Sideline Sid Sports correspondent & historian www.sunlive.co.nz

It would seem that the highly popular Auckland Anniversary Holiday trotting meeting held at the Tauranga Racecourse, is no more.

A cursory glance through the annual NZ Harness Racing calendar revealed that Rotorua Racecourse will host the annual Anniversary Sunday grass-track races this year.

Grass track trotting in the Western Bay of Plenty dates back nearly 70 years, to the first totalizator meeting at Gate Pa on the 10 June 1950.

Tauranga was then a sleepy fishing village with a population of around 12,000 residents and to get to Mount Maunganui by road required a trip through the back blocks of Welcome Bay.

The advent of all-weather tracks and racing under lights during the early 1960's, changed harness racing in the country forever.

While Bob Owens and a band of parochial supporters tried to establish an all-weather track at Gate Pa in the 1970's, cost and logistics proved too much.

During the 1960's and early 70's, Tauranga grass-track trotting found a niche with the then Bay of Plenty Trotting Club staging a very successful Auckland Anniversary Saturday-Monday meeting, which brought the trotting fraternity from throughout the North Island to the Gate Pa track.

In 1978, the lure of racing under lights with the resultant bigger tote turnover, saw the Bay of Plenty Trotting Club move there two (racing) permits to Cambridge Raceway in the Waikato.

A revival in grass track racing around twenty years ago, saw the return of the Auckland Anniversary (Sunday) meeting, which proved extremely popular with punters and holiday makers alike.

The amalgamation of the Bay of Plenty Harness Racing Club, with the Cambridge based clubs to form Waikato BOP Harness, seems to have taken control of harness racing in the Western Bay away from the locals.

This grey-headed punter has had plenty of good memories of the Cambridge raceway since the 1960's.

He was on track in January 1966, when Orbitor setting a Cambridge Flying Mile record of 1.58.8, smashing through the two-minute barrier and going within a whisker of Lordship's National mark.

The night that Orbitor sizzled around the Cambridge course was a dry affair, with the bars on course the night being locked, in the days before the repeal of six o' clock closing in 1967. How times change.

Twenty three years later, he was there to watch the Super Star of his time in Christian Cullen, extend his winning sequence to 13 in the same Cambridge Flying Mile.

There is nothing like a champion racehorse to bring people to the track in their thousands. A recall of that night brought back memories of the huge crowd that flocked to Cambridge Raceway. to catch a view of a champion in action.

Christian Cullen, who was named after the New Zealand champion rugby player, took the countries race fans by storm winning 22 of his 31 starts and $1.2 million in stakes, beating the best all-comers of the time.