There are 62 country racecourses in Victoria and you’d be hard-pressed to find someone that can name them all. Country racing is at crossroads, and it’s time to cut under utilised racecourses loose.
In concurrence with the rise of online betting and the comfort of watching racing from home, attendance figures have taken the biggest toll. Country racing is hosted for the purpose of midweek betting, but the quality is downright atrocious.
Facilities look dilapidated, tracks survive on life support and the poor quality makes it near-impossible for a country trainer to match it with metropolitan counterparts.
The Dunkeld Race Club in the North of Victoria for example, has just one official race day per year on their racecourse.
Maintaining racetracks is a very costly exercise, especially because almost all of them are turf track.
Last week’s Weribee fiasco highlighted how useless it was to have an additional racecourse capable of hosting races. $5million from the Victorian government couldn’t fix the surface and everyone in the industry would have been much better off if that money was never spent, and the facility closed down.
With 62 country racecourses throughout Victoria, there is an absurd quantity of courses scattered throughout the region. In terms of quality, however, many cannot be distinguished from neighbouring farms.
A change needs to be made with a shift from quantity to quality.
The Geelong racecourse is just about the ideal country racing facility. With turf and Pro-Ride synthetic racing surfaces, it hosts race meetings year-round. With the synthetic surface, it has no problem hosting two or even three meetings per week.
Its stable facilities house hundreds of horses and its central location in a regional hub make transit feasible and easy.
While Geelong can be the hub of country racing in Victoria’s west, superficialities need to be established in the north and east too.
Seymour is the ideal location in the north and the Pakenham Race Club’s new racecourse at Tynong is situated well in the east.
These superfacilities would need to be modelled on the Flemington concept which stables the most horses in Victoria and offers the best facilities in the state, if not country.
These super facilities would comprise of a grandstand, corporate boxes, a turf track, a synthetic track, multiple training tracks, water walkers, restaurants, hotels – the lot.
Regional racecourses would be consolidated to race at their regional hubs. Closing down country racecourses will have a minor hindrance on local economies but the costs associated with maintaining a racecourse can be used to improve the regional hub facilities.
If the courses are being used for racing, trials and training they would be used around the clock, every day of the year. The facilities would also be greatly improve trainer and spectator experiences.
Traditions would be broken with historic races shifted from their original locations. For example, the Moe Race Club would move the annual running of the Moe Cup from Moe to Pakenham. The race would still be run nonetheless.
For these super facilities to come to fruition, it would see a meteoric rise in the use of synthetic race tracks for midweek meetings. The shift from running on traditional turf seems bizarre at first but with greater use, punters would come around to it as form slowly stacks up.
The biggest knock on racing on synthetic surfaces is the inconsistency with turf. That objection is eradicated so long as synthetic surface form is consistent with synthetic surface form. Based on everything we have seen at Geelong, it won’t be a problem.
In terms of progression, horses would begin on midweek country synthetic, step up to weekend country turf, progress to metropolitan midweek turf and then graduate to weekend metropolitan turf.
Such a radical change to the geographic centralisation of sporting facilities is nothing new to Australia. We only need to look as for as AFL where 11 Victoria teams share just two centralised stadiums, the MCG and Docklands.
Through the centralisation of Victoria’s football facilities, the experience of spectators is greatly improved. There once was a time when football would be played at Windy Hill, Arden Street and Whitten Oval but the industry was able to successfully embrace the change towards stadium super facilities.
To those who have watched a midweek country meeting, it is unfortunate when we hear that individual track-side punter rooting his horse home. So tranquil is the atmosphere, the excitement of that solitary punter is comfortably picked up by the broadcast.
Not even the most aggressive marketing campaigns are saving country racing. As a result there are hundreds of trainers using poor facilities while corresponding racecourses are under utilised to the point they can no longer justify their maintenance and existence.
Three super facilities, north, east and west of Melbourne is the future of country racing. Money can only be haemorrhage for so long before consolidation of resources is the most sustainable solution to hosting a year-round racing calendar.
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