As one of the world’s largest horse racing jurisdictions, it has always surprised me how homogenous Australian racecourses are.
Beyond the fact that they are just about all turf surfaces and all circuit courses, they’re also very flat and shaped too similarly.
The three major racecourses in Melbourne are Flemington, Caulfield and Moonee Valley. All of them differ, but only slightly.
Flemington is the nation’s widest course and the only to host races up to 1200m down a straight.
Moonee Valley has a tiny 173m straight and the sharpest turn which many horses struggle to handle.
Caulfield is as close to undulating as our racecourses get with its uphill climb to the 1400m mark, but it is not steep enough to separate the tough from the weak.
While there are the differences in the tracks, the overall surfaces are quite similar which is reflected in the form of Victorian horses. Those who run well at Caulfield just about always run well at Flemington.
Likewise, those who handle midweek racetracks at Sandown, Ballarat, Mornington and Bendigo also comfortably handle the metropolitan turf tracks.
Something noticeable when watching racing in the UK is the large margins between horses.
Many English thoroughbreds fail to handle the shapes and undulations of their tracks. In particular, most of their tracks feature long straights, up to 1600m, so turns are less common and some horses handle them better than others.
They can do this because not all UK courses are circuits. Most notably, the Newmarket July course is in a dogleg shape and can run races up to 2000m down the straight.
Newmarket, not dissimilar to Ascot and most racecourses in the United Kingdom, is an undulating track that forces horses to climb, descend and accelerate towards the finish line. This could be what undid Animal Kingdom as the hot favourite in the Queen Anne Stakes at Royal Ascot last month.
These undulations have formed over thousands of years and are a trademark of British racing. Installing undulations into an existing Australian racecourse would be near impossible and certainly not worth the cost of construction.
So how could you possibly alter a racecourse to add variety into the racing mix?
You can’t. You’d have to build a whole new course. It just so happens that the Pakenham Race Club is doing exactly that in Tynong. But unfortunately, they have gone with a traditional turf circuit track.
So perhaps the next course after that could offer some variety? Now we’re really in the land of hypotheticals.
Synthetic tracks are the way of the future.
While the allure of racing on luscious green grass is the traditional method and will never die out, synthetic tracks are an environmentalist’s best friend. In particular, the Tapeta surface, a manmade material formed from sand, fibre wax and various chemicals could become the global neutral surface.
Tapeta is deemed a safer surface for horses to race on because it is immune to weather. It doesn’t go hard in summer nor does it shift in rain.
Most importantly, it only requires one tenth of the water that grass surfaces require.
Tapeta is used for races at Meydan in Dubai. The Tapeta course runs on the inside of the turf track and requires little to no maintenance. Under the desert sun where maintaining turf runs up a hefty water bill, Tapeta solves just about every problem.
The Geelong Through track is Victoria’s most used synthetic surface. It has no problem hosting multiple meetings per week, which is especially useful in winter when regional turf tracks get waterlogged and are unsafe. Meetings are often transferred to the Geelong Thorough track.
Flemington has dirt and sand tracks inside its course proper which are used as a training surface but not for official races. Considering the size of Flemington, the amount of training tracks and the central location, overhauling the dirt track for a Tepeta surface could be an option in the future.
The loss of a training track for Melbourne’s main stable facility may be a concern but considering the durability of Tapeta, training gallops on it should be no problem. If trainers don’t like that, there happens to be another seven training tracks at Flemington.
Hosting Melbourne’s four day spring carnival, the condition of the Flemington track is always a hotly debated topic around Melbourne Cup time. Over those four days, the course gets torn up quite badly but the track is still maintained reasonably well by the excellent ground staff.
If Flemington were to turn the dirt track into an all-weather surface, they would be able to lessen the load of the turf track. This is done at Meydan during the World Cup carnival as well as at Hong Kong and Singapore racecourses.
It ensures the turf is kept in excellent condition while also adding significant variety to the horse racing offered. The best horses manage to handle both turf and all-weather surfaces just as well.
Considering half the races on Melbourne Cup day and Oaks Day are irrelevant, not many would be bothered if the race card was to be split between the synthetic track and course proper.
They’re immune to weather conditions, they protect the luscious green turf and they are great for the environment. It may not happen in the immediate future but replacing the dirt track with an all-weather surface could give Victorian racing a nice piece of variety.
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