government is heavy handed on gambling. They are pro-racing but still very much against gambling. The idea of closing a racecourse without concern for the horses is unacceptable.

"That said, if there is no racing task for these horses, it is better that they are put down rather than neglected and left to starve. Four years ago, in Karachi, we rescued a lot of horses. Racing changed dramatically in Pakistan and a lot of owners could not pay their bills. They simply walked away from their horses and about 50 of them were left in their boxes gradually starving to death. "The Chinese have avoided that by the rather drastic act of euthanising these horses. While that's a tragedy, it's not as bad as neglect, starvation or being sold to work pulling a cart.

"It's not cruelty. It's lack of concern for the horses and they've taken the easy way out administratively.

"China must understand that, because of the 2008 Olympics, the eyes of the world are going to be on the way horses are treated in China.

"China has got to get its act together if it is going to be loved and admired at the Olympic Games."

Tongshun opened in August 2002 and crowds reached 5000, a healthy number but not overpowering, largely because upfront betting was not part of the package. Its future was thrown into doubt in the aftermath of a Government crackdown on illegal punting unrelated to racing.

It is an unending war. Chinese people are among the most culturally instinctive gamblers on earth, yet they do not have an official outlet for the habit. Their number eight is always well favoured as it sounds like the word for wealth and prosperity. The number four in any wagering event often goes unnoticed as that word sounds dangerously similar to the word for death.

Death came to the Beijing racetrack on the eve of its richest meeting of the season last month, when Cheng's patience, and perhaps his money, ran out and the operation was shut down, sounding the death knell for around a quarter of the course's equine population.

Racing with betting was a flourishing part of Chinese sporting life at the beginning of the last century. Tote boards and betting windows existed at Guangzhou, 80km north of Sha Tin, when every major city had a track.

That all changed in the Mao era, which began in 1949. Racing still happened at Guangzhou, and a betting culture existed out of sight of Beijing authorities.

Those at the track pondered a way of sidestepping restrictions, a "guessing game".

Punters, or racegoers as they probably had to be titled, were charged an excessively high entry fee and tickets carried the numbers of competing horses. Prizes were then paid out of a pool from the admission money. It was betting, but not as the bureaucrats knew it.

The rules slackened and spectators in effect became fully-fledged punters. More than 40 ticket outlets sprang up in Guangzhou city and neighbouring counties. In addition, Beijing, Shanghai and Huhhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia, held meetings. The island province of Hainan had plans for a course financed by foreign investors.

But the patch was eventually removed from the all-seeing eye. Officialdom caught up and gambling was snuffed out. The State Council ruled that this capitalist sin ranked alongside slavery and prostitution as one of the seven paramount evils.

The world's fastest-growing economy has since been able to take on some free-market characteristics, but officials are wary of gambling and observers detect an element of hypocrisy in their attitudes. Hong Kong and Macau are perhaps the hotbed gambling centres of the world, but are allowed to continue under the "one country, two systems" policy afforded the former colonies.

Beijing invented a "guessing game" at its 2002 rebirth to circumvent gambling restrictions, but now the guessing game is whether the course will ever open again.

This is the tribulation now facing Kevin Connolly, the man from a distinguished Irish racing tribe, a former trainer who met Cheng when he set up in Macau some 15 years ago and is now the racing director at Beijing. Like all the expats who work at Tongshun, Connolly has plenty of golf and karaoke options, but even swinging and singing lose their lustre after a while.

Connolly has minimised the significance of the cull, this week telling the Racing Post: "Not all the horses have been culled. If racing starts again we will have more than enough horses. But racing will not begin again until we have a clear direction from the Government."

Trainers at Beijing have been told to take an extended holiday and, although visas have been renewed for 12 months, most are looking for employment elsewhere.

"It leaves a sick taste," Nigel Smith, an English trainer at Tongshun, said.

"It is a sad story. It is a huge blow because all the horses I had got used to, and my staff, are gone.

"We have been told that we might restart in 18 months and will be offered our old jobs back, but it is still a huge blow."

It is not the first time that Connolly has been under examination. And in the previous time, racing again revealed itself as one of the most venal of activities.

When the Sydney vet Sven Arne Temmingh flew to Beijing in December 1999, he took with him in his luggage 16 litres of highly valuable anabolic steroids. But what happened to those bottles of steroids - and 35 litres of anabolic steroids sent by Temmingh to Beijing and Hong Kong - remains a mystery.

Were they used on the hundreds of horses sent from Australia to Beijing as part of a fledgling breeding and racing joint venture?

The bottles of injectable anabolic steroids - including Stanazol, Deca, Drive and Supertest - have a black market value of about 87 ($215) for 10 millilitres. At Temmingh's trial in Australia, in which he pleaded guilty to charges of wilfully supplying injectable steroids then making false records, Connolly told Justice Carolyn Simpson that before moving to China he had run the Australian racing interests of Cheng, and that Temmingh was consultant veterinarian. Connolly added that he "terminated" Temmingh's employment when he noticed large volumes of steroids on invoices from the veterinary product wholesaler.

Under questioning from Elizabeth Fullerton, acting for Temmingh, Connolly denied instructing the veterinarian to improve the condition of the horses to be sent to China, including by using steroids.

Fullerton said: "You later told him that he had been sacked because Mr Cheng had learned that steroids had been used to improve the condition of horses for export and he was concerned the Chinese authorities might be concerned."

Connolly replied: "That's incorrect." He added that about 750 horses went to China, but rejected Fullerton's suggestion that those at the Beijing stud were not in good condition.

He also denied asking Temmingh to "obtain substantial quantities of the anabolic steroids so the horses ... could be placed on an ongoing steroid programme".

Now drugs, in this case lethal injections, have returned to bedevil horseracing in China.

Just 40 miles east of Tiananmen Square, a verdant racecourse - a track fit to be compared with Paris' Longchamp in the words of one well-travelled work rider - has become a killing zone.

Yet another racing gamble seems to have gone astray - but this one has chilling consequences for the horses at the Beijing racecourse.

- INDEPENDENT