By Neto Baptiste
The executive arm of the Antigua Turf Club (ATC) is set to address the Cabinet later this month regarding the planned redevelopment of the Cassada Gardens Race Track.
This was revealed by the President of the ATC, Hansen Richards, who said the body recently hosted a foreign investment group that visited the site and expressed an interest in developing the area into a modern horse racing facility.
“We had an investment group who made two site visits in the past five weeks. [During] the first visit … they met with government officials including the Prime Minister [Gaston Browne]. They are now finalising a business plan, a model, along with the turf club to redo the facility as well as bringing in a business model to sustain our product. Within the next two weeks or so or before [November] is over they [investors] will be back on island to meet with the members of the executive and we will be meeting with Cabinet to present our proposal,” he said.
Richards, in an interview with Observer media, said that apart from the track itself, negotiations are to install modern amenities within the facility that could propel it to international status.
“The other standards we would have to meet would be the quarantine facilities and test barns so the race track facility itself will be of some standard. In order for it to be fully international we would need to have certain components like the quarantine and the receiving barns as well as a regulatory body, which is part of the proposal to government for them to implement so that it is a government operation to oversee the full scope of horseracing,” the turf boss said.
Richards added that to date, the body has moved ahead with dismantling the old track rails at the facility while clearing debris from what he described as a derelict building at the site.
He is hoping that some form of racing could take place at the track within the first quarter of 2024.
“Part of the negotiations is to complete phase one which is the track itself in terms of the reshaping and resurfacing and so forth. These things take a bit of time because we’re talking about a proper running surface in terms of space for those horses to compete on but what we have or what we have been racing on before was relatively unsafe so we are going to bring in the professionals to get this done and getting in some overseas engineers to work with some local engineers to have the track up to that standard,” he said.
Richards was elected president of the turn club in May for a two-year team expected to end in 2025. He took the reins from long serving head Neil Cochrane who had served since 2009.
Cochrane opted not to seek re-election.
