Turfed-out race meetings spell setbacks for our region
Seldom are race meetings scuttled in summer because the track isn't up to scratch.
We’ve had a few turf calamities in Manawatu over the years, but none so disastrous as that at Awapuni in the past 10 days.
The Boxing Day races went south to Otaki and the Manawatu Cup meeting was abandoned and held a day later because of wet turf and horses going for a skate.
Manawatu Cricket lost firstclass matches at Fitzherbert Park for a few years because the pitch and outfield were not up to NZ Cricket’s warrant-of-fitness standard.
In the first year of the Manawatu Turbos’ rugby in 2006, there was more sand than grass on the Oval for the opening game after the sand-slitting hadn’t grassed over. The game against Auckland went ahead, even if in one scrum the Auckland hooker told his Manawatu counterpart they were playing on a beach.
Auckland had insisted the game be switched to Eden Park to protect their precious milliondollar jaffas. By the way, the Arena surface this year looked horribly patchy.
Greenkeepers can seldom get golf courses and greens to a standard to satisfy every member, most of whose turf credentials are restricted to mowing their weedy lawns at home.
But seldom are race meetings scuttled in summer because the track isn’t up to scratch, especially not at one of the country’s premier centres. Surely only a good thatch of grass is required. Small clubs such as Woodville get it done, so why not Awapuni?
This time the national body’s heavyweight Racing Integrity Unit gave the track the thumbs down, as apparently did the jockeys both times on safety grounds.
That meant less income for them too. It didn’t help that a jockey had died at Gore after a fall. The 800-metre bend area in question looked stable, until tonnes of horse flesh ploughed across it.
Water has long been a factor at Awapuni. The late trainer Noel Eales would frequently complain about the track being ‘‘overwatered’’. Our unusually wet winter and spring hasn’t helped. But to rip up grass and re-drain an area won’t happen overnight.
All sorts of theories have abounded regarding the wet area, including that it has a 25-year history of being wet and now it has got worse. There was also a nutty theory about sabotage. There might be a spring bubbling beneath ground or maybe the water-table runoff has been altered by new houses being built right on the 800m mark.
Below that end of the course is a swampy area and a flood runoff stretching around to the Mangaone Stream on Pioneer Highway. The course is close to the site of what was once the Awapuni Lagoon. There is an 1881 photo of it and it was one of five lagoons drained to form the swampy city. Ironically, awa-puni means ‘‘blocked up river’’.
Heavy holiday hit
The Manawatu Racing Club and its overall controlling body, RACE group, will take a heavy hit over this washout.
The budgeted loss could run into hundreds of thousands across the two affected meetings and noone knows how far this will track into 2017.
Entry was to be $20 a pop on Boxing Day and if the usual 6000 punters had fronted, just do the multiplication.
Instead, they had to go off for the second time in five years to Otaki, on the best weather day in Manawatu, and that was too distant for most Manawatu punters, whose prime interest on that day is to get under the weather. You could have alpacas belting around on Boxing Day for all the notice most would take, but it is money for jam.
The debt of $12 million from building the new grandstand has been reduced to $8m, mainly through land and asset sales, but the debt burden has cut spending in other areas, including, perhaps, the course.
The Marton Jockey Club cup meeting on January 7 must now be in jeopardy. I hear New Zealand First had hired a room for a fundraiser that day involving Winston Peters who, by the way, was once the minister for racing.
Manawatu will badly want the track operating on April 1 for the first City of Palmerston North Gold Cup Festival, because they have rocker Jimmy Barnes lined up to perform for an hour after the last race. That’s a major promotion, not to mention the Sires Produce Stakes that day being the only group 1 race run at Awapuni.
The New Zealand Racing Board and the Palmerston North City Council have heavily backed the festival financially and the other two racing codes are involved with meetings.
The council has also been part of the Awapuni master plan, which includes a grand new entrance and a ‘‘Flemington rose archway’’ to welcome patrons. That might have to go on the back burner now.
The plan also included New Zealand’s first synthetic racing and training surface to cope with a planned increase in horses and meetings to increase from 18 to 30 a year. Until then, the grassy bit comes first.