Ballarat Turf Club is located 115km west of Melbourne and is one of Victoria’s oldest and most famous racing clubs.

Ballarat Turf Club was formed in 1853 when racing was held at the nearby Rosehill course. Racing remained at Rosehill for almost 100 years until a transfer to the Dowling Forest racecourse, the current home of the Ballarat Turf Club.

Dowling Forest was the site of the first race meetings conducted by the Victorian Amateur Turf Club in 1875 before that club transferred its meetings to Caulfield in Melbourne.

Ballarat Turf Club conducts 27 race meetings each season with the highlight being the Ballarat Cup meeting in November at the end of the Victorian spring racing carnival.

The Ballarat Cup, first run in 1864, is a Listed Race run over a distance of 2200m and was worth $350,000 in prizemoney in 2018.

The course proper at Ballarat’s Dowling Forest racecourse featured an inner and outer track and now will also have a synthetic race course to racing.

The outer track has a spacious anti-clockwise circumference of 2200m and inner track is 1800m.

The undulating home straight is a long 450m and over 30m across which is equal to the width of the course proper at Flemington.

The spacious Ballarat racecourse caters for races over a range of distances from 1000m up to 2400m and also has significant jumps racing plus even the Magic Millions juvenile race on Ballarat Cup day run in the clockwise direction.

Ballarat’s Dowling Forest racecourse is one of major training centres in Victoria and that continues to grow with even more stables opening.

The facilities include an all-weather uphill training track that is the only one of its kind on a racecourse in Australia complemented by grass training tracks, sand track, synthetic track and an equine swimming pool.

The Ballarat Cup, run in late November, is essentially the end of the Melbourne Spring. The best recent winner of the Cup was in 2013, as The Offer would go on to win a Sydney Cup later that season.