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Dr Goh
Keng Swee's few good men and women tasked to reverse the
horse racing decline - Part 2 Dr Sing Kong
Yuen, BVMS (Glasgow), MRCVS
Update: 07 July, 2012
First written: 13 May 2012
As the Club veterinarian from around 1982 - 1988, my job was to diagnose
and treat race horses. There was no need for me
to do management which would involve lots of
meetings, gathering of facts and figures and
making forecasts. When the Singapore Totalisator
Board (STB) took over the horse-racing
operations around 1988 and appointed the Bukit
Turf Club as its agent, my employment contract
was assigned to the Bukit Turf Club (BTC) with
its own new managers.
Changes are a constant in life and this new
development of a new STB and BTC was a tsunami
for the employees of the side-lined Singapore
Turf Club (STC) which was a private club at that
time. Many of us, including the Personnel
Manager, knew our days of employment were
numbered as the new management would replace us
in time to come. New brooms sweep clean and this
is the way of life.
I had decided to go back to private practice
treating dogs and cats and small animals and
therefore I would just wait till my employment
contract expired. I was given another one-year
contract by the Bukit Turf Club and I accepted
it.
In the interim period, I was part of the task
force formed by the STB to reverse the decline
in racing. The task force comprised a small
group of people under the leadership of Mr Quek
Chee Hoon, the general manager of the STB.
Excluding the STB's management staff, there was
the BTC management staff. The Betting Manager,
the Racing Manager and the Junior Veterinary
Surgeon (myself) were the main work horses,
working for the dormant STC earlier and were now
the employees of the BTC.
There was Ms Violet Lim, a Ms Universe
Singapore, as the Manager in charge of this task
force and she would be the one to produce the
findings and give the recommendations to Mr Quek
Chee Hoon, in my observation. Mr Quek would do
his own visits and had others doing research.
Once we had a meeting with Mr Quek and he said
that the propeller-type aircraft door could not
be closed tightly open when he flew to Sabah for
a meeting, when the Racing Manager mentioned
some matters about aviation.
I went with the task force to visit and research
the horse-racing clubs in Hong Kong, South Korea
and Thailand. The members were supposed to write
their comments to Ms Violet Lim. We had a tough
time writing anything to reverse the decline in
Singapore horse-racing, since we were not into
writing reports under the old STC. Our lives
were hands-on technical work and no writing
management reports. Maybe the Racing Manager
would compile some racing statistics for the STC
Annual Report to Mr Thompson, the General
Manager of the STC.
So it was up to poor Ms Lim who asked us to
write our observations after the overseas trip.
But she would be able to do the writing as I
believe she was trained in accountancy or
business-management matters. Beauty and brains
are a powerful combination for the business of
racing and Ms Lim was a good catch for the BTC,
in my opinion.
After several weeks, including interviewing (as
suggested by me), a prominent stock broker
committee member of the STC and a brother of the
then Prime Minister for their views to reverse
the decline in horse-racing, there would be a
presentation of the report by Mr Quek Chee Hoon
to the Board of Directors of the STB and the BTC
in the STB office in Alexandria PSA Tower.
I did talk to the trainers and the jockeys and
would submit my observations and analysis of the
facts and figures by faxing a page of report
with "analysis", directly to Mr Quek Chee Hoon.
For example, I had faxed once, a report that a
3-horse race should not be permitted to start as
it would be easy to fix the race and "tum" the
tote. At that time, there was an insufficient
number of horse running per race and so 3-horse
races were permitted.
As Mr Quek did not speak to me directly, there
being a hierarchy of management from the Chief
Stipendiary Steward as my boss to the General
Manager of the BTC and then to STC, I did not
expect any reply from him nor did he contact me.
One day, the Racing Manager mentioned to me that
Mr Quek asked him why he did not provide the
"Analysis" when he submitted the racing
statistics to Mr Quek. I did not inform him
about my few faxed reports with "Analysis" to Mr
Quek.
Finally, the big day came for presentation of
the report by Mr Quek to the Board. "You have to
be present," Mr Quek instructed the Betting and
Racing Managers and myself through Mr Lim. Just
in case, we had to answer some questions from
the Board.
Mr Quek presented slides from a projector. There
were no fanciful Power Point slides in 1989, if
I remember correctly. At the end of his
presentation, Mr E.W. Barker, a well-respected
politician, horseman and Chairman of the BTC
said "Good report, well done."
Some 2- 3 weeks after Mr Quek's presentation, an
inaugural racing magazine published a report on
racing written by me. The Editor wanted an
article on horse-racing and since I had done
much research on the "racing decline", I gave
him my report. It took me many weeks to compress
all my research and findings into this report.
It was a "monotonous black and white report" and
I did not think of submitting this to Ms Lim or
anybody as the report was in a mess of text,
pictures and graphs that needed to be gelled to
be readable.
However, the magazine Editor had staff and
produced this report in an interesting way, with
colour and good layout. I hoped that this report
would have an impact in an inaugural magazine
rather than some pieces of written report to the
STB and benefit the trainers and jockeys. I do
not know whether it was of any use.
A few days
after the publication of this article, the
General Manager of the BTC wanted to see me in
his office and to let me know that all
publications should be vetted first. I expected
this administrative control in any organisation.
So I phoned the magazine Editor to kill Part 2
of this article (see page 12 -
http://www.asiahomes.com/dev/Stc12.JPG).
However, I have scanned the 12 pages of the
defunct magazine as follows:
Around 24 years have raced by. It is 2012 now and I believe
that the horse trainers and jockeys have a
better working environment at the Singapore Turf
Club than before the STB took
over.
Dr Goh Keng Swee's few
good men and women tasked to reverse the horse
racing decline - Parts 1 & 2 will be located
at Horses
in
www.toapayohvets.com. The articles have been
written to inspire the younger vets to add
value to their employers outside their
technical expertise by publishing research to
help their clientele.
P.S Nobody in the task force gave me any
feedback after publication of this article. I
was not fired from my job and I left at the
expiry of the one-year contract with the new BTC
to be full time in
www.toapayohvets.com where I treat small
animals for the past years.
Writing the 12 pages of articles was not a walk
in the park. It involved a lot of time reading
and thinking and collating all data and comments
from the various successful racing clubs in
their annual reports kindly posted to me by
snail mail (no website or internet in 1998). I
borrowed marketing books from the library to
read on business factors affecting success and
finally wrote the report which I believe would
be useful to racing club management. I had to
think of a title for the article and it was
"What makes a horse racing club profitable?"
PICTURES OF THE MACAU JOCKEY CLUB IN 2012 FOR
READERS
I was fortunate to stay in a hotel where I could
have a bird's eye view of the Macau Jockey Club
and fond memories of my years at the old
Singapore Turf Club flooded back. The
beautiful race horses, the
jockeys, trainers, bookies and colourful
characters made the Turf Club an interesting
place to work. But no other veterinary medicine
and surgery can be more exciting than
being a small animal veterinary surgeon for me.
Racehorse practice is restricted to lameness
mainly unlike the diverse challenges and
problems involved in the diagnosis and treatment
of dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters, turtles and
guinea pigs!
BE KIND TO
DOGS & CATS --- GET EYE ULCERS TREATED
WITHIN 4 HOURS --- IF YOU DON'T WANT THEM TO BE
BLIND. More case studies, goto:
Cats
or Dogs
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