The Auckland thoroughbred racing season may officially end at Pukekohe today but the new one has already started.
And it is so far so good for phase two of the Ellerslie StrathAyr track after its refurbishment for the biggest year in the track’s history.
Today’s Pukekohe Park meeting, on a likely heavy 10 track, contains some decent betting races and the latest round in the Warren Kennedy versus Michael McNab battle for the jockey’s premiership – although, with Kennedy nine ahead and only 10 meetings maximum left, that title may be as good as decided.
But most in northern thoroughbred racing are already looking ahead to next season and the biggest raceday in New Zealand history, Champions Day at Ellerslie on March 8.
For those who have forgotten just how mammoth that $9 million meeting will be, it will not only host the first running of the $3.5m NZB Kiwi slot race but the New Zealand Derby, the Bonecrusher NZ Stakes, Sistema Stakes and NZ Breeders Stakes (all group 1s) as well as the Auckland Cup.
It will be the zenith of 22 meetings Ellerslie hosts next season, which means that getting the new StrathAyr surface right and consistent is crucial after a messy end to this season.
Auckland Thoroughbred Racing chief executive Paul Wilcox is confident the surface will deliver on its earlier promise even though it got slippery after rain late on Karaka Million night in January and then two later meetings saw partial abandonments.
Those teething problems saw ATR move one late-season meeting to Pukekoke so Ellerslie’s track renovation work could start earlier and horses returned to the home of Auckland racing for the first time on Monday.
Six horses galloped in three pairs ridden by top jockeys Kennedy and Craig Grylls and both were happy with the surface, which the horses were able to get their hooves into rather than staying on top of.
The inability for horses to always “get their toe in” to the new surface was a key reason, when combined with rain, why it became slippery in its initial season, albeit most meetings went off without a hitch.
“Our team has done an enormous amount of work on the surface,” Wilcox says.
“The top surface was broken right up to take the tension out of it and 450 tonne of sand was added, with that work to continue and another 350 tonne of sand to be added.
“We have been working really closely with experts like Liam O’Keeffe, the track manager at Flemington, and Chris Hay from Elwick [Hobart, also a StraythAyr track] and they are both really confident we have got it right.
“So Monday was an important first step and to hear Warren and Craig so happy was very satisfying.
“We will have more gallops, jump-outs and then trials and, all going well, we will be back racing on September 21.”
Ellerslie is in for a summer of such scale that most in the New Zealand racing industry are still struggling to get their heads around it.
As well as Group 1 racing at Christmas, it will have the Karaka Million in late January, which next season will also include the Railway, moved from New Year’s Day and boosted to $600,000.
Then looms Champions Day and New Zealand thoroughbred racing’s first slot race, the NZB Kiwi as the centrepiece of the strongest race meeting yet held in this country.
“I know we really shouldn’t be comparing ourselves to another jurisdiction but to have a $9m race meeting [in its first year] puts Champions Day up there with Australia’s biggest racedays,” Wilcox says.
“So we are very excited and Monday was one of the first steps toward all that.”
Michael Guerin wrote his first nationally published racing articles while still in school and started writing about horse racing and the gambling industry for the Herald as a 20-year-old in 1990. He became the Herald’s Racing Editor in 1995 and covers the world’s biggest horse racing carnivals.
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