SAIGON RACING A HURLY-BURLY

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31343, 13 April 1967, Page 4

SAIGON RACING A HURLY-BURLY

(Reprinted from "Neioeweek" by arrangement.; The war has put a damper on entertainment for most residents of Saigon. Gambling is forbidden, private dance parties require a permit, and nightclubs have become too expensive for anyone but Americans and war profiteers.

As for a Sunday drive in the country, no-one is apt to try that more than once. So every week-end the yearround, thousands of Saigonese spend their afternoons trying to pick a winner in the frantic hurly-burly of Phu Tho Hippodrome, Saigon’s Churchill Downs.

Like much else in South Vietnam, the Phu Tho horse races strike the Western eye as intolerably shabby and crooked. During the salad days of French rale in Indo-China, ■leek European thoroughbred* thundered around the Hippodrome’s two concentric tracks, but during the Second World War bivouacking Japanese armour tore up the outer track and the colonial glories have never been regained. Today, the bright silks of the riders momentarily evoke the bygone splendous, but their mounts are scrubby crosses between the old thoroughbreds and tiny Vietnamese pomes. (One owner feeds his stalwarts 151 b of rice a day and fortifies their tired blood with shots of calcium and liver extract) The start of each of the seven daily races at Phu Tho is sheer chaos. Hones dart about in all directions, biting and kicking, and the ■tarter screams epitheta to get them in line. Then, as the pandemonium reaches its height, ho inexplicably decides that all la ready, and they’re off. But not for long. Because the puny cooteoteato

lack the stamina to get all the way round Phu Tho’s Itmile track, the finish is never mere than a mile from the stirfing gate. A winning jockey at Phu Tho normally gets 15 per cent of the owner’s profit Most riders blow their winnings on wine, women and bets, but South Vietnam’s leading jockey, 18-year-old, 951 b Phuoc Nam, is more frugal, his victories have hoisted him from poverty to the ownership of three houses, a farm and three racehorses.

Generally, however, the jockeys-are better at toeing races than winntnr them One Phu Tho jockey is so adept at throwing races that he has won fame as the “king of the horse-breakers.** His particular specialty is putting on the brakes out around the far turn where no-one can see him, holding back his mount so that interested parties can cash in on a dark horse. But he has also made an art of the false start, managing to get himself disqualified by failing to get his horse into the starting line within the prescribed fiveminute limit Collusion indeed, seems to be a way of life at Phu Tho, but occasionally the bettors lose their tempers and mob a jockey suspected of firing a race.

To cope with such events, 800 uniformed police and 400 plainclothes men are assigned to the track. Individual beta at Phu Tho’s part-mutual booths—no bookies are permitted to operate in Saigon—range from 2 piasters (about a cent and a half) to 200 piasters, and more than 212,000 dollars change hands on an:avarage week-end. Under a 1948 law, 14 per cent of the track's take is supposed to go to the Ministry of Social Welfare, but some say that, in fact, it has ended up instead in the Prime Minister’s private kittyWhen a brash reporter questioned him on this point, however, Nguyen Cao Ky indignantly retorted: “My God, with all the money the US. pours into this country every day, why should I bother with peanuts?”