Hong Kong rocked by discovery of poison darts
Hong Kong triads, or organised-crime gangs, are believed to be behind a sinister and elaborate poison-dart device embedded in the turf near the starting point for races at the Happy Valley racecourse.
During a routine examination of the track an inspector came across the poison dart shooter, which had 12 metal tubes, each around a foot long, filled with darts buried in the grass under the spot where the starting stalls would be placed for the three races over 1,200 metres (six furlongs) on Wednesday night’s card, the Hong Kong Jockey Club said in a statement.
Happy Valley and Sha Tin are Hong Kong’s two tracks. Turnover on a single day’s racing in Hong Kong can outstrip the income many European or American courses generate in a whole year. A single race here can take in nearly £20m and the gambling-mad people of Hong Kong spend £5.4bn a year on the racing.
The bizarre device could have harmed one, a few or all of the horses in the stalls. The tubes were wired together and linked to a wireless receiver, and spaced in a way that each tube would aim upwards at the horse standing overhead.
Hmm, I don’t think they would use poison. Killing the horses would sort of ruin their business.
However, an irritant or sedative given to several horses; or better yet, an enhancer of some kind delivered to a single horse, would sway race results.
Shooting a horse with darts would be very obvous (dart either sticking in horse or falling back down on track at some point, and in any case leaving a puncture in the horse). Looks to me more like a warning to somebody, of the horse’s-head-in-bed variety: “We can do this, you jockeys had better cooperate.” Finding the rig would be part of the warning.
Just speculation. Really. I didn’t actually hear about it from my cousin Huang Jua Kang Wang in HK, honest.
How ingenious! Nothing like making money the old fashioned way — cheating. Dang, wish I’d thought of that.
I’ll take $1K on Glue Pot in the fifth to win…
That course has a history of this sort of thing happening.