WHY do adults rarely admit to mistakes or errors of judgements? Is it to preserve their own ego or do they like digging themselves a big hole they are unlikely to easily escape from?
We see it all the time, financial experts who try to cover one mistake by moving money here, there and everywhere and then one day their world comes crashing down. Why not just fess up, admit to stuffing up and get on with the job? Sure it hurts but the pain is short-term and while an investor would be annoyed if their cash had reduced, they would be comforted that honesty is the best policy.
Today a group of nine men and two women will enjoy a trip to the Yarra Valley Racing Centre for the Racing Victoria Limited annual general meeting. Nine of them were involved in last week's decision to axe jumps racing at the end of winter next year. Two of them will officially join the board for the first time.
For the nine, today gives them a chance to admit they got it wrong - jumps racing shouldn't have been banned. But there is no way they will admit they got it wrong.
Instead of being forced to swallow such a bitter pill, perhaps the board could say that some new evidence had come to light or that a vital piece of information (like the dramatic improvement after the sport's suspension last May) had been lost in the maze of statistics. Surely, that's happened to all of us ... we can all understand how it happens.
The worst part is going to sleep each night, waking up at 3am from a deep sleep and the error pops back into your head - the last thing you do is go back to snoozing.
It would be interesting to know if any of the board members have had that experience since last Friday.
If they haven't, perhaps they will after they consider some of the developments this week and outcry.
Maybe the statistics provided by Racing Victoria Limited chief executive officer Rob Hines had bamboozled their thinking and they didn't ask for more.
Take the argument put up by RVL that betting turnover on jumps races had fallen 49.4 per cent last season compared with 2008. Terrible. But what wasn't considered was that more than a quarter of the previous year's races weren't held and that horse numbers were down.
Horse numbers were down not because jumps racing was on the nose, but the uncertainty RVL created by reviewing the sport and waiting until just three months before the start of the new season to announce it would continue - but it would be reviewed yet again. Then just a month into the season, it was suspended for six weeks.
And here's a question the board members could ask Mr Hines. If turnover being down represented a major loss in income, what would have taken its place and how much extra would it have created?
Well, according to my sources, if you replaced a jumps race with a three-year-old maiden flat race, the most, on average, additional betting would have been $20,000. Multipled across the season, that's $2 million.
But here's the knockout blow. RVL only gets six per cent of that $2 million, that's $120,000. So for $120,000, jumps racing was axed. That's the cost of one of the many senior executives based in Epsom Road, Flemington.
Then there's the statistics about the falls and fatalities. Why were the only statistics released covering the whole season? Considering the initiatives introduced after the suspension in May, why weren't statistics broken down before the suspension and after. Answer: The statistics had changed considerably and they didn't say what RVL wanted them to say. Fatalities per starters had fallen from 2.34 per cent before the suspension to just 0.87 per cent in the following 61 races. Falls per starters had reduced from 5.26 per cent to 5.08 per cent.
The decision is not irreversible, so too the lack of sleep for board members. Wake up, it's time to admit the mistake. Or there could be even more sleepless nights ahead and we all know that's not good at this time of the year because Santa knows who's been naughty or nice.
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