Familiar
I was starting to recognise people. Not people I knew. They certainly did not know me. But after three visits to Rosehill Gardens this year, there were faces that had become familiar: the same men sitting in roughly the same places, watching the same screens, following routines that I had now seen often enough to recognise.
That was new, because my previous visits had mostly been about discovering the place. This time I already knew where I wanted to go. I arrived a little before the first race, found a seat in the grandstand and watched Rosehill get busier. My original plans for the day had disappeared the afternoon before when another event was postponed, leaving me unexpectedly free for a full day at the races.
So I put $100 into my TAB account and prepared to lose it. I eventually came home with $58 and change, which by my standards probably counts as responsible gambling.
The racing was familiar. Rosehill was not quite. It was a beautiful Sydney spring day, warm under a mostly blue sky with smoke haze sitting in the distance. There were considerably more people than I remembered from winter. More bars were open, more tables were occupied, extra seating had appeared and the members areas looked busier.
The racing regulars were still there, or at least the people I had started identifying as regulars. Around them were many more younger people, groups drinking together and people who had clearly dressed for a day at the races rather more seriously than I had. Rosehill simply looked different from winter.
There were other differences around the day. Sponsors received longer introductions before presentations, and one of the most noticeable additions was above the course. A large drone spent much of the day moving around the horses, following them as they came out, moving towards the starting gates and circling into position while they were being loaded. Once a race began, it would follow from a distance, sometimes behind the field and sometimes moving around the corners with them.
I found myself watching it almost as much as the horses. The footage appearing on the screens was excellent, but what interested me was seeing how it was being made. From the ground, I could watch the drone position itself for what was about to happen and then see the resulting shot become part of the broadcast.
By now I was moving around Rosehill quite differently myself. Across the ten races I watched from perhaps five different positions, sitting in different parts of the grandstand, standing against the fence and going towards the end where the horses entered. None of those places was new anymore.
At one point I started talking with one of the officials working around the horses. The conversation wandered through racing, gambling and sport and eventually stretched across a couple of races. She had worked around the industry for years and was not particularly interested in gambling herself. She might put a few dollars on a horse because something about it caught her attention.
That sounded remarkably sophisticated to me, although my own system remains under development. Sometimes I study the form and attempt to make an informed decision. Sometimes I like a horse's name. Colours can be influential. Occasionally I just like the look of one.
While we were talking, a group nearby became increasingly loud as the horses came past. There was yelling and gestures towards the horses, and it became another part of our conversation. She said it happened often enough to be familiar. Some horses appeared more bothered by the noise than others, and standing there watching them pass, it was difficult not to wonder what effect a large group suddenly yelling beside them might have.
It irritated me more than it had on my earlier visits. Maybe that was simply because there were more people doing it, or maybe I had now spent enough time around the horses to notice their reactions more closely. Either way, later in the afternoon I found myself moving away from the fence.
Earlier in the day it had still been one of the best places to watch. There is a point late in a race when you begin to hear the horses before they reach you. The hooves build as they come around towards the finish, then there is the breathing, sometimes a jockey yelling, and finally the crowd rising with them. For twenty or thirty seconds everything gets louder together, and it remains one of my favourite things about being at the races.
But as the afternoon went on and the drinking crowd became louder, I spent more time upstairs. By then the sun had disappeared behind the grandstand anyway. The warmth of the morning had gone with it, and people were gradually moving inside. Eventually I did too.
There was still plenty of racing going on around me, but I found one of the quieter areas, sat at a table and opened my laptop. I plugged it in and did some work between races. It was an odd rhythm for a day at the races: a race would approach and I would stop what I was doing, go and watch it, discover what had happened to another few dollars, then return to the laptop until it was time to do it again.
On my first visit, I had wanted to see everything. Now I knew which parts I wanted.
