Hear the full interview
From 30:46 in Thursday’s episode of Nick Luck Daily. Press play to start at the interview.
James Oldring, who helped launch British Champions Day and is now chief executive of Perth Racing, says Ascot in Western Australia pays out more prize money than its Berkshire namesake.
Oldring moved to Perth with his wife Amanda and daughter Evie at the start of the Covid pandemic, beginning with two weeks in hotel quarantine. “They put you in there, shut the door and don’t let you out for two weeks, which is a pretty robust test of any marriage,” he told Nick Luck at Flemington. “My wife is from Western Australia, and I always had my eye on working in racing. When the opportunity at Perth Racing came up, it was the only role I really wanted.”
Two tracks, 90 meetings
Perth Racing runs the city’s two tracks, Ascot and Belmont. “They’re very unoriginally named,” Oldring said. “We race 90 times a year across the two venues, and they’re both turf tracks, which is an astonishingly high usage of turf. But we actually pay out more prize money from Ascot WA than they do at Ascot UK.”
For four weeks from mid-November, he says, Perth has the best racing in Australia. The Pinnacles Carnival is worth A$10.5 million over five days, followed by the A$1 million Perth Cup. Getting the eastern stables there is a challenge in itself. “It’s further from Melbourne to Perth than it is from London to Moscow,” he said. “You can put horses on a horse box, but it takes three days non-stop. So we charter a 737 out of Sydney a week before our first big race, and bring over anything from 12 to 24 horses.”
“You think the north-south divide in the UK is strong? Wait till you see east-west in Australia.”
James Oldring
Western Australia also produced Cosmic Crusader and William Pike, who won the Cox Plate last month. “We are massively partisan,” Oldring said. “So it’s a challenge for me, because you want the very best horses to come over and run brilliantly, but you want them to just get touched off.”
Event first, then the racing
He says the main difference from Britain is that many Australians see racing as a betting product first and a sport second. “The thing we’ve had to do at Perth Racing is focus on the event and make sure the entertainment is everything people want it to be,” he said. “Once you’ve got them there, you can get them to fall in love with racing.”
It is working, he says. “Sixty per cent of our ticket bookers are now under 30, and the average age of attendees at a carnival meeting is 32,” he said. “We are getting a whole new generation of people to come racing.” Oldring, who now holds an Australian passport, added: “It’s a bloody great place to live and work.”
