Million-dollar Black Opal raceday revamp for Canberra
Pearce playing long game in hope of revitalising racing industry in the Australian Capital Territory
Canberra will host its first million-dollar Black Opal meeting next year in a reshuffle of its programming and scheduling as part of a longer-term plan to win over the Australian Capital Territory government and community support for thoroughbred racing in the nation’s capital.
Darren Pearce, an experienced racing administrator with the Australian Turf Club who also had a stint with Tabcorp, is about to bring up 12 months at the helm of Canberra Racing Club as he embarks on reshaping the thoroughbred industry’s place within the ACT’s sporting landscape.
Part of the Pearce-led change is shelving day two of Canberra’s Black Opal carnival on the March long weekend after a four-year experiment. The Canberra Cup (Listed, 2000m) will be brought forward to the Sunday meeting and will be run on the undercard to the Black Opal Stakes (Gr 3, 1200m) juvenile feature, often used as a last-ditch Golden Slipper (Gr 1, 1200m) lead-up, on a ten-race card worth $1 million.
Four Saturday race meetings will also be conducted in Canberra in 2023-24.
“We’re playing the long game as we’ve got to build community support and build more racing fans to allow us to have a louder voice with government and, although Friday race days are great and we make the most of those, people have busy work and family lives, so it is hard to get big audiences to those Friday afternoon meetings, which is why we have worked hard to find a few windows in the calendar to have some Saturday meetings,” Canberra Racing Club chief executive Pearce said yesterday.
“We are going to create event race days around those dates and really invite the community in and showcase how good thoroughbred racing is in the nation’s capital to grow our community support.
“[Saturday meetings] are very important to us strategically and commercially and they will be very important for the racing industry here to be able to showcase what they do very well.”
Specifically regarding the changes to carnival, Pearce said he wouldn’t be surprised if the condensing of the card made it “a record Black Opal day as a result”.
“If you just take a step back, the Black Opal is the race that is synonymous with Canberra and the race everyone wants to get around, so [we are] putting the Canberra Cup on that day to strengthen the programme by making it a ten-race card,” the administrator said.
“By investing the money we spend on the Monday [of the two-day carnival] and redirecting that to Sunday to make it as big as possible, I think it will give us a better long-term outcome.”
The club also continues to push for its master plan for the development of the Thoroughbred Park site which is intended to have a large parcel of land used to construct industrial, commercial and residential properties.
About 60 per cent of the precinct is used for racing and training purposes while the remaining 40 per cent of vacant land would be developed under the yet-to-be-approved plans.
“It is such a well-located racecourse with a lot of parallels with Randwick, just on the city fringe. It is a real gateway site from the north into Canberra and Canberra has an amazing north-west growth precinct called the Gungahlin district which Thoroughbred Park is a bit of a gateway for,” said Pearce, who joined the Canberra club last September.
“There’s an opportunity to put racing back in the spotlight here and to get up a master plan which has massive implications for the community but also for racing if we get the master plan right and we get our rezoning through.
“We can create a business model which sustains racing in Canberra for many years to come.”
Of all the state and territory governments, the ACT has arguably been the least supportive of racing, having already banned greyhound racing. It is something Pearce acknowledges as “improving, but with some way to go” as he goes about bridging the gap between politicians and the sport.
“Where we are aligned is in the need for the master plan and using the land we have that is not used for racing and training to be developed and released to help the government meet its housing supply targets by building some accommodation and affordable housing,” he said.
“We’re very much aligned on those things and we’re hoping, through creating a bit of a partnership around that, we might be able to have better discussions around the funding of racing and the future of racing in the ACT.
“We all know government priorities change over time, so you have got to play the long game. There might be times when you’re not aligned, but you have got to keep working hard to grow the support of the community around you and be a source of pride for the community.”
The Labor government last week announced it would increase the Point of Consumption tax on Canberra’s punters to 25 per cent, the highest in the nation, which Liberal MP and opposition racing spokesman Mark Parton slammed as effectively “starving” the Territory’s local racing industry.
Pearce revealed the Canberra Racing Club received zero revenue directly from POCT, which is estimated to be $32 million annually.
“We don’t think that model is right and it would be smarter to align racing’s revenues with the wagering tax, but they don’t see it that way at this point in time,” he said.
“There is no direct relationship between the annual payment we get from the ACT government and the POCT which goes to its consolidated revenue and it’s a reasonable number, too.”
The well-documented insurance costs have also crippled ACT trainers, many paying ten times as much in premiums compared to their New South Wales-based counterparts, prompting the likes of Matthew Dale (Goulburn), Nick Olive (Queanbeyan), Doug Gorrel (Wagga) and Luke Pepper (Scone) to relocate their stables.
Pearce, however, maintained Canberra was an important training hub for not only its local industry but also for the sport across southern NSW.
He said the club had invested in upgrading its Polytrack, which hosted its first meeting of the season last month, and also recently opened an owners’ and trainers’ lounge.
“There’s great facilities here and it would be a shame if policies beyond our control made it unfeasible for trainers to be here,” he said.
“We are working hard on a few initiatives to try and ease the burden there and ultimately that workers compensation is something we have got to solve to make it competitive. If we can solve that, then we’ve got to make our venue and race programming as strong as possible to keep those trainers and their owners investing in Canberra racing and that’s a priority for us.”