Mildura Racing Club cancels Melbourne Cup Day meeting

MILDURA Racing Club has called off its annual Melbourne Cup day meeting after deciding “the risks outweighed the benefits”.

The meeting, on the first Tuesday in November, is traditionally the biggest race day on the Mildura racing calendar. But the club’s bosses have erred on the side of caution in forgoing a potential money-spinner of up to $60,000, based on the past two years’ figures.

“We really don’t want there to be a ‘Mildura Racing Club cluster’ outbreak (of coronavirus),” the club’s manager, Jarratt Farley, said yesterday.

“And there’s another thing we’re not comfortable with: How unfair it would be for local businesses that have been shut for six months.

“If local racing goes and opens up and has up to 1000 people on-course and has a great day – but local hospitality businesses have strict density rules where you can’t have more than 20 people inside their venues. That doesn’t sit well with us.

“We’ll lose some profit by not having the day, but the overall risk versus reward … well, we don’t want to risk what could be dire consequences for the community by getting industry participants up from Melbourne and surrounding areas.”

He also said the limited wagering on the meeting meant it wasn’t a viable proposition with a relatively small number of on-course patrons.

“Melbourne Cup day at Mildura is a non-TAB day event. So it’s not on Sky Racing 1 or 2, or Racing.com, and therefore it can’t be bet on nationally,” Farley said.

“There’s only wagering on course and we can’t have a big community event due to COVID restrictions, so it’s not worth us having the day this year.”

It will mean that the club hasn’t hosted a meeting all year.

“We were due to race at the end of March this year. We had put in our COVID protocols for the racing industry and then a week before the first race meeting, the call was made to not race in Mildura,” Farley said.

“And that was due to things like industry staff having to travel up here from Melbourne and Bendigo and stay for a couple of nights. And logistically, it would have been tough in getting the horses up here.

“That all cruelled our first few race meetings this year, then we moved our Cup carnival in July to Swan Hill. This was another one of those risks versus rewards, and we didn’t want to risk holding it here.”

He said that despite the absence of racing, the Mildura club was still in “pretty strong” financial shape.

“We had a bit of fat in the bank before COVID hit,” Farley said.

“In the first lockdown we cut our operations right back and then when things opened up briefly, we got assurances from Racing Victoria that our race dates would remain at the same levels in future years.

“We’ve been using this time to fix up some of the facilities and the track, and people should notice the differences when racing starts locally in March next year.”

In terms of the broader impacts on the local thoroughbred racing industry, he said there were only five trainers in the region who are not professional.

“It is a minimal impact; we are certainly not as big as the Mildura harness-racing industry in terms of locally-based participants,” Farley said.

“Like everyone else, we’re focused on a bigger and better 2021. We’ll be back from March next year, with our eight race meetings for the year.

“And we’ll be looking to hold a race day early on where the community can come out and hopefully celebrate more freedoms again and being COVID-free.”