The Golden Nugget affair

Updated

The annual Uluru Camel Cup is an outback camel race that combines two of the biggest vulnerabilities for race fixing: the allure of prize money, and a near total lack of oversight.

For the past two years, Renay Jeffrey and her family had zigzagged their way across the Australian outback in their Toyota 4WD towing a huge campervan they all called home.

They'd swum with dolphins in South Australia, traversed ancient gorges in Western Australia, and hit up the theme parks in Queensland.

It had been an epic road trip.

So, when Renay saw a Facebook post looking for volunteers at the 2018 Uluru Camel Cup, she jumped at the chance.

They signed up as volunteers, turned the Toyota north from Adelaide, and arrived at the Camel Cup venue just days before it started.

"We were just total newbies," Renay said.

There were to be no bookmakers at the Camel Cup, explained the organisers, but if Renay and the other volunteers wanted, they could bet on the camels by "buying" one at something called a Calcutta auction.

Renay and her husband, Aaron, asked around the campground where they were staying and put together a syndicate that raised more than $1,500 to spend at the auction.

"That's a lot of money for families travelling Australia," she said.

But what the members of this new betting syndicate didn't know was that one man controlled every aspect of the race.

And what happened next left Renay astounded and angry.

The cowboy and the Calcutta auction

The man on the mic at the Calcutta auction was Chris Hill.

As well as being the auctioneer, he was also the owner of the camel farm that hosts the race.

A gregarious character with a barrel chest, Chris was decked out in a big cowboy hat, a bright red shirt, and a leather vest adorned with a sheriff's badge.

And as the auction began, he peppered the bidding with salty jokes about meeting people on Tinder and one-night stands in swags.

Then he outlined the rules.

When you buy a camel at the Uluru Camel Cup Calcutta, he explained to the increasingly tipsy crowd, it's just for the duration of the race. All the money raised goes into the prize pool.

"You do not have to take it with you tomorrow afternoon," he joked. "Because they will not let you on the plane with it."

As the beer flowed, the crowd got more excited and the bidding ratcheted up another level.

Renay Jeffrey watched as rowdy patrons battled to bid on camels that started selling for thousands of dollars. The race favourite, Golden Nugget, went for an eye-watering $7,000-plus bid.

Chris is a natural auctioneer, and by the end of the night, he had managed to help push the total prize pool to a record $33,000.

First prize on race day would be 50 per cent of the total — more than $16,000.

Renay and her syndicate swooped on a camel called Ted which they landed with a winning bid of $1,550.

But as it turned out, the odds were never going to be in her favour.

And when the final race ended in controversy, the events on auction night would call into question the entire running of the 2018 Uluru Camel Cup.

'This is so rigged!'

Billed as a charity event, the Camel Cup is held along a red-dirt track that runs in a semi-circle around a picnic shelter, some food trucks, a dance floor and a bar.

Cheering punters line the inside rails, and Uluru is visible over the final straight.

But as Renay watched the camels race back in 2018, she became concerned at how shambolic and poorly enforced the starts were.

"The starts were never even," she said. "You know we're talking sometimes up to a camel length here."

Then came their camel Ted's last race of the day.

"I remember videoing it, and I've watched back my video and I come up and I said, 'I can't believe this is so rigged!'"

There were no starting gates, just a group of handlers that line the camels up loosely in a row.

And the auctioneer from the night before, Chris Hill, was also one of the handlers.

On top of that, he was the one picking the rides for each jockey — a choice that could be the difference between winning and losing.

Then as another race started, Renay realised Chris was also the one counting down to start the race.

With so much of other people's money invested in the result, she started getting worried at the concentration of power in one person's hands.

"It didn't sit right with any of us," she said.

The false start

In the end, Renay's camel Ted didn't make it through to the final.

But she was at the final race, her video camera trained on the start line, and she caught every frame of what happened next.

In her video, Chris can be seen on the inside track struggling to get his camel into place in the moments before the race begins.

The camel he holds is number 1, Golden Nugget, the race favourite.

In the centre barrier is number 15, Smarty.

As the race begins, he doesn't let go of Golden Nugget. And Smarty bolts ahead.

The other camels continue racing around the track anyway, and Smarty crosses the line first.

Renay Jeffrey could see Smarty's owners celebrating wildly, "because they thought they had won the race".

Meanwhile, back at the start line, Chris Hill could be seen shouting "cut it, cut it! It's a false start!"

"Nugget's been tied up to one of the other camels at the start," she remembers hearing over the loudspeaker. "The race will be rerun."

Renay couldn't believe it.

Chris, on top of being the auctioneer, the owner of all the camels, the selector who picked the jockeys, a camel handler and the guy who started the race, was also the race steward.

Which meant if he said it was a false start, then it was a false start.

Background Briefing was also given drone footage of the final race from another source.

Compared side-by-side with Renay's footage, it reveals in minute detail exactly what happened in the final race.

You see Chris holding onto Nugget, nearest the inside rail, and he doesn't let go. The vision shows that Nugget hasn't been tied up to any other camel.

Smarty, 15, streaks ahead and wins.

Suddenly, the mood shifts.

"Everyone was booing, everyone was yelling it's wrong," said Renay.

The camels that had just spent their energy sprinting hundreds of metres in the final are rounded up and brought back to the start line where Golden Nugget and Chris are waiting.

As the crowd boos, the camels re-assemble at the start line.

Then, with Nugget nearly a full camel length ahead of the others, Chris calls "go" to start the race again.

This time, there is no false start called and Golden Nugget wins the Cup.

"I think when you look back on it now, it was always planned which camel was going to win," Renay said.

"The hardest thing for me … in the end was … I felt so bad that I'd gone around and asked for all this money off these people that I didn't even know."

Need for oversight

The Jeffreys weren't the only ones left feeling uncomfortable about the final race of the 2018 Camel Cup.

A complaint sent to the Northern Territory's Racing Commission outlines in detail what happened during the final race, and claims Chris fixed the race.

But when approached by the ABC, no-one from the Commission was available for an interview, saying in a statement that only preliminary inquiries were made, and that no action was taken.

Despite attracting prize pools valued in the thousands of dollars, camel racing in the Northern Territory is largely unregulated. Integrity issues are a matter for the police. The NT Government confirmed the Uluru Camel Cup had a permit to conduct the Calcutta auction.

In other states where camel racing exists such as Queensland, race fixing is a crime punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment.

Queensland's Racing Integrity Commissioner, Ross Barnett, wouldn't comment on the specifics of the 2018 Uluru Camel Cup, but said where there was money in sport, there was a need for integrity measures and oversight.

"I think the risks in any sporting contest where one person has control of many elements that can affect the outcome is pretty obvious," he said.

"We're trying to protect the people who bet on events to make sure that it's a level playing field and that if a person bets on an event they have an expectation that the animal they've bet on will be allowed to run on its merits in a fair race.

"Anything that compromises that is not acceptable, obviously."

Behind the Connections syndicate

Nearly 12 months after the controversial 2018 Camel Cup, questions remain over exactly what happened, and who benefitted.

Even though Renay believes Chris fixed the race, the evidence isn't conclusive.

Background Briefing has spoken to ex-jockeys and camel farm staff and scoured social media searching for the answers.

On the Camel Cup Facebook page there are a handful of posts from the 2018 Cup, including one that celebrates the Calcutta sale of Nugget to a group called "Connections".

This was the sale that raised the suspicions of so many.

So, who was behind "Connections"? And who took home the $16,500 first prize?

During the investigation, an anonymous source sent the ABC a video that seems to provide some answers.

The video shows the final moments of the bidding for Golden Nugget in last year's Calcutta auction.

Chris can be seen on stage pointing towards a shorter, balding man in a red shirt.

It's Chris's brother, Damien. And he holds the final bid.

As the auction closes, Damien, looking back towards Chris, gives a curt nod and the man next to him raises his arm in celebration.

Broome's 'Camel Wars'

Chris and Damien Hill have faced controversy before.

In 2008, the pair lived in Broome, where they played a key role in the town's now-infamous "Camel Wars".

The Camel Wars began in 2006, when the Broome Shire Council granted one camel tour operator all three licences to run camel tours on Cable Beach.

This decision infuriated the other camel tour operators, and as well as fighting the council's decision, the operators started fighting each other.

During this turmoil, Chris Hill began his own camel tour business.

Background Briefing The Golden Nugget Affair

Reporter Alex Mann delves deep into the Camel Cup operator's colourful past to investigate what really happened that day. About

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Reporter Alex Mann delves deep into the Camel Cup operator's colourful past to investigate what really happened that day.

He recruited his brother to help, and soon both men were embroiled in legal battles.

In 2010, Damien Hill was in a dispute with a rival operator's son, who was then charged with assault.

That same year Chris Hill was charged with sabotaging a rival's bore, slashing his car tyres, breaking into his caravan and stealing personal documents.

He was also charged with stealing merchandise worth $70,000, some plants, a painting and a portable toilet.

He said he was just taking back what he was owed from his former business partner.

Court documents from Chris Hill's trial reveal a dark side to the now-popular camel tour operator.

Before asking the jury to retire to consider their verdict, the judge reminded them about the evidence one of his ex-partners had given.

The judge said:

"She had previously been in a relationship with Mr Hill and that relationship ended in February 2009 and ended acrimoniously. She was pregnant. She said Mr Hill wanted her to have an abortion. She then decided to have an abortion and Mr Hill changed his position by then and wanted her to have the baby. She said that he sent her text messages calling her a murderer and there were about 20 or so of those messages. He would also make hand signs cutting across her stomach when he would see her."

The jury found him guilty of burglary and stealing but acquitted of the other charges. In sentencing, the judge found him to be of good character and didn't give a custodial sentence. He was fined $25,000.

Shortly after this he left Broome and set up shop in Yulara — the town at the edge of Uluru.

Over the next eight years, Chris Hill turned this business into one of the Northern Territory's most successful tourism brands — Uluru Camel Tours.

The Bobcat encounter

As you enter the Uluru Camel Farm that hosts the tour company and the Camel Cup, the presence of Chris Hill is everywhere.

His name is on the sign out front, and in the office there is a majestic hand-painted mural of an outback scene with Chris Hill gently guiding two camels along a track.

As doors opened for the 2019 Camel Cup and tourists came pouring through, the real Chris Hill was there too, performing all the roles he did the year before.

As the camels gathered at the start line for the first race, it was Hill handling one of the camels.

When the race began, it was Hill giving the call.

And as the final race finished, it was Hill giving the post-race commentary over the loudspeaker.

This year, the race passed without great controversy, and Golden Nugget won again.

But despite the many hats Chris Hill wears on race day, when Background Briefing tried to interview him, we found he was a hard man to pin down.

We wanted to ask him if, back in 2018, he had acted in any way to benefit his brother, or if maybe he had another explanation for why the false start was called.

By this time, the golden afternoon sun streaked across the now-empty camel track.

Uluru itself glowed on the horizon, and the Camel Cup staff had begun packing up the starting gates and feeding the camels.

But as we set up for an interview with Hill, he was nowhere to be seen.

Then, as we looked across the dusty track, a Bobcat emerged from the dust.

Behind the wheel was Chris Hill, earmuffs on, dexterously manoeuvring the bobcat between his staff and the saddlery.

We were eventually able to shout out a few questions and get him to respond.

"I'm under the pump," he said. "I've gotta go, I'm sorry."

And with that, he drove off into the Uluru sunset.

Neither Chris nor Damien Hill replied to our repeated requests for comment.

Credits

Reporting: Alex Mann

Additional reporting: Oliver Gordon

Photography, video and digital production: Jack Fisher

Archival drone footage: Shane Diemic, Freelance Aerial Imagery

Topics: travel-and-tourism, nt, alice-springs-0870, australia

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