A tweet I posted during the week about Racing Victoria’s move towards more Thursday twilight meetings sparked plenty of discussion about participant welfare and working hours.
@Matt__Welsh_ Yeah it’s been great, got home from the last at Geelong yesterday at 9pm, in the last again today at Kyneton at 6:30pm, lucky I’m only in the second last at Cranbourne tomorrow night at 9:15pm!
— Reece Goodwin (@RGoodwinRacing) October 7, 2026
The concerns are legitimate. Racing asks a lot of its people, and I have enormous sympathy for those working long hours to keep it going. But there’s a perspective missing from much of the debate.
Racing administrators don’t walk into work looking for ways to make life harder for participants. Most are trying to build a stronger industry that delivers better outcomes for the very people criticising their decisions.
Our Principal Racing Authorities are not-for-profit organisations. Nobody is chasing a fat bonus for adding a twilight meeting or squeezing another race onto a program. Their biggest expenditure is returns to participants, mostly prizemoney, and racing is overwhelmingly funded by wagering.
To sustain those returns, let alone grow them, the industry has to become more commercially viable. That means more nine and ten-race cards, strong field sizes, potentially fewer meetings overall and, where it makes sense, racing later in the day. Every meeting carries fixed costs regardless of how many races are on the card, so spreading them across more races makes for a far more efficient schedule.
RV has years of data showing people bet more later in the day. Wednesday metropolitan twilights generate 14 per cent more turnover than equivalent daytime meetings. I understand Thursday’s Kyneton twilight and Wednesday’s Geelong twilight were both well up year on year. Of course, two meetings don’t make a trend, so it’ll be worth watching how they perform over the rest of spring and summer. But it’s an encouraging start.
The 14 Thursday twilights between October and January are another step towards putting racing on when punters are more inclined to engage with it.
If we’re happy with a smaller industry, less prizemoney and fewer opportunities, then by all means, leave the program as it is. Personally, I want to see racing handed racing the next generation in better shape than it’s in today.
Race times aren’t a cure-all. They need to go hand in hand with a compelling racing product, quality broadcasts, effective promotion of our stars, better value and vibrant betting landscape as well as a serious effort to reach new audiences. There’s plenty of work to do on all of those fronts.
But programming is part of the equation, and we can’t ignore what the wagering data tells us just because change is inconvenient. As someone who runs a business in racing and punts, I’d rather it was all done during the day too, but what suits me isn’t necessarily what’s best for the industry.
I’m not aware of too many industries that have prospered by telling their customers when and how they should consume their product. Racing shouldn’t expect to be the exception.
It’s also worth noting RV has cut its workforce by around 10 to 12 per cent over three years and taken more than $20 million out of gross costs, partly to protect prizemoney. The organisation isn’t asking participants to carry the load alone. Real people have lost jobs to help ensure returns to participants can be maintained, despite turnover on the product decreasing.
I’m not naive enough to suggest prizemoney flows straight into the pockets of stablehands mucking out boxes and strapping horses. But it underpins the training businesses that employ them, and without financially viable stables, those jobs become harder to sustain.
Owners and trainers also have considerable say over where their horses race. Nomination numbers relative to acceptances, along with scratching patterns, show just how selective they can be.
Everyone wants the perfect race: the ideal distance, suitable ground, a good barrier, the right speed map and a time slot that suits their operation. But if every horse waits for all those boxes to be ticked, programming a commercially viable calendar becomes almost impossible. Administrators have to balance the preferences of thousands of participants against the needs of the broader industry, and they can’t accommodate everyone.
That choice belongs to owners and trainers, though. A stablehand doesn’t get to pick which meetings they work. So if we’re serious about working conditions, we should look at when the day starts as closely as when it finishes.
Racing involves long hours, physical labour and unpredictable 500kg animals. Starting work at 3.30am is neither humane nor attractive to anyone thinking about joining the industry. Fatigue is a real safety concern, and as racing moves later, surely there’s scope to push training hours back where practical.
Participant welfare and commercial sustainability aren’t competing objectives. You can’t have one without the other.
It’s fair to challenge administrators. But most of them are making hard calls with the aim of improving life for participants.
Because without a commercially sustainable racing industry, there’s precious little left to protect.
