Royal Ascot 2012: don't be fooled, Black Caviar still a star Having got over the thrill of seeing the great mare and enjoyed the unique take the Australians have on life and its slings and arrows, we should ask ourselves why they bothered to come at all. It sometimes takes an outsider to give you a frank opinion on the state of your household and that's what I heard last week. "Ascot is as good as it gets," one of the entourage pointed out. They do everything so well and she came out of respect to the Royal meeting. And I inferred from his words that the Queen was very much part of the meeting in their minds. "But your sport is in trouble," he said. We just can't believe how bad your [financial] model is. You're not going to be able to survive in the long term against the international competition. In Australia racing takes 5 per cent of Tote turnover and 1½ per cent of what they call corporate bookmakers" turnover. And they treat Betfair as a corporate bookmaker. Their attitude towards bookmakers is simple. They don't want to be partners with them and don't want to rely on them being good managers. One and a half per cent of the turnover on Saturday's race would have yielded a handsome return. The turnover on Betfair alone was £13 million. Even though Black Caviar started at the unbackable price of 1-6, the race still posed an attractive conundrum to punters. Which horse would finish second? As it happened, the most obvious candidate, Moonlight Cloud, filled that space. And as that was the most likely result, the bookmakers probably didn't make much money. Which means, due to the model that we operate, so rightly ridiculed by the Australians, the financial benefit will have been negligible.