After 182 years, horse racing in Singapore has like many things of the old and familiar world, passed into history with the last race at the Singapore Turf Club held at 5.40 pm on Saturday 5 October, 2024.
Singapore’s need to intensify land use does mean that the closing of the chapter was going to be a matter of time. While substantial revenue is derived from the horse racing, the 120 hectares that the turf club occupies will go a long way to satisfy Singapore’s insatiable appetite for development, especially in the area of public housing and a decision was made to bring a premature end to the sport — if I may call it that.
Horse racing was introduced to Singapore through the formation of the Singapore Sporting Club by Scotsman William Henry Macleod Read and a group of enthusiasts. The first race course was established in 1843 on a site that would become Farrer Park following a move to Bukit Timah (see: Parting Glances: the boxing gym at Farrer Park). With the exception for the war years, the Bukit Timah site was used as a racecourse from 1933 to July 1999, after which the course moved to its current site in Kranji (see: The great “hold up” at the sixth mile and The last, and soon to be lost countryside).
While horse racing may have exited the scene, it is something that we in Singapore will find hard to forget. Buying beh pio (马票) — literally horse tickets in Hokkien, for example, is an unescapable part of being Singaporean. Beh pio is used colloquially to refer to 4D, or four digit lottery, which many queue in order to place a bet on. The 4D lottery does in fact have origins in horse racing, with sequences of four numbers drawn and assigned to horses running in the race, hence the term “starters” applied to the tier of winning numbers that follow the top three.
Winning, literally striking (the) horse ticket”, tio beh pio (中马票), is another term that is commonly used. Also used generally to refer to describe a fortuitous situation, it can also mean the opposite when the usage of the term is tinged with sarcasm, like when one is unlucky enough to draw the short end of the straw. And, to check if one had indeed tio beh pio in the pre-internet era, one would have turned to the evening newspaper — mah piu poh, literally “horse ticket newspaper” in Cantonese, which carried the day’s horse racing and 4D lottery results (see: The Mah Piu Poh intersection vendors).
Another commonly heard expression in colloquial Hokkien, bo beh chao (没马走) or “no horse run”, has its origins in horse racing to refer to a horse that is well ahead of the field. It will however be no horse run in the literal sense for the Singapore Turf Club. Having run its last race, it will continue to stay on the Kranji site for a few more years and run it as an event venue until March 2027, after which the grounds will be handed over for redevelopment.
Parting glances
Final Day Scenes
Around the grounds
