We had earlier carried S K Sagar’s four-part series titled Mathematical Balance and Racing’s Fragile Economics. Today we carry a critique of his thesis. Sagar applied mathematical rigour to a sport that has traditionally run on emotion, legacy and blind faith. The verdict that emerges is brutal. The numbers no longer sustain the romance. The mathematics suggests the sport is structurally bleeding out.

S K Sagar’s work applies mathematical rigour to an emotional and historic sport and the result is a chilling warning. Just as the universe exists only because certain constants are finely tuned, he argues that Indian racing too survives only when its financial ratios are in balance. Today they are not. The numbers have collapsed, and with them, the sport itself is beginning to unravel.

Ownership, he shows, is no longer a pursuit of passion but a guaranteed loss. A horse costs around ?34.4 lakhs to buy and maintain in its lifetime, yet it recovers only ?14.8 lakhs. The ratio is a pathetic 0.43 when even to merely break even it should be 1. The message is stark. No rational newcomer will enter the game unless this arithmetic is restored.

Prize money, the second pillar, is even more disheartening. It should average close to ?19.6 lakhs per race, but we sit at around ?7 lakhs. Globally competitive centres like Chantilly thrive on far healthier ratios. We meanwhile trudge along with numbers that suffocate rather than sustain.

What shocks the reader further is what these distortions have done to breeders, the backbone of the sport. To stay viable, prize money to sale price ratios should be above 1.09. In India they are stuck at 0.4. You cannot build champions when it is not even financially sensible to breed ordinary runners.

And then comes the cruellest cut, punters. The 40 percent GST changed racing more brutally than any rulebook revision in a century. Before it, punters recovered ?88 out of every ?100 wagered. Now they get around ?60. International ratios sit near 0.8 or 0.9. We are at 0.6. Tote turnover collapses, clubs cannot raise stakes, and the government collects less in reality than what it thinks it is protecting.

It becomes even more absurd when Sagar reminds us that the Karnataka High Court in 2021 clearly ruled that GST should be applicable only on the club’s commission just like in every other financial activity. Years later, the ruling remains unimplemented. This is not just stubbornness. It is self-destruction disguised as policy.

Sagar does not limit the damage to numbers. He touches the painful ethical truth that when owners shrink and breeders shut down, horses themselves suffer. Some stud farms have closed. Horses have been abandoned. These animals do not understand tax codes. In their eyes, he reminds us, humans are gods. To betray that trust is not just mismanagement. It is cruelty.

In his most stinging passages he lifts the curtain on racing’s deep state, illegal betting networks, black money, and vested interests. The real problem is not gambling. The real problem is the refusal to regulate it transparently. India has the technology to do it. It has the systems. It simply lacks the political honesty.

His conclusion is not sentimental. It is surgical. Reduce GST to 10 percent, apply tax only on club commissions, legalise and regulate betting properly, and bring owners, breeders, trainers, punters, and administrators to the same table. Racing is not sin. It is a game of skill and a legitimate economic activity.

Sagar’s final blessing, “God Bless the Horse”, is not poetic flourish. It is the last line of a system where emotion is all that remains intact while mathematics collapses. His work is not a complaint. It is an autopsy with a faint heartbeat still present. And if those in power choose arithmetic over arrogance, that faint heartbeat may yet return to a gallop.