A lot has been written and said about the Ellerslie track, which took plenty of bedding in when the new StrathAyr surface debuted last January.
They still had the racing office “meeting” after last year’s Karaka Million but that was when track manager Jason Fulford was still learning how to treat his new baby. How to look after her, how thirsty she was.
Back then, especially when two meetings got called off early or when things got a bit touch and go at the 2024 Karaka Millions, the track boys came in looking like they had been in a fight with Mother Nature.
Mother Nature is, of course, undefeated.
The knives were out and good people bore the brunt.
The track was first good, then bad, then a disaster. Heads must roll said those hitting the panic buttons on their keyboards.
The faces were longer at “the meeting” last year than but one thing was the same. Chief executive Paul Wilcox thanking his staff, standing by them rather than over them when things went wrong.
Auckland Thoroughbred Racing chair Doug Alderslade was right there too, as he always is for “the meeting”.
On Saturday, the bosses were there again but this was a different meeting. This Karaka Millions was the crowning glory for the new surface.
Like last year we had Karaka Millions rain but not a word of a horse slipping.
Our greatest sprint, the $700,000 Sistema Railway, was run in fading light after two heavy downpours but produced the race of the night, Crocetti beating two brave girls in Alabama Lass and Luberon.
The reality is without this new Ellerslie Strathayr track our most important sprint race would have been run on a bog, a track unworthy of the event.
She may be thirsty and she may still be revealing her mysteries to the track staff but the Ellerslie StrathAyr track showed in those three World Pool races on Saturday why it matters, why it works and where the money went.
Fulford’s merry men, wet and having barely seen a race, drank their beer and Wilcox thanked them, and supported them just as he had last year. Staff were named one by one, thanked personally.
Last year’s issues were mentioned.
Fulford spoke about what he has learned, how everybody he helped, about what he still hopes to learn.
But on this Saturday night, a dozen people who had gone to work to try to put on a show, a safe show, for the 10,000 people who went to the Karaka Millions and the millions who watched it around the world, enjoyed their beer.
The talk soon turned to when “the boys” would be back at it. Back on their track.
More race meetings just around the corner. Then the big one, the $9 million Champions Day on March 8.
Then, after one beer maybe two, one by one they left. No after party for them.
Ellerslie isn’t perfect, no racetrack is. It will have issues, some trainers will criticise it on the days they get beat, others love it when they win.
The ideal equation of verti draining plus watering will change and evolve. It is, after all, a living thing.
But on Saturday the Ellerslie track was the other winner at the TAB Karaka Millions.
And those who attend that post-racing “meeting” with no invite and, as it turns out, no bottle opener, left Ellerslie smiling.
Michael Guerin wrote his first nationally published racing articles while still in school and started writing about horse racing and the gambling industry for the Herald as a 20-year-old in 1990. He became the Herald’s Racing Editor in 1995 and covers the world’s biggest horse racing carnivals.
