Bathurst Thoroughbred Racing ecstatic with Soldier's Saddle numbers, attention turns to The Panorama

There was a sense of a return to normalcy at the Bathurst venue at the recent Soldier's Saddle meeting, with more than 5,000 tickets sold for the annual April event.

It was a great bounce back for the Tyers Park after a couple of challenging years for their biggest event on the calendar and Bathurst Thoroughbred Racing manager Michell Tarpenning was thrilled with the turnout.

"It did feel like 'old times', and it was wonderful to be able to welcome back people with no restrictions so they could enjoy the day and there was such a great crowd," she said.

"We had a good crowd for the official ceremony. People who normally wouldn't go to a dawn service got to experience that. While that's a serious part of the day it's also a very important part of the day for our major sponsor, the RSL club.

"Everyone turned up early this year. Sometimes people leave it until 2pm or 3pm to turn up but many of them were here at 1pm, just before the first race when we had that ceremony."

This year's race was taken out by Lemaire, trained by Tara and Philippe Vigouroux for their second successive win in the saddle.

Now attention for the club turns to the $100,000 The Panorama, which is steadily becoming one of the premier country lead-up events for the lucrative Sydney race, The Kosciuszko.

The Panorama was designed to attract big profile candidates for the Randwick finale, and last year it delivered on that potential when Spiranac took out the Bathurst race.

Spiranac went on to finish third in The Kosciuszko - a great boost for the profile of The Panorama.

"The club has built that race up over the past few years, and with the upgrade to our training facilities, the aim is to not only get locally trained winners of The Panorama but to then get a local winner of The Kosciuszko. That's the ultimate goal," Tarpenning said.

"Now it's been given that extra prizemoney. For our club it's a real endorsement from Racing NSW that they have faith in the product that we're producing with that race. It's such an exciting thing to see from our governing body.

"The calendar move that we had from February to September has allowed us to catapult the status of this race in a short space of time. It's become an industry highlight for the region."

Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can access our trusted content: