NOTES.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume LXIV, Issue 11561, 9 January 1913, Page 3

NOTES.

[By "Punter."] An error occurred in the calculations of the dividends on Thursday last, at the Stratford races, and for a time the totalisator was paying out a few shillings short on a second horse. The mistake was soon discovered, the shutters dropped, and the dividend corrected. Punters, who had already received their dividends, immediately applied for payment ot* the extra shillings, and Messrs Marett and Fox, taking them on trust, duly paid the balance. In conversation with a prominent Australian sportsman during the concluding day of the A.E.G. summer meeting, he expressed the opinion to an Auckland sporting scribe that New Zealand was only" behind Australia in racing in two respects. One was the length of time horses were sent out of the paddock before they were asked to line up at the barrier, and the other was the time they were kept at the barrier owing to some fractious brute that would not lace the tapes. These matters, he said, struck Australians at once and he seemed at a loss to understand why such a state of affairs was tolerated." It was pointed out that the public wanted to sec the horses before they made their investments; but thia he only pooh-poohed, for, as he said, the first consideration of the authorities should be for the racing side of the question, not for the machine. The question of the delay at the post in order to get some mad-headed brute away with the others, he remarked, was a relic of barbarism, and it beat creation why a dozen horses should be penalised for the. sake of one, which as likely as not might get out with a ily. Followers of the turf in New Zealand will say "Hear, hear," to the latter remarks, at all events, when they think of such "mad-headed" brutes as Longstep and Full Rate.