The Queen of Australian horse racing has called for radical changes to the industry to attract young people back to the sport, slamming them for only coming for the party, not the action on the track.
Acclaimed trainer Gai Waterhouse has been in the industry since 1992, achieving over 145 Group 1 wins and accumulating prize money exceeding $194million.
She has won seven Sydney trainers’ premierships and was inducted into the Australian Racing Hall of Fame in 2007.
During that time Waterhouse has seen almost everything there is to see in racing, but the alarming dip in young people attending meets has her worried.
Waterhouse is a champion for tradition and previously railed against new dress codes at Flemington that allow men to wear shorts.
Now Waterhouse has warned young people are treating race days as nothing more than an opportunity to get on the drink with their mates, and know nothing about the racing itself.
‘I think [younger people are] poorly educated and they come for the wrong thing,’ she said on Melbourne radio station 3AW.
‘They come for the party and they’re not really taught about the horses or to have a bet.’
Her comments come after police arrested 24 people and ejected 30 others from the Caulfield Cup on October 19 while a host of underage drinkers were also nabbed.
Waterhouse said that while 26,000 people mostly aged under 35 crammed in for the Caulfield Cup, the majority of young people were only attending one racing meet a year.
The racing doyen said more needed to be done at membership level to encourage the next generation to attend multiple race days a year.
‘It’s more that you want them to come back next week and the week after, and the week after [that],’ she said.
‘I think the biggest thing is to get them to become members of a club.
‘I think the membership should be very affordable to young people.
‘Going to the races, you shouldn’t be paying. Because you don’t pay to go to a pub where you can watch the races. So why should you pay to go to Mooney Valley?
‘I think on the big days you should pay, those who want to become members. But I think going into the public [areas], it should just be free.
‘You should be able to walk into the track, any track, and not have to pay.’
‘Everything is too expensive, the beverages are too expensive, it’s not real world,’ she said.
‘You can’t even take food into many of these places.’
Caulfield Cup organisers made an effort to lure in more young people this year by branding it a ‘party day’ and enlisted Aussie DJ Tyson O’Brien to pump up the crowd.
Melbourne Racing Club executive Ashley Curnow said the tide was turning and younger people were returning to racing.
‘About 15-20 years ago, Caulfield Cup certainly used to be that younger crowd,’ she said.
‘That then wavered over time but this is certainly the resurgence of it now and we’ve got a lot of initiatives targeting that younger group.
‘So it is certainly not an accident that the audience falls that way … we are trying to drive younger people to the track.’
The Victorian Government also relaxed laws on public drunkenness in 2023, meaning it is no longer a crime to be drunk on Melbourne Cup Day in the state.
That means young people can party to their heart’s content this year without fear of arrest or a $1160 fine.