Fifty years into her career at The Raceway at Western Fair District and 36 years since she became the track charter, Deb Salhani (right) said she’s never been bored working at the racetrack.
“I still like coming,” she said on a recent Monday night, mere minutes before the first race went to post at the London, ON track. “It's been a great ride. I've enjoyed all my time here. They've been good to work for.
“I think I've seen a dozen announcers and probably five or six CEOs retire.”
Salhani started working at Western Fair as a mutuel seller early in the winter of 1976. She moved to the race office in 1987 and then in 1989 she moved to the judges’ stand to become the track charter, a role she’s held ever since.
“I've always been interested in horses,” Salhani said. “I came to the races with my mother when I was a kid, and I’ve bought horses and had horses my whole life. I had a full-time job that I worked for 40 years, and I did this part time.”
The charter plays a critical role at a racetrack determining where each horse is positioned at each quarter-mile and the finish, as well as how far away they were from the leading horse at each station. The charts are posted online and printed in race programs and become important information for bettors handicapping the races. Since betting handle is a critical source of income for a racetrack, a charter’s accuracy is key.
“It’s like a referee in hockey,” said Greg Blanchard, the director of equine programming at Western Fair. “You don’t want to ever hear about [the charter] from your customers… But you’ll hear about it if [the charts] are wrong.”
HOW TO CHART A RACE
High above The Raceway, Salhani watches the races through binoculars and speaks into a tape recorder as the horses reach each quarter-mile station. She records herself saying each horse’s number and approximate distance, in lengths – about the distance of a horse from nose to tail – behind the leading horse.
“We're supposed to call at the quarter as if you stopped the race at the quarter and we took a picture,” Salhani said.
“When they go by the quarter, into the tape recorder I say, ‘one by one and a half, two by a neck, three by half,’ and then I play that tape back and add it up again,” Salhani said. “If a horse has got his nose right on a driver’s helmet, we know that's one and a half [lengths]. Then, if there's a little bit of a gap, we know it's one and three quarters… If it looks like you can put another horse in between two horses, then that would be two [lengths]. There’s five [lengths] between each pylon.
“It's a job that’s different because when you're doing this, they're moving, and that's where people have difficulty, and they really want to give it up really fast, because they can't [process it]. But once you do it enough times it’s like they're standing still to you, and the call is quicker.”
Salhani can also look at the video replay of the race to ensure she has the correct chart lines, but that is rarely necessary.
“If a horse makes a break right in the middle of my call, I can go to the replay and look,” she said.
Beyond races where she can’t see the horses, such as during fog or a snowstorm, the most difficult races to call are the uncompetitive ones where horses are strung out at greater distances, she said.
“The more gapped out they are, the more you're guessing,” she said.
SALHANI’S CHARTING ORIGIN STORY
Back in the late 1980s, when she was working in the Western Fair race office, Salhani heard that the charter job was going to be available, so she asked Mike Hamilton to train her to do it at Orangeville Raceway.
“He had the company Central Program,” Salhani said of Hamilton, who employed charters to produce race programs for several Ontario racetracks. “I said, ‘If I come to Orangeville, will you train me to chart?’ I didn't want any pay. I just knew that I wanted to learn this job.”
Salhani remembers that it was four days of training and it was a little difficult to learn at first.
“Now it's different,” Salhani said. “You have to be accredited. I trained a woman at Grand River that's there now, and she was the best part of three months learning the job. You have to have so many hours, I think it's 40 hours in the stand, and then you learn the job, and it depends on how confident you are whether you're ready to go ahead. Then you have to write an exam.”
Salhani said the people best suited for the job already know a little about the horse business.
“Although I wasn't very confident [at first, it helps to be] fairly confident, because it's a job that can be really intimidating at the start,” she said. “I've tried to train two or three people that just gave up. They just thought it was too much, because you've got such a small amount of time to compose the chart. I keep telling them, ‘You're going to get better at this. You'll get faster. Just stay with it.’”
Five decades on, Deb Salhani is glad she did just that.
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