It Gets In Your Blood: Lives Of A Racecourse by Marty Smith is an immersive portrait of the people and horses who make the Hastings Racecourse, composed in diary form over 10 years, from 2015–2025. In this abridged and edited excerpt, the future of the track is in jeopardy.

Thursday 10 October, 2025

It’s slightly before seven when I arrive, and mild, early sun throwing a weak light through ballooning high cloud, wisps of mare’s tails. Of course, there’s not even a hint of rain. It’s an eerie kind of sky that makes horses and people twitchy and gets their backs up.

The sun has yet to break out in the float park, and Georgia’s bright pink headscarf floats in the dimness as she moves down the side of Guy’s green float. She looks smaller than she is against the bulk of the big truck as she reaches for the door; hauls herself up into the cab. Lights on dim, she reverses in a careful slow circle, then turns, drives off slowly and evenly, so as not to unbalance the horses in the back.

Over in the stables, a slant of sun strikes gold off Billy’s palomino coat. Fred is one stall along from his lead pony, bent down, undoing back cover straps. Caitlin’s sorting through the bridles, pulling the reins clear.

In the next block, Jordie is doing up the buckle of the cheek-strap on an ink-black horse; further on still, Mick and Sue’s block is jam-packed, every tie-up taken. The place is humming.

The multiple hazards sign on the sliding gate is even more faded; through the bars behind it, Richard the vet is leading a horse into the hosing bay. Dean is turned towards him, on the small rickety chair. He hasn’t spotted me yet. When he does, he sits up straight and grins. 

“Morning!” he says brightly, sliding back the gate. Then, straight off the bat, “Have you heard about the Phantom Meeting? It’s on the front page of the paper.”

Sadly, I have. The meeting is going to go ahead, without the horses: the venues sold out, the bands booked, the bars stocked to bursting. 

He grins up at me, as happy in the ironies as the facts. “It’s for the people who got tickets. For the marquees and stuff.”

Then his face falls, and he says glumly, “Two meetings. I missed out on $80 for the races this Saturday. That’s a lot. $80 for this meeting and $80 for the Arrowfield. That’s $160. It’s a lot for someone on a benefit.” 

The day of the Phantom Meeting is going to be horrible: hanging over it, the possibility that the track will never again host a big meeting. Once they take races away, it’s hard to get them back. I can’t help thinking of Richard the track manager and how he’d only be human if he thought, I told you so, but really, he’d be sad. Richard and his family have been part of the club since the year dot. They’ve lost the two big meetings. And his dad is getting on, like an elderly gent I always see, who shuffles with his two sticks between the horses and the betting windows. They won’t be going to their local races again any time soon. 

Dean gets glum; nods up at the roof of the stable block above him. “They were going to use the money to fix up those boards,” he says, looking up at the rotting, paint-cracked gable ends. They’re some of what he looks at while he sits on his chair, waiting for horses to arrive and leave. 

“Three carnivals ago, they were going to fix these,” he says. “No one listens to me. Give me some green paint and I’ll do it myself.”

“It’ll need a bit more than paint,” I say, staring at the big cracks and the flaking dark wood. 

“No one listens to me,” he says, again, wistfully. Then he cheers up. “How’s the book?” he asks, with his usual lightning change of subject.

“Slow.”

He grins; says brightly, “Good things take time!”

Across the concrete from the hosing bay, the stalls are all clean, dry, shining whitely in the early sun. No splashes of water and scatterings of shit across the yard; no horses gazing peacefully across or shaking their heads; no clopping, no gossip, no clatter, no clutter. All Dan and Katie’s horses and all Kirsty’s horses have gone home for the summer since the track at Waipuk dried out.

Deano’s social activity has been cut by more than half. 

I follow Richard and the dripping horse and the trail of water. He turns it into a stall beside Jordie, who’s standing beside a small black horse with a black hood and oddly floppy ears. She wants Richard to give her a lead; her horse is a bit toey going out and coming in. 

I want to ask Richard about the races.

“What are the chances of getting the Group 1 race back,” I ask, “when the Racing Authority itself describes running it at Hastings as too big a financial and reputational risk?” That’s how NZTR described the risk of an abandonment in running the next two big Group meetings on the track, right before they transferred the Spring Carnival races to other courses.

Richard bends to scrape water across his horse’s belly, flicks it behind, looks up with a worried frown.

“We’ll never get it back,” he says, simply. 

He scrapes water round the curve of the horse’s belly; says, “It’s 75 percent of the club’s income for the year. What are they going to do?” he says, unclipping the rope on to the bridle of Jordie’s awkward young horse. He leads them round the corner of the bay and across the open concrete, the horse bouncing a little and swinging its haunches. 

I come light-heartedly up the stairs, expecting Patrick and Dene at the window. The stools are empty, but they’re there, all right, over at the sink, bent towards each other, frozen rigid with anger, in a muted, insistent conversation. 

I move away to stand at the window; watch Richard and Jordie and the fidgeting, arse-swinging little black horse, high stepping and poised to explode. Jordie jumps off smoothly, and I wait quietly out of earshot, studying the surface of the track.  There’s no getting away from the fact that in two days’ time the party for the biggest race of the year will roll out at the racecourse empty of horses and trainers, strappers, jockeys and owners.

The race has gone to Te Rapa.

There’s a heavy silence. 

“There’s supposed to be an announcement today,” Patrick says, grimly, and turns to stare at the track. Again, there’s a heavy space in the room.

“From NZTR. About the future of the track.”

Another deep silence. 

He looks fiercely up from under the peak of his cap. “Including closure.”

We all stare at the track. 

I stop by Patrick, who’s standing in front of Baha Emerald, unclipped and ready to go. He says, “What’ll happen if they close the track?”

He nods to the scene behind him. A row of Guy’s horses stand in the next bay, their heads moving slightly. Some move about a bit; most stay still and quiet, watching. Sophie’s up on her horse, waiting in the tie-up for Rosie to bring hers round. Maddy’s just along from her, picking up rugs from the ground. Leah’s in the top bay, her back to us, easing a bit into a bay horse’s mouth. Kelly’s beside her, standing up on her toes, pulling her weight upwards to tighten the girth. PK stops to let Sue lead Mick past on the big stroppy horse in the red ear hood, then crosses to the bay beside us to saddle his next horse. 

Patrick’s gaze travels across them all, and he says bleakly, “All these people will be unemployed.” He looks at the horses and their people again; shakes his head. “No; we’ll never get those races back.” 

Tayla climbs up on the rail, moves across to the saddle, settles her feet in the stirrups. She takes up the reins, clicks the horse up.

Patrick moves back out of the way; turns to follow her. He stops; turns back to say, “If they close it, what will happen to other Central Districts racing? Palmerston’s gone; Trentham’s in trouble. Where will the trainers train?”

I’m not really thinking about the others. I’m thinking about Patrick, and Mick and Sue. Patrick taught Jimmy Cassidy to race-ride on this track, when Jimmy was apprenticed to him. Patrick was training Burletta to be the 1983–1984 three-year-old Filly of the Year while Rob Muldoon was still prime minister. Mick won a race for the Queen as a jumps jockey in England; Sue was the first female jockey to win the Wellington Steeplechase in 1981. 

What will they do without their horses? What will their horses do without them? 

I go round past the hosing bay, and there are horses and people everywhere. I’ve never seen a traffic jam like this: Sophie and Rosie up on their horses, still in the tie-ups, waiting to lead Mick out; Mick backed into the hosing bay on his horse; Sue holding them in there with the lead rope, pressed up against the chest of the agitated horse. 

There are four or five people in fluoros standing on the Grass outside the Crossing, and one of them is Jordie. The gates aren’t closed, but Mick can’t take his tetchy horse near loose standing people.

“What happened?” someone asks Jordie. “Did you come off?”

“No,” she says. “I jumped off. It was playing up coming back, so Richard is leading it.”

It’s that kind of day: scratchy and windy, and the horses have got their backs up. Just like the people. It doesn’t help that the horses have to go past the marquees, just over the hedge in the lane, their tent sides sucking in and billowing out in the slight wind. 

Richard comes back leading the little black horse. The people disperse. Rosie and Sophie give Mick a lead onto and over the Crossing, his horse swinging its arse and cat-stepping, but it jumps off when Sue lets it go. He drives it forward firmly with his legs to keep it going straight as it goes away from the other two.

The cloud has full cover now; puffy little bruises darken the sky, and maybe it will rain after all. It has that feel: the air cooling. Patrick and Dene are getting ready to go, their line of horses nearly all rugged up.

Tayla comes back saying, “The gate’s closed. Leah came off.” She shrugs. “But no big deal. They’ve caught the horse and she’s okay.” She starts picking up the saddles from the ground, stacking them in the trolley.

There’s that feel of the wind coming up, and I’m thinking, the horses have picked up on the prevailing mood today. A lot of the ones coming in have had their backs up as well, their riders sitting tight all the way over the Crossing and down the pot-holed lane.

It Gets In Your Blood: Lives of a Racecourse by Marty Smith ($40, Te Herenga Waka University Press) is available to purchase from Unity Books.

Note: Hastings Racecourse is currently open and on track for its first meeting of the season on August 22.