BOUQUETS to SKY RACING and the SEVEN NETWORK for ensuring that the TOWNSVILLE CUP meeting on Saturday got the NATIONAL coverage it deserved.
SEVEN restricted their cross to the Cup itself but apart from showing all the on-track action found time for a nice tourism promo for Townsville and shots of the special guest on the big day, former Melbourne Cup winning jockey Michelle Payne.
SKY showed the eight-race card on their No 1 Channel and didn’t restrict the races apart from the Cup and Cleveland Bay to SKY 2 which does not attract the same turnover.
LGHR, like many others, believes that Townsville should be the primary meeting on the day and that’s not meant to discredit the fixture at Eagle Farm. The other option is for the Cup and Cleveland Bay double to be run on the Sunday.
Would it attract the same crowd numbers if they didn’t have a holiday to get over the celebrations the next day? Probably not. It works in Victoria but perhaps not in North Queensland.
We can tell you that the Townsville Turf Club would be happy to experiment with a Sunday. Progressive thinking Chairman Geoff Weeks tells us that his committee made Racing Queensland aware of their preparedness a couple of years ago but have heard nothing of that since.
Just look at Sunday’s racing – the Sunshine Coast was arguably the best meeting from a punting perspective. Ballarat was transferred to the synthetic and eventually abandoned when heavy fog rolled in and made visibility unsafe for participants; Casterton was a mixture of jumps and highweights; and one of the two ‘nothing’ meetings in the NSW bush was washed out.
Interestingly the turnover – like the crowd – on the Cup meeting was terrific considering Townsville was racing against Eagle Farm. As a standalone on a Sunday one suspects it would be outstanding.
It must have had some appeal for Seven to cover the Cup. This was the first time a provincial racetrack in Queensland – and perhaps Australia – had attracted live free-to-air on a major network.
And a couple of interesting things you might not know about Townsville racing.
At a time when RQ is desperate to find ways of increasing field sizes, Townsville last year recorded the highest number of acceptors in races for any club in Queensland and that includes the metropolitan area.
‘We would love to race as many Sundays as possible,’ Weeks told LGHR.
And why shouldn’t they.
Victoria manages two provincial meetings and so does NSW on Sunday. Let’s not take anything away from the Sunshine Coast which pioneered Sunday racing in Queensland but Townsville – perhaps every second Sunday – would prove an instant winner and a far more appealing one to punters than Cairns.
And something you probably didn’t know about Geoff Weeks. He hails from Cronulla in Sydney. We won’t hold that against him despite the fact that the new RQ Board Chairman Matt McGrath is on the Board of that NRL club.
More importantly Weeks was a former topline rugby league referee who actually made his First Grade debut the same day as Racing Minister Tim Mander kicked off his career in a lower grade game in Sydney.
HOOFNOTE: AND once again the quiet achiever of the race-calling ranks in Queensland – TONY WODE – produced another superb performance – not missing a beat on his home club’s biggest day where he has been a ‘star’ for more years than LGHR can remember.
