A punting ego trip has evolved into a six-figure surge in generosity as Stephen Salter’s Harness Charity Challenge builds from strength-to-strength to the benefit of many at-need causes.
A record 62 entries accepted the challenge this season, which runs throughout October and has punters using Twitter to declare daily picks, with donations benefitting the leading tipster’s nominated charity.
Some $15,500 is up for grabs this year, which will boost donations to an extraordinary $113,000 since Salter dreamed up the proposal in 2015.
He joined Toby McKinnon on SEN Track’s TrotsLife this week to give insights into the challenge.
“I used to run a tipping service, poggaharness, you’ve got to have a bit of an ego when you run these tipping services, because you have to promote the product and the like,” Salter told TrotsLife.
“There were a couple of people getting a bit sick of my tweets (so they) took me on, said they’d had enough of this, let’s have a tip-off on Twitter.
“I was amazed how much traction it got. One of the guys on Twitter said why don’t you do this every year, we want to get involved and it will grow some legs.”
And boy did it.
“We said let’s make it $250, if we get four people in it that’s $1000 we can donate to charity,” Salter said. “The first year we would have had close to 20-odd people sign up, which was just crazy.
“It’s pretty serious money we’re talking about, we’ve got to do this the right way. So we ended up saying let’s tweet every day, let’s have a leaderboard, let’s have everybody have a nominated charity, let’s call out those charities on Twitter and give them a bit of focus.
“I thought that year would be it, 2015. Here we are six years later, we’ve now raised just over $113,000, just off a couple of blokes with an ego trip.”
This year’s challenge all comes to a head this Sunday, with Jamie Cockshutt ($3380) the leader on behalf of his charity We Can Make A Difference, while Brett Coffey ($3040) and Albie Ashwood ($2890) fill out the placings with four days to play.
“It’s grown to a point where there’s a bit of work in it, I must admit I’m having some late nights trying to update the leaderboards, but it’s definitely well worth it when I look back at how much money we’ve raised and also hearing about some of the smaller charities that the guys are playing for.”
Some of those stories were profiled on TrotsLife, with Marcus Kirkwood, Ash Haynes and Coffey all featuring as part of the show. Click below to listen in.
Follow along on Twitter at @HarnessCharity
