The Hong Kong Jockey Club’s Conghua Racecourse will host five demonstration races today, marking the first official competition at the sprawling racing and training facility on the Chinese mainland.
The races themselves are of little note in the Hong Kong hierarchy.
The feature is the Hong Kong Jockey Club Trophy at 1200 meters on the turf.
Conghua Training Centre (photo: HKJC)
Most of the HKJC’s top trainers and jockeys will participate in the day’s events.
The point, though, is not the racing as much as it is a demonstration of the potential for racing and other equine sports in southern China.
HKJC CEO Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges portrays Conghua Racecourse as a cornerstone of a world center for horse sports with the potential to draw competitors, fans, and tourists to the area and spark economic growth.
Conghua is located in a mountainous, hot-springs area about 3 1/2 hours by highway from Hong Kong—a largely rural tourist destination in a country where the population increasingly lives in massive cities.
Engelbrecht-bresges has offered to make tours and equine promotion at Conghua a further attraction. Occasional racing could be a further enhancement of the tourism industry.
Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges, CEO, The Hong Kong Jockey Club
There will be no wagering on the events as race betting is illegal on the Chinese mainland. The HKJC has gone to great lengths, too, to prevent clandestine wagering operations. There will be no live broadcasts of the races and reporting of results will be delayed.
The site itself is tightly controlled for biosecurity reasons, limiting access to approved guests and officials.
While the HKJC emphasizes Conghua’s purpose is to enhance and expand racing in Hong Kong, successful demonstrations of racing on the mainland could play a role in Chinese government deliberations involving wagering—a potential game-changer for the industry worldwide.
The Conghua site has operated since August 2018, with increasing numbers of Hong Kong-based horses traveling back and forth from training on the mainland to racing in the Special Administrative Region at Sha Tin Racecourse and Happy Valley. Trials are regularly conducted on the turf and all-weather courses.
The facility boasts four tracks, a 2,000-meter (about 1 1/4-mile) turf course, two all-weather tracks, and a 1,100-meter uphill turf gallop, all constructed to be as similar as possible to the Hong Kong surfaces.
There are nine stable blocks with 664 individual stalls and two stallion stalls in each of the six wings. Turf paddocks provide an outdoor experience not available for horses stabled in Hong Kong and the site has complete equine clinic facilities.
- Tabnews
