Curtain to come down on Macau racing
Aussie Allendorf to stay in Asia to care for his horses until the bitter end
Expatriate Australian jockey-turned-trainer Geoff Allendorf will end his 35-year involvement with Macau thoroughbred racing when the gambling mecca hosts its final race meeting on Saturday, just months after being told the sport had no future in the city.
The rug was pulled from under the financially crippled Macau Jockey Club by Macau’s Special Administrative Region government in mid-January, giving the Asian jurisdiction’s racing participants just 11 weeks’ notice that their careers in the region were over.
The shock announcement came about seven months after the Singapore government made a similar decision, axing racing in the Lion City last June with a 16-month grace period.
A disappointed Allendorf, 67, was an accomplished rider who first came to Macau in 1989 when thoroughbred racing was re-established in the city as a replacement for harness racing and he later took out his trainer’s licence to continue his affiliation with the jurisdiction.
Despite being disappointed he has been prematurely forced into retirement from training, permanent Macau resident Allendorf intends to remain in Asia for the foreseeable future to care for the horses left at Taipa racecourse when the curtain comes down on what was once a thriving racing industry.
“The worst feeling about it is the disrespect shown to the owners [by the Jockey Club],” Allendorf told ANZ Bloodstock News this week.
“They are wanting the owners to pay to relocate the horses and then they will reimburse them, but what the owners are worried about is that the club has been lying to them for the past year, so they don’t trust them.”
Allendorf has 11 horses in his stable, six of which are likely to race at Taipa on Saturday at a venue where the trainer has won Macau Derbies and Gold Cups.
“Some horses hopefully will go to New Zealand with the option of going to Australia from there, then a good amount of them might go to Malaysia and most of them will still go to China, like they used to,” the trainer said of the approximately 300 horses still housed at Macau’s racecourse, 80 of which are already retirees.
“Too many things can go wrong when you’re looking after them, let alone with somebody who isn’t going to take perfect care of them. They’re not going to earn prize-money, so everybody’s wages are at rock-bottom.
“To a lot of people connected to them, it’s just a job, it’s not a passion and mine’s been a passion for my entire life.
“I’ll be here until my horses leave and if I have to look after anyone else’s, so be it.”
Michael Beattie, the current chief executive of the Clarence River Jockey Club at Grafton in Northern NSW, worked at the Macau Jockey Club in two stints, firstly in 2006 and 2007 and then again for three years from 2011.
“Macau racing, when I was there, I won’t say it was at its highest point, but it was still more than holding its own within the Asian market,” Beattie said.
“We had 700 to 800 horses there and even the second time when I was there, we raced two days a week on most occasions with seven to eight races which almost always had capacity fields.
“The second time I was there, I was running a stewards’ inquiry one night into interference in a race and I had jockeys from nine different countries giving evidence at the one inquiry.
“It had a really cosmopolitan feel.
“Macau racing was always, in my view, unique even in the Asian region because they essentially ran half their race meetings on turf and half their race meetings on the sand surface.
“There was pretty much something for every horse and there were a lot of horses that were very good sand horses that were essentially turf maidens and vice versa.”
In January, the Macau SAR government rescinded the MJC’s betting concession contract, even though it had only been renewed last year and was due to run through until August 31, 2042.
The first nails in the Macau racing industry’s coffin occurred in the early 2000s when the Hong Kong Jockey Club successfully lobbied for cross-border betting to be banned, meaning Hong Kong residents could not wager on Macau race meetings through betting shops in the city.
Beattie also blamed the MJC for its lack of promotion of the sport to tourists and locals alike.
“A lot of people came to Macau to gamble and left Macau after having been at the casinos without even really being aware that the racecourse existed,” he said.
“They were always very member focused but not particularly public focused and I think that was probably to their detriment in the end.
“The other thing, and it happened before my time, was there were some changes in the early 2000s to the cross-border betting arrangements with Hong Kong and that certainly had a detrimental effect on Macau being able to grow its gambling product.”
Allendorf, whose training rivals include fellow expatriate Australians Gary Moore and his son Nick, believes the fact the MJC was privately owned, and poorly run, also contributed to the sport’s demise.
“If we made racing a government charity, based on the blueprint of Hong Kong, it would go through the roof, I can tell you that now without a doubt,” he said.
“If somebody said you’ve got to put every dollar that you’ve earnt, plus your mother’s and father’s, that’s how confident I’d be, I’d put everything into it because all the casinos want to get involved but they can’t be involved with private enterprise.”
Despite murmurings of trouble in Macau, January’s announcement still came as a shock to Beattie.
“I always thought Macau would fight back. The product was so good and if it was properly managed and properly promoted it had so much to offer,” the administrator said.
“I am disappointed that the Macau government has indicated that they’re not interested, at least at this stage, of listening to any other applications to reopen the venue. I have got to say, hand on heart, I hope that’s revisited.”
The ramifications on Macau’s closure, and that of Singapore, will be felt across Australasian racing and breeding sectors.
Since 2010, according to data sourced from Arion, $11,603,000 was spent by the Macau Jockey Club on 223 horses at public auction, predominantly at the Inglis, Magic Millions and New Zealand Bloodstock two-year-old sales.
Up until the onset of the pandemic, which stifled activity, there was also a significant private sales market for Australian and New Zealand horses to race in Macau.
“I am not talking about the million–dollar horses, but if you go back to the pre-Covid days, and Singapore would have had an even higher figure, the Macau Jockey Club was buying 20 to 30 horses at the ready to run sales year-on-year,” Beattie said.
“While 30 might not seem like a significant number, where it becomes interesting is of those horses that have been sold, it’s not so much the 30 they buy, but it is the other 100 horses they bid on and drive the price up, so as a consequence of that it’s going to have a really huge effect.
“It may take a while to bite but it’ll bite and it’s going to hurt us.”
Allendorf will attend the Royal Ascot Meeting in the UK in June with one of his sons and when he does eventually return to Australia he may reside on the Gold Coast, although he hasn’t made any firm plans.
One thing for certain, however, is he won’t be taking out a trainer’s licence upon his return to his home country.
“You’ve got to be big and I don’t have any history in Australia. I haven’t ridden there for 30-something years,” Allendorf said.
“The middle-of-the-road trainer who earns wages – I’ve got a lot of friends who do that and they work hard – whereas I have been in Asia and spoiled.
“In saying that, I don’t mind working, but I won’t get up at 3.30 in the morning at 67 years of age and work all day and travel to all these race meetings.
“I’ll do something else part-time, but I can’t be a horse trainer. I haven’t got the connections to get that many horses. Put it this way, if you’re a big owner I wouldn’t be looking for a 67-year-old.
“I’d be looking for someone on the way up.”
Allendorf felt more for his peers than himself, not only in Macau but in Singapore as well, given the situation they find themselves in. Singapore racing is slated to end on October 5.
“We’ve got the two Moores here at the moment, Gary and Nick. Nick being young, he’s got a wife and a child, it just pulls the rug right out from under them. It is sadder for them than it is for someone older like me or Nick’s father Gary,” he said.
“I don’t want it to happen to me, either, but I’d hate to be in my early 30s and for it to happen.”
Beattie added: “What concerns me more than the expats, if you like, is the local people who have been employed in and around horses and horseracing for the last 20 or 25 years and essentially have no other skill level in a society where it is going to be difficult to get a job.”