Racing Queensland and Magic Millions say they are 99.9 per cent sure that Saturday’s $14.5 million Magic Millions meeting will proceed at the Gold Coast after remedial work on a key section of the track which was poisoned last week.
A press conference featuring Magic Millions owners Gerry Harvey and Katie Page, Racing Queensland CEO Jason Scott, and key integrity official Kim Kelly was staged on Wednesday, where it was confirmed that six riders and horses will test the track on Thursday morning at 8am (AEST).
There were, however, no representatives of the Gold Coast Turf Club, who are responsible for fixing the issue, at the announcement.
Scott said that he believed the impacted area of the track around the 500-metre mark will get the all-clear and racing would proceed.
“I'm 99.9 per cent sure it'll be all just head-straight for Saturday with the goalposts up,” Scott said. “Yesterday, Katie said she was 95, but … I think we had to be slightly conservative yesterday.”
That confidence has improved in part due to the feedback of champion trainer Chris Waller, who inspected the impacted section on Wednesday morning.
“We needed to see what happened overnight. When Australia's leading trainer looks at it this morning and says, this can't be moved, we need to listen to him,” Scott said.
In a statement, Waller, who has five horses engaged on Saturday, although none in either of the feature two-year-old or three-year-old races, put his support behind Gold Coast retaining the meeting.
“I had a good look at the track this morning, and I was very impressed. The 500-metre mark is the critical part of the track, and it's an area that tends to wear down badly by the end of most carnivals,” Waller said.
“However, heading into this meeting, we're working with essentially fresh ground at this section, which means horses will have very good traction and the surface is very safe.”
“There is no movement at all, and I was particularly impressed with how well it has come together. The layout of the new track is fantastic.”
It has been confirmed that Eagle Farm is the back-up option, with Page saying that in the unlikely event of the racing being moved, a phantom meeting with full entertainment would continue at the Gold Coast.
Warwick Barr
“What you'll see on Saturday, regardless of outcome, is we're going to get up to 25,000 across the road here. It will be amazing,” she said,
“The entertainment will be amazing. Even if we're racing at Eagle Farm, this continues. There is not one person that will cancel their ticket, I promise.”
In an odd press conference, Harvey then proceeded to ask his wife about the number of people watching racing from the Sunshine Coast on Saturday, which had to be relocated at short notice after the poisoned section of the track was reported last Friday, as well as about the number of female-owned horses in the feature two-year-old race.
Page was asked about the trying circumstances of the last few years, including the race day being called off two years ago after just two races, and a nasty pre-race incident which delayed the races significantly last year.
“We've become very good at this. For some reason, Gerry and I have been born under this rainbow that continues to test us,” she said.
“We've got amazing teams. All the people that have been involved with us as Magic Millions have been with us for a very long time. If you could have seen Friday night, six o'clock, everyone did their job.”
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Earlier, Gold Coast Turf Club CEO Steve Lines told SEN Track that he was extremely confident in the meeting progressing,
“At the end of the day, the stewards will make the final call, but all the industry experts are telling me things look pretty good from a grass point of view. I'm not a racetrack manager, but I'm a club manager, but as I said, the experts are telling me the right things,” he said.
“If there's a couple of concerns, we might just give it … our contingency is to just give it another 24 hours until Friday morning.
“it'll depend on what that feedback we get tomorrow is, but there is 1.4-tonne slabs of turf going down. So it's not like it's tiles or anything like that.”
The mystery over the cause of the poisoned turf took another twist on Tuesday when the club said it suspected vandalism, as opposed to an error by one of its staff.
Lines said that the police investigation was continuing, but he was confident, having spoken to all of his staff that it was not of their doing. He is awaiting the final report from turf expert Craig Easton.
“I expect a full report back later this week. There has been a lot of conjecture and I’m not sure why. Our advice from the police is that there is an investigation going on and we need to let it run its course,” he said.
“I’ve interviewed all of my staff, I’ve sat them down, I’ve had one on ones, I’ve inspected our chemical sheds, I’ve reviewed the records, because we have records of when we spray. When you spray a track, you spray the whole track, you don’t spray one section.
“I’ll wait on (Easton’s) final report but he is pretty much 100 per cent convinced its been vandalism.”
The suggestion that it wasn’t vandalism was driven by a series of interviews early in the week with both Scott and Gerry Harvey where they said they didn’t believe it was a deliberate act.
Scott was more muted in his response on Wednesday, saying he will let the inquiry run its course.
Warwick Barr
“We'll have testing back later this week. Frankly, I'm not sure it's going to tell us something. We know it's been poisoned. Again, it's probably a secondary concern, certainly for us,” he said.
“It (the grass) was green and then it was brown. So there's only one answer to what happened. But deliberate? Look, that's to be determined.
“There are a few signs that we've seen that make it look like it was deliberate. So I'll leave that to the boys.”
