Trentham, the Upper Hutt track that has staged the Wellington Cup for generations, is one of seven racecourses that would stop holding race meetings under a national plan released on Tuesday by the organisations that run thoroughbred and harness racing in New Zealand.
The plan is called Project Stamina. It pairs an independent national masterplan, prepared by the consultancy RCP, with a shared implementation position that New Zealand Thoroughbred Racing and Harness Racing New Zealand have adopted together under the label One Equine View. It is the first time the two codes have put their names to a single infrastructure strategy, and it was developed with the support of TAB NZ.
The starting point is a blunt one. New Zealand racing currently spreads its capital and operating spending across 63 venues, and the report found that money is stretched far too thinly to keep any of them to a decent standard. The recommendation is to concentrate investment on fewer, better tracks.
Under the proposal, 19 venues would close. Seven of those are racecourses. Alongside Trentham, the list names Rotorua, Manawatū, Hāwera, Ōamaru, Gore and Wyndham. The other 12 are training and non-racing facilities, which the Otago Daily Times reported include Waikouaiti in East Otago and Balfour in Northern Southland. A further five venues would have business cases prepared before any decision is made about them, and the remaining 39 would keep operating.
Three of the seven racecourses on the closure list are in the south. That has stung in small towns where the racing club is one of the last organisations still pulling a crowd together a few times a year. The Ōamaru, Gore and Wyndham tracks each sit in districts where the local meeting doubles as a social fixture, and where the club rooms get used well beyond race days.
Trentham is a different kind of loss. The Wellington Racing Club has raced there since January 1906, and the course carries a summer programme that includes the Wellington Cup, the Thorndon Mile, the Telegraph Handicap and the Levin Classic, along with the New Zealand Oaks in autumn and the Wellington Steeplechase in winter. If Trentham stopped racing, the capital would have no thoroughbred meetings at all.
The people behind the plan are not pretending it is comfortable reading. New Zealand Thoroughbred Racing chair Russell Warwick told RNZ that “doing nothing is not an option”, adding that “our infrastructure must reflect today’s racing landscape and be capable of supporting future growth”.
Harness Racing New Zealand chair Grant Jarrold said the work was more than another consultant’s report gathering dust. “It provides a unified direction that links strategy, investment and implementation, giving the industry greater certainty about the future,” he said.
New Zealand Thoroughbred Racing chief executive Matt Ballesty framed the exercise as a long game rather than a set of immediate demolition orders. “The industry’s been around for a hundred-plus years and we want it to be around a hundred-plus more,” he said. He also made the point that nothing on the list is settled, describing Project Stamina as “not something that happens tomorrow” and calling it “a living, breathing document”.
That distinction matters, because the plan is a proposal rather than a decision. Both codes have said the release marks the beginning of the next phase of engagement rather than the end of the conversation. Meetings with affected clubs are the immediate next step, and Warwick has indicated that clubs facing closure will get the chance to argue for their own survival. Business cases, detailed assessment and a minimum standards framework for community venues all sit ahead of any final call, and implementation would run over several years rather than a single season.
Clubs have already signalled they will not go quietly. The venues on the list are, in most cases, owned by clubs with their own members, their own balance sheets and in several cases land that is worth a great deal more than the racing operation sitting on top of it. Trentham itself is part of a redevelopment arrangement announced in 2022 that involves government funding towards housing on racecourse land while the track continues to operate, which complicates any simple reading of what closure would mean for the site.
Behind all of it is a horse population that has been shrinking for years. Fewer horses in work means fewer runners per race, fewer races per meeting and fewer meetings that stack up financially, while the fixed cost of maintaining a track, a grandstand, stabling and a set of rails does not fall at anything like the same rate. The joint industry release from Harness Racing New Zealand describes the goal as a venue network that matches where the horses and the participants actually are, rather than where they were decades ago.
The proposal also lands in a week when the racing sector is already in the headlines for other reasons, with greyhound racing due to hold its final New Zealand meeting on Saturday under a government ban. The two are separate matters with separate causes, but together they make for an unusually unsettled month for an industry that employs thousands of people and underwrites a good deal of rural social life.
For now, nothing closes. The seven named racecourses will run their scheduled meetings while the codes work through club consultation, and any change would need sign-off from the boards of both organisations. What has changed is that the conversation is no longer hypothetical. The tracks have been named.
Should the racing codes consolidate onto fewer, better tracks, or is a local racecourse worth more to its town than the numbers suggest? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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