Listowel Course Guide

A left-handed, sharp track of about one mile and a furlong in length, with a run-in of about two furlongs. It suits a speedy sort of horse.

Listowel is a tight track that in truth rides best when it’s soft. It’s quite tight and undulating and soft ground slows the whole thing down a bit and makes it easier to handle. The draw isn’t all that important when the ground is on the soft side, but proven stamina is very important, as the ground gets very heavy indeed at Listowel, it isn’t like anywhere else, and it takes an awful lot of getting. If the ground is on the firmer side, a low draw is a help and pace is important.

View from the saddle: Mick Kinane

A very sharp, flat, left-handed oval track of about a mile and a quarter in extent. It very much favours the handy type and even races over three miles present little in the way of a test of stamina. There are five fences to a circuit of the chase track, with two in the home straight of less than two furlongs. The run-in is around 200 yards.

Listowel is a tight enough track in general, but they do have a couple of different tracks that they use, so there are different degrees of sharpness depending on which track they are using on that particular day. One quite unique feature of the track is the nature of the ground, as when it is testing, there are a lot of horses that just cannot handle it at all and you’ll notice the fields getting quite well strung out quite quickly. The soil down there is quite black and holding and it seems some horses just don’t perform at all on it. I would always be prepared to forgive a horse an inexplicably bad run on testing ground there for that reason. The fences there were always quite stiff.

View from the saddle: Charlie Swan