Werribee racecourse, the quarantine base for international horses competing in the Spring Carnival, is making global racing headlines after the massive fall-out from its abandoned race meeting on Wednesday.
The meeting was called off with two races left to be run. During the running of the eighth race on the ten-race program, Frenchkook broke down badly and was subsequently euthanised.
Frenchkook was the second horse to be fatally injured at the Werribee meeting.
Frenchkook’s apprentice rider Boris Thornton, who was competing at his debut card, was sent through the inside running rail with Frenchkook. The 15-year old can count himself lucky to be out of hospital without serious injury today.
Two races prior to the Frenchkook fall, jockey Dean Yendall warned stewards of the poor state of the track, but he later tweeted, ‘nothing [was] said back’.
Yendall’s tweet was in reply to a remark by triple Melbourne Cup winning jockey Glen Boss, who described the Werribee surface as ‘without doubt the worst track I have ridden on’.
At about the same time on Wednesday evening, Racing Victoria announced it would be conducting an inquiry into the circumstances that led to the abandonment of Wednesday’s Werribee meeting.
The real issue is the claims of both Boss and Yendall. When senior jockeys bash the state of a provincial racetrack surface, alarm bells ring. Could the fatalities have been avoided?
Furthermore, the fact that Werribee – the international training base for the Spring Carnival – is probably the most important provincial circuit in the country means this is a massive issue for Racing Victoria.
What seems to be forgotten is that for three years, between the end of 2007 and the end of 2010, racing wasn’t conducted at Werribee because of the poor state of the track.
At a Werribee race meeting in November 2007, jockeys refused to ride because of the state of the surface.
Racing Victoria and the Victorian Government responded by pumping $5million into the facility. The money was used to build a world-class quarantine centre and fix the track surface.
In the spring of 2010, the quarantine centre was used for the first time and racing resumed at Werribee at the end of the Spring Carnival after the internationals went home.
But the surface was still poor. A few years since the resumption of racing at Werribee and I’m not the only one asking whether racing should ever have returned to Werribee.
You could even say the money spent on Werribee has been wasted. The quarantine centre could be the best in the world but what good is it at Werribee if the racing surface is as bad as everyone says?
International raiders need to be quarantined near a racetrack so they can complete the required track work in the lead-up to their races.
But what trainer or owner would want their international-class horse working on the Werribee surface as it stands now?
Looking forward to the spring, Racing Victoria could probably stable and quarantine international horses at Sandown racecourse, in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne – it was the site of the old quarantine centre – if Werribee isn’t available.
But I’m not sure what the requisite concessions are – including a possible reduced stabling capacity (and therefore less international visitors) – in restoring Sandown as the quarantine base.
In any case, it’s an embarrassing situation for RVL. Track safety should never be under-estimated.
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