For years, everyone in New Zealand racing has known the industry has too many tracks and not enough money to look after them properly. Almost nobody has actually done anything about it.
That changed this week.
Project Stamina, the joint roadmap from New Zealand Thoroughbred Racing, Harness Racing New Zealand and TAB NZ, recommends retaining 39 venues, holding another five pending business cases, and letting nineteen leave the network entirely. Seven of those currently host race meetings.
It will sting for the clubs and communities attached to them. But it’s exactly the kind of call an industry serious about its own survival has to be willing to make.
The power has existed for years. The will hasn’t.
NZTR has effectively had the legislative tools to do this since the Racing Industry Act 2020, which built in a process for vesting surplus venues in the codes and winding up clubs no longer racing. The power has been sitting there for years.
What’s been missing is the will to use it. Nobody wants to be the executive who closes a community’s track. It’s easier to keep spreading the same shrinking pool of money across the same oversized network and hope the problem solves itself. It never does.
It’s taken a new leadership group, headed by NZTR chief executive Matt Ballesty and chair Russell Warwick alongside HRNZ’s Grant Jarrold, to actually get to work. That matters, and they’re not alone in making the case.
In June, the TAB New Zealand Racing Advisory Committee, chaired by Sir Peter Vela and made up of some of the country’s most successful breeders and owners, put its own reform plan on the table, warning of a structural deficit of more than NZ$50 million a year. Rationalisation of the club network is the single biggest lever in its savings case, worth an estimated NZ$9-14 million a year on its own.
People with genuine money on the line are largely pointing at the same fix NZTR and HRNZ have put forward. So rather than attempting to disrupt, it should be getting behind Project Stamina and backing the current administration to navigate the industry forward.
Stakeholder input matters in any racing jurisdiction. But there’s a difference between consulting people and letting every voice hold a veto.
Too often, racing authorities get bogged down in exactly that kind of politics, where nothing moves because nobody with the authority to decide is actually allowed to. It’s the “veto culture” the Advisory Committee’s own report calls out. New Zealand’s leaders need the latitude to direct the sport forward once they’ve listened, not a free pass from scrutiny, but the actual authority to act.
Full fields fill tills, and everyone already knows it
Project Stamina’s modelling maps horses, people and race-day economics to find where a meeting can actually draw a full field. The industry’s own principle sums it up better than any spreadsheet: full fields fill tills. Field size and quality drive wagering turnover, and turnover pays for prizemoney, welfare and everything else.
New Zealand racing knows the alternative, because it’s been living it. The sport here has been plagued by avoidable track issues in recent years, with meetings abandoned that better maintained surfaces would likely have saved.
That’s not bad luck. It’s what happens when a network this size tries to keep every venue race-ready on a budget built for a much smaller one.
It’s not unique to New Zealand either. I made a version of this argument about Victorian racing last year: a track network where well-resourced venues hold a good surface while stretched country tracks increasingly can’t, leading to the same pattern of abandonments and inconsistent racing.
If the resources aren’t there to sustain the current footprint, something has to give, and it’s better the industry chooses what gives than let the weather choose it, meeting by meeting.
Don’t confuse a sugar hit with a cure
The NZ racing industry trumpeted its 2023 Entain deal as the potential panacea to many of its problems. Yes, it brought welcome upfront cash into New Zealand racing. But, poorly deployed, it can leave the industry with even more headaches.
It’s easy to please the participants of today by investing a good chunk of that into prizemoney, but while that may be popular, it’s not the most prudent strategy – it’s a sugar hit. It feels good today and does very little to grow field sizes, turnover or the venue network racing needs to be standing on in twenty years.
And if the increases aren’t sustainable year-on-year, the industry ends up worse placed than before.
Project Stamina recommends meaningful, structural change that can help secure the future viability of New Zealand’s thoroughbred and harness industries.
NSW flirted with future-proofing the industry… but chose romance instead
For a sense of what happens when an industry flinches, look across the Tasman. Racing NSW’s Peter V’landys is a divisive figure, and I don’t agree with everything he’s done.
But since he took the job in the early 2000s, when NSW racing trailed Victoria, he’s dragged the sport forward through sheer aggression about growth and real discipline on the business fundamentals underneath it. He’s currently focusing all his attention on the NRL, where he’s just landed the largest media rights deal in Australian sporting history.
Say what you like about the style. It’s hard to argue with a record of delivering the unglamorous (and many glamorous!) wins that secure an organisation’s future.
Which makes the one big call that got away all the more interesting. Racing NSW pushed hard to sell Rosehill Gardens to the NSW Government, a deal that would have funded new racing infrastructure from a housing redevelopment. In May 2025, Australian Turf Club members voted it down, 56 to 44 percent.
Whatever the deal’s true value, and reports vary, it was a genuinely enormous sum that could have gone a long way toward securing racing’s future in NSW.
Rosehill has extraordinary history. But was overruling Racing NSW actually the right call? A club protecting its own turf is understandable. Whether it was good stewardship of the wider sport is a different question.
Rationalisation isn’t shrinking the sport. Done right, it’s how the sport grows.
None of this means racing should accept managed decline, or stop chasing new revenue and new audiences. Project Stamina only works alongside real ambition on growth, not instead of it.
But rationalisation and growth aren’t opposites. A good track drives turnover; a neglected one drags the whole product down. Concentrating investment into fewer venues gives punters, owners and horses something genuinely better to turn up for.
It’s safer too. Fewer venues, properly maintained, beats a patchwork where the best and worst tracks compete for the same shrinking budget. And modern technology means a smaller, well-resourced network is easier for ground staff to maintain to a high standard than a sprawling one spread too thin to do any single track justice.
True leadership looks past tomorrow
Clubs affected by Project Stamina deserve real consultation, and they’re getting it before anything is final under the Racing Industry Act 2020. But the direction shouldn’t be in doubt.
True leadership isn’t protecting every venue on the map today at the expense of the whole sport tomorrow. It’s making the harder calls now so the next generation of owners, trainers, jockeys and punters inherit a sport that’s thriving, not one quietly managing its own decline one under-funded track at a time.
Rosehill could prove an example of what happens to an industry when it flinches. Project Stamina is New Zealand racing’s chance to use rationalisation as fuel for growth, not an excuse to shrink.
