By Max Davies
SEYMOUR Racing Club is back with a full racing season for 2023-2024 – returning to a full schedule for the first time in nearly eight years.
The club hosted its first meeting of the season on Thursday, with the event proving successful as club officials began work to revive Seymour as a major country racing venue.
Chief executive Chris Martin, who was appointed about three months ago, said it was an exciting time for the club.
“It’s been an exciting time to jump on board in terms of what’s happened in the last six or seven years, obviously we haven’t been racing very often,” he said.
“It’s been a bit of a baptism of fire in that sense because we’re racing again, it’s reasonably full-on.”
Seymour Racing Club last hosted consistent races in 2015, after which the track underwent its first resurfacing in 2016 and briefly returned to action for several meetings and the Seymour Cup in both 2017 and 2019.
The track went out of action again in 2020 and did not return until mid-November last year, however racing was briefly paused until April this year as the club dealt with a turf disease that was introduced through Seymour’s floods.
Thursday’s meeting featured a 10-race card and was ‘a good stepping stone’, as the club now prepares for a busy racing season that will include the Seymour Cup on October 22 and Christmas Raceday on December 21.
“It was a bit of a relief – there’s a lot of people here who have worked so hard for a number of years and through no fault of their own, things have just gone awry with the track,” Mr Martin said.
“It couldn’t have gone any better … there’s a fair bit of reputational damage that we’ve suffered and that’s just what happens. We’re fighting really hard to become one of the major rural country tracks again.
“We’ve got some short-term goals around exactly that, let’s just race consistently and safely for the season. We’ve got 12 meetings, so we just want to get those happening.”
Mr Martin said the club was also looking to re-establish partnerships with local businesses and hoped the upcoming season would be a chance for sponsors to become involved again.
“Thursday was a good stepping stone to mend or build those bridges,” he said.
“We want trainers, jockeys, our members and the racing industry as a whole to get back to coming to race at Seymour and trusting the track and the surface.”
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