Wairoa Racing Club president Paul Toothill, four years after the last races in Wairoa he's still trying to get them back, and says: "I haven’t given up. I’m not going to give up." Photo / Warren Buckland
Wairoa Racing Club president Paul Toothill, four years after the last races in Wairoa he's still trying to get them back, and says: "I haven’t given up. I’m not going to give up." Photo / Warren Buckland
New Zealand Thoroughbred Racing’s response to a bid to revive the Wairoa Racecourse reads like a death knell for any hope of horse racing returning to Northern Hawke’s Bay and the East Coast.
But the Wairoa Racing Club, established more than 140 years ago, is still going, and in thesame tack as the rest of a community fighting for its survival, president Paul Toothill is not ready to give up the fight yet.
In a stroll around parts of the Te Kupenga course, between Wairoa and Frasertown, it’s easy to see why, even when the wintry conditions are more than the (short) length of the straight from the hot summer days most fondly remembered of the three-day meetings which used to include the Saturday and Monday of the Auckland anniversary weekend.
Things changed.
It became a two-day Thursday-Sunday meeting in February, but ultimately came the chop.
The Wairoa Races, despite comparative geographic remoteness, attracted some good horses, including Big Mike, pictured including the 2020 Wairoa Cup in a career worth over $600,000 in stakes. Photo / Peter Rubery
On February 23, 2020, Big Mike, a galloper that had 16 wins, including cups races in both New Zealand and Australia, with stakes well over $600,000, won the last Wairoa Cup on the course.
The powers that be determined that, to use the more official standing, the Wairoa club would no longer have a licence to race at Wairoa, and its Cup has since been staged over 130km away in Hastings – or three to four hours on the road if the loyal members of the club still want to have their big day out.
The Poverty Bay Turf Club’s racing at Makaraka, Gisborne, went the same way, meaning that in the Wairoa and Gisborne districts, which have a combined population of about 60,000, there is no horse racing.
In many such areas throughout the country, the two big days out, for more than a century – “where everyone turned up,” says Toothill were the annual races and the A and P Show.
Regardless of whether or not they’d backed the right horse “everyone was a winner,” he says.
At the end of February the Wairoa club made an extensive submission to New Zealand Thoroughbred Racing on the “Update of the NZTR Venue Plan 2024,” and focused on the Wairoa-Tairāwhiti region “being the only regions across New Zealand where live racing is too difficult to access.”
It included an eight-page business plan for racing to return at Wairoa in the 2026-2027 plan, or earlier, but it was again clear Wairoa had been balloted out without the right of re-entry.
A wager at the Wairoa Races, where, according to club president Paul Toothill, because of its place in the community, "everyone was a winner," whether or not they backed the right horse. Photo / NZME
In a letter dated April 30, the club was told by NZTR chief executive Bruce Sharrock: “As per our phone call, while NZTR carefully considered your submission, alongside other submissions that in effect supported your submission, we have decided not to reinstate the Wairoa Racecourse.”
“A key objective of the venue plans is to create a venue network that caters, as optimally as possible, to our current racing landscape and racing programme,” he wrote.
“In NZTR’s view, reinstating the Wairoa Racecourse would not be consistent with this objective.”
“We understand that this decision may be inconsistent with the guiding principle that New Zealanders have access to racing, but it is a matter of balancing all the guiding principles that have underpinned the development of our venue plan, with the result that this principle may be outweighed by other principles in coming to a decision on a particular venue,” Sharrock wrote.
Thus, the 2024-2025 racing season started on August 1 with Wairoa still excluded, apart from Hawke’s Bay Racing’s plans to stage the Affco Wairoa Cup Raceday on February 16 in Hastings next year.
The Wairoa Races on a typical hot summer's day in 2018. Photo / NZME
The thing is, the Wairoa Racing Club owns about 40 hectares, and Toothill, wants a round table with such people as MP Katie Nimon, Minister of Racing Winston Peters and Minister for Regional Development Shane Jones.
With most of it grazed to pay the bills, its future could be as the major events centre for the region, depending on the future of the nearby Wairoa showgrounds, which was unable to be used for the annual A and P Show this year, because of the devastation in Cyclone Gabrielle in February last year.
But in the meantime, the focus is on the racing, and Toothill says: “I haven’t given up. I’m not going to give up.”
Doug Laing is a senior reporter based in Napier with Hawke’s Bay Today, and has 51 years of journalism experience, 40 of them in Hawke’s Bay, in news gathering, including breaking news, sports, local events, issues, and personalities.
