Local horse racing owes a lot to Greg Bortz

The king of execution has retired as chairperson of Race Coast. The problem is not the strategy. The real challenge lies in execution. This revelation comes from the ‘Department of the Bleeding Obvious’. Millions are often spent on diagnosing inability to get things done; conference resolutions, academic reports and smarty-pants journalism identify barriers to building infrastructure, creating jobs and fixing potholes. But earnest debates and study groups seldom identify ways through, over or around those barriers. Meanwhile, horse racing has had a solution all along: Greg Bortz. Fixing a dying industry This man took a dying industry by the scruff of its scruffy neck and shook it back to life. Anyone who saw the glamorous spectacles of the recent Hollywoodbets Durban July and World Pool Gold Cup race meetings at Greyville – and, indeed, the earlier WSB Cape Town Met at Kenilworth – would not recognise the bankrupt, sad, moribund sport that was limping along four short years ago. Of course, it wasn’t just Bortz that resurrected South African racing, but he was a main catalyst, dynamo, spark that got hundreds of people and billions of rands working flat out to fix things: the executor of the strategy. The strategy he designed. Bortz’s retirement this week as chairperson of Race Coast – at the tender age of 56 – is a story that slipped a little under the radar as the 2025/26 racing season headed to a noisy conclusion. The low-key departure is perhaps a measure of the change he has wrought: no-one is panicking that the kingpin is bowing out; the right systems and people are in place to keep things galloping along on good going. In an interview with Sporting Post, Bortz said most of the strategic milestones he’d set at the start of his rescue mission in 2022 had been reached, some of which “came with a high degree of difficulty”. Therein lies a lesson. Execution ain’t easy. Perseverance pays off. Clearly identified goals are paramount. Leaving behind ‘a committed pool of talent’ “We overhauled our stadiums and infrastructure, which was a massive project in itself. We boosted stakes and implemented incentive schemes to kickstart horse population growth and increase field sizes … most importantly, we assembled a deep bench of dedicated, talented team members. It is this committed pool of talent that provides me with the opportunity to step away now and simply focus on enjoying, as an owner, what Race Coast has to offer,” Bortz told Sporting Post. Bortz has retired before: from a highly lucrative career in investment banking and private equity in the US. Raised in Durban, a stone’s throw away from Greyville racecourse – which lit his passion for racing – he headed overseas as a young man in search of fortune. In 2012 he moved to Cape Town to enjoy the rewards of that fortune – including owning a few racehorses. But the local racing set-up was a shambles. What was a youthful, energetic retiree to do? The story of how Bortz stepped forward to join forces with the Hefer family’s Hollywoodbets online gambling firm and reconfigure the game in the Western Cape and then in KwaZulu-Natal is well documented. A record-breaking R10-million 2026 Durban July purse, a thriving Race Coast operator and burgeoning international racing tie-ups are evidence of the dramatic turnaround. Of course, Bortz’s assertiveness and zeal to put things to rights is possibly not to everyone’s liking and some people might be wary of his, now considerable, influence. Mere mortals are never perfect, of course. But, in the final tally, racing has a lot to thank this bloke for.