Racing at the Hong Kong Jockey Club’s (HKJC) new training facility in mainland China has been delayed due to the “relatively high” probability of rain in the summer months.
The Jockey Club had planned to begin a new dawn for racing in Asia with the first of regular meetings at Conghua Racecourse, which is situated 150km north of the Hong Kong-China border, scheduled to take place in April 2026.
But in order to avoid the typically wet summer and give the Jockey Club ample time to carry out tests on the completely new site, HKJC chief executive officer Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges told Idol Horse that the proposed date for the opening fixture has been pushed back six months.
“We have changed the date to October because we think if we start in April, the probability of rain is relatively high at this time,” Engelbrecht-Bresges said. “If you start and then you have to pause, it is not ideal, so we thought we’d do everything in October.
“We would be practically ready to start in April from an infrastructure point of view, but it means we have much more time to do tests because it’s a completely new site.”
Spread across 150 hectares of land, Conghua Racecourse is over twice the size of Sha Tin and was initially designed and built as the specialist equestrian venue for the Guangzhou Asian Games in 2010.
With the ability to house more than 600 horses, it has become a useful tool for trainers in Hong Kong, who are increasingly basing their horses up at the facility between runs.
David Hayes has previously told Idol Horse that his superstar sprinter Ka Ying Rising “loves it up there”, while Ricky Yiu Poon-fai’s top miler, Voyage Bubble, is another regular visitor to the racecourse in preparation for his Group 1 targets.
But transforming a top-class training facility into a racecourse capable of withstanding regular fixtures and a buzzing crowd is a task that Engelbrecht-Bresges appreciates takes meticulous planning and constant testing.
“It’s not easy, but I think it will be absolutely magnificent,” he said. “The grandstand for the public is very advanced and it looks great. That will be finished in November of this year.”
The HKJC held an exhibition race meeting at Conghua in March 2019 that consisted of five races – streamed back to Hong Kong with a 15-minute delay – no betting and 3,000 fans on course.
The delay to racing at Conghua Racecourse, which is based in a military “no-fly zone” and takes approximately three hours to drive to from Sha Tin, is the latest of a series of postponements from the HKJC in commencing racing at the venue ∎
