RACING has a long and proud history in New Zealand, but it is unlikely the sport has had worse weeks than the one it has just endured. At 8.55pm today the lure will be released for the final time as the ‘‘End of an Era’’ 305m sprint is run and won at the Whanganui Greyhound Racing Club. For the past seven days the country’s greyhound racing community have held a succession of final race days as a government-imposed ban on the sport comes into effect. Emotions have, understandably, run high. Most dog racing stables are family-run businesses, and people who have previously enabled what was also a multimillion-dollar industry to function feel, understandably, aggrieved that not only their income but their way of life has been pulled out from under them. Many factors have played into this. A well-organised and well-intentioned lobbying campaign has highlighted the animal welfare aspects of greyhound racing; the sport’s governing body, arguably, did not recognise soon enough that the tide of social opinion was turning and implement safety improvements swiftly enough. There is a lesson here for horse racing which it cannot afford to ignore. It has been said by many that dog racing had lost its ‘‘social licence’’; animal welfare is a live issue in gallops and harness racing too and cannot be ignored. Homes now have to be found for more than 1000 retired racing dogs, and jobs found for the many people who worked in the sport. Neither will be easy tasks. Coincidentally this week, the far more prominent and far more powerful horse racing industry had its problems sheeted home to it in a controversial report which has grassroots racing people up in arms. Project Stamina, a report billed as a ‘‘long-term roadmap to create a modern, sustainable racing and training venue network’’, was released on Tuesday and greeted with howls of horror from many. It proposes closing several provincial venues, including tracks at Oamaru, Gore and Wyndham in the South and, contentiously, Trentham in Wellington, with the aim of concentrating most racing at a few venues. Some provincial clubs are scheduled for survival as ‘‘community venues’’ — the Christmas-New Year circuit in Otago and the carnival week of racing on the West Coast being examples — but others with proud and parochial histories face an uncertain future. This is not the first report in recent years which has attempted to modernise New Zealand racing, and given the furore which has greeted it, it may not be the last. While its fundamental point is sound — that this is a small country with a large number of racecourses — is correct, many of its slash-and-burn proposals run the risk of upsetting the method by which the sports ‘‘product’’, i.e. racehorses, are prepared to compete. Many of the venues now under a cloud are now used for training and trialling and fulfil a valuable function in getting horses ready to race. The provincial tracks also play a crucial role in developing horses for higher honours: not every equine can turn up at Ellerslie or Addington as a potential champion. While some might wish for New Zealand racing to have a more corporate look, much of the charm of the sport is that the farm-trained galloper can compete against the big boys and sometimes have its day in the sun. Country clubs and country trainers have their place, and those meetings often draw bigger crowds than race days in the city, which have to compete against many other events. Same rationalisation — at both head office and at the grassroots — is essential, but racing’s administrators cannot afford to alienate the people who actually train the horses and stage the race meetings that generate the turnover which keeps the industry going. Nor should they ignore that history and tradition plays a huge part in the allure of racing, and dispensing with historic venues and races risks undermining that aspect of the sport, to its detriment. Project Stamina is a useful start point for a discussion but the accompanying One Equine View report — in which several of its recommendations are contested — suggests that the Stamina report’s authors have not fully convinced the industry, nor local communities, that their way is the best way. On available evidence, they have a long way to go to achieve either of those goals.
