Hong Kong Jockey Club chief executive Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges has labelled the technology underpinning the city’s colossal wagering operation “not fit for a HK$30 or HK$40 billion business” after a database failure caused major disruption at Sha Tin on Sunday afternoon, costing hundreds of millions in turnover and delaying races by nearly 40 minutes.
The technical fault was discovered just before race nine when the HKJC detected instability in its core commingling database – a system which accepts and processes overseas bets into Hong Kong’s pari-mutuel pools.
With around two-thirds of the Club’s 60 international wagering partners affected by the instability, which Engelbrecht-Bresges described as “intermittent”, officials made the unprecedented call to “zero out” all overseas bets for the final three races on the card, removing them from the pool entirely.
“Our turnover is down a little bit, probably around HK$350 million,” Engelbrecht-Bresges said. “We think the current technology which is there is not fit for a HK$30 or HK$40 billion business.
“We have a database for commingling that permanently exchanges the bets and we could see that from 4:40pm onwards, this database was not stable. It was on and off.”
After race nine, which was run at 4:48pm, punters were left in the dark with no official dividends displayed, as the Club worked to confirm that international bets had been properly excluded from the pool.
“They were in frenetic discussions with the partners overseas but normally when you look at these things, it’s not easy to solve them in 10 to 15 minutes,” Engelbrecht-Bresges said. “It was a decision to ensure the integrity of the pool and we didn’t want to take any risk. We stopped commingling and any bets were zeroed out and taken out of the pool.
“We had to fix race nine and that was a big issue to take everything out. After that, you have to restart systems – the database for our wagering control – and you have to reboot the whole system.
“It took a little bit longer than we first expected but we wanted to double and triple check that no overseas bets were in the pool. From there, we had to start the recalculation of bets.”
That process caused a cascading delay to race 10 following a bizarre and confusing sequence in which horses paraded, returned to the pre-parade area and paraded again.
At one point, horses were preparing to load behind the gates at the 2000m start when jockeys began to dismount and crowd around chief starter, Tony Speechley, to find out what was going on.
The race was eventually run at 5:57pm – 37 minutes later than scheduled – and dividends were recalculated and confirmed for both races nine and 10 based solely on local turnover. Race 11, which followed at 6:39pm, was also run without any overseas bets.
Engelbrecht-Bresges said there was “no indication” before the incident that the system would fail. “There was speculation there was hacking but there was no hacking,” he insisted. “It’s between our 60 commingling partners and us. There’s no security issue.”
He also added that the problem was limited to an older database platform used by some of the HKJC’s global partners and noted that the newer systems encountered no such difficulties.
“An interesting thing is that those that bet from the new wagering protocol had no issues, it was only those on the other database,” Engelbrecht-Bresges added. “It’s a pure technical issue to do with us and to do with our commingling partners around the world and that’s significant investment.”
The error also led to the HKJC only accepting bets from local customers for the two-race World Pool fixture at The Curragh on Sunday, something Engelbrecht-Bresges estimated would cost the Club between “five to six million” per race.
While he apologised for the “significant inconvenience” and “long delay between races”, the Club’s chief executive said the “integrity of the pool” was at the forefront of the organisation’s mind. “If we saw any issues, we would have cancelled the races,” Englebrecht-Bresges said.
As of Monday afternoon, the HKJC could not provide any further update on the details of the failure, or clarify whether they would be able to fix the error ahead of midweek racing at Happy Valley on Wednesday.
“I have great confidence that our team can solve this before Wednesday,” Engelbrecht-Bresges said after racing on Sunday. ∎
