Horse racing: Cancellation leaves trainers fuming

The Arawa Park track was described as a mudbath by some senior jockeys on Saturday. Photo / Trish Dunell

New Zealand Thoroughbred Racing boss Bruce Sharrock says he is "incredibly frustrated" by the abandonment of Saturday's Rotorua meeting that left many northern trainers seething.

The meeting at Arawa Park was abandoned without a race being run because of the track surface, which was described as a mudbath by some senior jockeys.

The entire industry loses with the abandonment of any race meeting, but a Saturday meeting, racing's prime turnover day, being canned without a race being run but after
all the horses and participants had travelled to the venue is the worst-case scenario.

It will cost the industry $50,000- $60,000 in direct compensation for participants, and costs the Rotorua club, while the TAB would have lost between $1 million and $1.5 million in turnover, with a fraction of that loss mitigated by the increased turnover for the one domestic meeting that remained at New Plymouth.

New Zealand thoroughbred racing has been dogged by meeting abandonments in recent years, often in winter, although major meetings such as the Group 1 day at Trentham in December were also abandoned because of poorly prepared tracks.

It is not a New Zealand-centric problem — racing at Randwick in Sydney was also abandoned after one race on Saturday because of a sodden track — but what angers northern trainers is their belief Arawa Park was never going to be suitable to race.

"The jockeys will tell you it was too wet and some parts were just mud," said top trainer Roger James. "That isn't good enough and how do we explain that to the owners who pay the bills?

"We know winter can be a difficult time to prepare tracks but we [the industry] spent all this money building synthetic tracks. So why can't we move these meetings when we know early in the week there is going to be a problem?"

The synthetic track at Cambridge is almost exclusively used for Wednesday industry days and has yet to host a Saturday meeting but Sharrock, the new chief executive of NZTR, says that and a raft of other changes are on the table.

"We're very disappointed by what happened on Saturday, and when trainers have rung me complaining it's not good enough, I've had to agree with them," he told the Herald.

"One of the key issues with our industry is far bigger than just this meeting being lost, it is how we run our meetings.

"We [NZTR] pay clubs the money to put the meetings on, but only have so much oversight on how they are run, and that includes track preparation and suitability.

"Clearly the surface produced on Saturday wasn't good enough and we all lose out because of that, including the club.

"We need to be made aware of any potential track problems earlier and, yes, moving a Saturday meeting to the synthetic track before fields are drawn is realistic, if that is what has to be done to save meetings.

"At the moment, we rely on the clubs to provide that information and I believe that has to stop."

Sharrock says in the new season, six regions of the country will come under the control of senior track managers from those regions to oversee preparation of tracks and alert NZTR to potential problems.

But the repeated failure of some tracks to measure up to the required standard will only boost calls for more track closures, especially when struggling tracks could in some cases be sold for tens of millions and their clubs, and the overall industry, use that money to hold vastly enriched meetings as tenants at other tracks.

Sharrock says Saturday's abandonment and any in the future raise the possibility of NZTR holding back money from clubs who fail to meet their basic objectives of providing a suitable surface and the infrastructure needed to run a meeting.

"But we also need to look at the overall governance model of the industry," he said.

"At the moment, we pay money to clubs to run race meetings but have little control over how that is done, and we need to have more control and then secure the expertise to run them as efficiently as possible.

"But the bottom line is nobody wins out of these abandonments and we have to do better as an industry. That means making some changes."