Racing: First day of spring has Kiwi punters looking westward to Australia

New Zealand racing shares the minds and wallets of those who punt on the horses every Saturday.

The first Saturday of spring will have Kiwi punters looking westward as one of the greatest shifts in this country’s betting culture is demonstrated in full effect today.

While New Zealand racing has undergone plenty of dramatic changes in the past 30 years: the migration to online betting, the TAB/Entain deal and even before that the arrival of fixed odds and corporate bookmakers, the single greatest change has been how New Zealand now shares Saturdays with Australia.

Saturday is far and away the biggest betting day of the week and used to be all about Ellerslie, Trentham and Riccarton, with harness racing most Saturday nights and Australia’s biggest races simply sprinkled in between.

It wasn’t that long ago Kiwi punters could only see the best races out of Australia and the local stuff dominated but bump into a punter in a cafe or check out a punting chat-group most Saturday mornings now and you are just as likely to see the words Waller, Jmac and Ollie as you are anything to do with the domestic product.

The ingratiation of Australian racing into how New Zealand punters now think, supported by the seemingly endless screens of information available out of Australia, means plenty of Kiwis bet more and more often on Australian racing than meetings a few kilometres away.

Today is the fullest embodiment of that as we have two relatively standard-fare meetings at Whanganui and Riccarton where there are group races at both Randwick and Caulfield stacked with New Zealand storylines.

I Wish I Wish meets Aegon in the group 1 A$750,000 Memsie at Caulfield while in Sydney two of the favourite sons of New Zealand racing, trainer Chris Waller and jockey James McDonald, take a genuine racing superstar in Nature Strip back to the races to start his last campaign.

Part-owned in New Zealand, including by former All Black coach and now Wallaby helper (although he didn’t seem to help much) Sir Steve Hansen, Nature Strip’s fan club among New Zealand punters would be 10 times that of any local galloper racing today.

To top it all off even Kiwi harness racing fans might tune in to watch the A$2.1million Eureka, the world’s richest harness race at Menangle tonight, which will be a lot more interesting than any harness race at home in recent months.

The class imbalance between the two sides of the Tasman won’t always be as pronounced as today, with group 1 racing returning at Hastings next week and horses like Legarto and Sharp N Smart even assuring some of their punter’s eyeballs are looking this way, if even only for a few races.

Add in some of the revamped carnivals coming this summer at Te Rapa and a reopened Ellerslie, highlighted by the Karaka Millions, which will have its final stakes schedule announced on Monday, and New Zealand racing has an enormous amount to look forward to.

But the very lucrative genie that is Australian racing is out of the bottle and she is never going back in.

Now New Zealand racing only shares the minds and wallets of those who punt on the horses every Saturday, you wonder how we ever got on without the Aussies.