The Poverty Bay Turf Club committee knew the odds and took them.
The Gisborne-based club, which has been racing at the Makaraka (Ashwood Park) racecourse for more than a century, has accepted the need for a change of home ground.
Rather than waste time and energy fighting a battle they were unlikely to win, the committee is concentrating on making the best of an opportunity to shift their annual meeting to the Hastings racecourse.
When the provisional dates for the 2020-21 season were released last month, Makaraka was among the 10 tracks not included in the schedule. The PBTC committee quickly decided that it was more sensible to embrace change than oppose it and has already had a meeting with Hawke’s Bay Racing chief executive Darin Balcombe.
The club has taken a glass-half-full approach to their future and has also recognised the wider interests of an ailing industry, rather than take a lead from the tale of King Canute.
“It was a big blow, but we had been aware that something like this was coming,” PBTC president Rod Young said. “The Gisborne community has lost its raceday, but the club will continue, and we just have to make the best of the situation.”
The club had known that its geographical position, the absence of locally trained horses and the declining health of the industry left it in a vulnerable position.
“We have probably been lucky to have carried on for as long as we have [at Makaraka],” Young said.
“It’s very different from the time when we had five days a year. We have had to provide financial incentives to entice the trainers to bring their horses now. That happened after we got only 40 nominations one year.
“It has been easier since we tacked our day on to the two days at Wairoa, to provide a bit of a circuit. That seemed to work and we have had some good days here and the public have enjoyed it.”
However, the recent race days had not been profitable for the club. Fixed costs can be a problem when an isolated course hosts just one raceday a year and the incentives to attract horses – which included a $200 payment per horse and a $10,000 trainers’ prize this year - are an added cost.
“We have been in a position to do it, but it has been eating into the capital, which is slowly whittling away,” Young said. “We usually have bills of around $100,000 to $120,000 to pay after each meeting and there will be savings if we race at Hastings.”
There were 69 runners, spread over eight races, at the PBTC’s most recent meeting, in February, but Team Rogerson provided a third of the starters.
The PBTC significantly improved its financial position when it sold the Makaraka course in 2010 and obtained a long-term lease. The club’s investment portfolio has suffered a hit recently but still has a value of more than $1.5 million.
The club is now discussing the various options with Hawke’s Bay Racing over the date for the Poverty Bay meeting at Hastings.
The PBTC has few members and is not expecting a large number of supporters to make the trip from Gisborne to Hastings for the club’s race meeting.
“It’s not like the situation with the Marton and Feilding clubs, with Awapuni being only a short distance away,” Young said. “It is two and a half hours from here to Hastings and I would think Gisborne race fans would be more likely to head to one of the big spring days in Hastings.
“But racing at Hastings might suit some of our sponsors and we will be looking to attract new supporters.”
Makaraka has been the club’s home venue since 1908, though it has held meetings in Hawke’s Bay in the past, when their own track could not be used. The club’s three days in the 1997-98 season were staged at Hastings and In earlier times some meetings were transferred to the now-defunct Napier course at Greenmeadows.
From the 1970s through the to the mid-1990s, there were usually six race days a season at Makaraka, with the PBTC having five days and the Poverty Bay Hunt Club one.
That number was reduced to a two-day spring meeting, which struggled for horse numbers, and from the 2014-15 season, the PBTC has held one meeting, in February, which has tied in with the two days at Wairoa.
Kindergarten is almost certainly the best galloper to have raced at Makaraka. Kindergarten, one of the inaugural inductees to the New Zealand Racing Hall of Fame, was bred and owned in Gisborne by Ned Fitzgerald and at times was also trained in Gisborne. He won two races at Makaraka as a juvenile but did not race on the track again.
More recently, the 2012 Cox Plate winner Ocean Park recorded his maiden win at Makaraka, and Van Der Hum won a 2000m hack race on the track just six months before his victory in the 1976 Melbourne Cup.
