The History of Galway Racecourse

The first race meeting at Ballybrit took place on Tuesday 17 August 1869. It was a two-day event, and by the standards of the day it was an extraordinary success, drawing an estimated 40,000 people to the high ground above the city. The town could not hold them all. Eyre Square, the open green at the heart of Galway, was given over as a campsite for the crowds who had travelled in from across Connacht and beyond.

The men who built it

The driving force was Lord St Lawrence, then a Member of Parliament for Galway and chairman of the stewards. He worked alongside a committee of hunting and steeplechasing men, among them the Marquis of Clanricarde, who saw the appetite for a proper meeting in the west of Ireland and set about creating one. The land they chose, associated with the Lynch family of Renmore, lay on a stretch of undulating ground that would give the course its distinctive character.

The track itself was laid out by the civil engineer Thomas G. Waters, who designed the original circuit at about a mile and a half round. From the very beginning Galway was a course with personality: a rising, falling, turning circuit rather than a flat galloping oval, the kind of track that asks as much of a jockey's judgement as a horse's stamina.

The Plate from day one

The Galway Plate was a feature of that inaugural 1869 meeting, and its first winner was Absentee. From the outset the Plate was the race that mattered, the prize that horsemen wanted on their record, and it has run as the centrepiece of the Wednesday card ever since. For its first decades the Plate was a chase of two miles five furlongs, a trip that suited the bold, tough handicappers who came to define the race.

The companion feature, the Galway Hurdle, came later. It was added in 1913, with Red Damsel taking the inaugural running. For its first six years the Hurdle was contested over a mile and a half before settling into the two-mile test it remains today. Together, the Plate and the Hurdle gave the meeting its two pillars, one over fences and one over hurdles, and the rhythm of the modern festival, with Plate Day on Wednesday and the Hurdle on Thursday's Ladies' Day, was already taking shape more than a century ago.

For most of its first century, Galway was a two-day meeting. The transformation into the seven-day festival that now dominates the Irish summer happened in deliberate stages, each one pushing the event a little further into the national consciousness.

A meeting that learned to broadcast itself

The early milestones tracked the arrival of new media. In 1929 the races were broadcast on radio for the first time, with the Galway Plate and the Curragh Derby going out over the airwaves. Sponsorship arrived in 1959, and with it the meeting extended to three days, a significant step that gave the festival room to breathe and grow. Television coverage followed in 1963, putting Ballybrit in front of a far wider audience than could ever fit on the hill. In 1969 a separate September meeting was added, broadening Galway beyond its summer week.

Adding days, building crowds

The festival lengthened steadily over the decades that followed. From three days in 1959 it grew to four days in 1971, five days in 1974, and six days in 1982. The final step came in 1999, when the meeting expanded to the full seven days it runs today, from the last Monday in July into early August. That same year the Millennium Stand opened, replacing the old Corrib Stand of 1955, a building once reputed to have had the longest bar in the world.

Year	Festival length
1959	Three days
1971	Four days
1974	Five days
1982	Six days
1999	Seven days

A national institution

By the 2000s the festival had become one of the largest sporting and social gatherings in Ireland. The numbers are enormous: 138,909 attended across the week in 2016 and 137,682 in 2017. In the years since the pandemic the totals have settled in a still vast 116,000 to 126,000 range, with 116,374 in 2024 and 125,997 in 2025, the latter up nearly 10,000 on the previous year, with Friday's crowd of 26,234 the single busiest day. Ladies' Day on Thursday and Galway Plate Day on Wednesday remain the biggest and most glamorous occasions of the week.

The festival's reach extends well beyond the racing. A 2002 study by the Marketing Department at UCD's Smurfit Graduate School of Business found the Galway Races contributed more than 58 million euro to the economy of Galway city and the surrounding region, with over 23 million euro spent in the immediate locality. The single largest gathering ever held at Ballybrit, though, was not a raceday at all: in 1979 Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass at the racecourse before an estimated 280,000 people, with 800 priests distributing communion to a crowd that dwarfed even Galway's biggest racing weeks.

Galway is a track with a strong character, and understanding it is half the battle of reading a race there. The circuit is right-handed and undulating, a sharp switchback roughly a mile and a quarter to a mile and three furlongs round, semi-circular in shape. It climbs steeply through the back straight, drops sharply into a dip on the approach to the home turn, and then rises again to a stiff uphill finish of just over two furlongs, one of the most testing run-ins in Britain or Ireland. The home straight itself is short, little more than a furlong.

Over fences and over hurdles

The chase course carries seven fences per circuit, which means fourteen are jumped in the Galway Plate over its two laps. The last two fences are a famous feature: sited in the back straight on the descent and placed extremely close together, they are described by several sources as the closest two fences of any course in the world, and they are followed by a long run-in of over two furlongs to the line. The hurdle course sits inside the chase course and is sharper still, with six flights per circuit; the Galway Hurdle is run over nine flights across its two-mile trip.

A track that rewards position

For all that Galway is a jumps stronghold, it has an unusual quirk on the Flat: a measurable draw bias, which is rare for a turf course. Timeform's guide notes that "a low draw at 7f and 1m 100yds is a slight advantage." Geegeez analysis finds some residual edge even at a mile and a half, most pronounced for low-drawn or pace-pressing horses, with the bias stronger on faster ground and weaker on yielding or soft going.

Running style, though, matters as much as the draw. The tight, turning circuit and short home straight place a high premium on being handily placed. According to Geegeez, since 2009 hold-up horses in fields of eight or more in handicaps have won at just 4.18 per cent, one of the worst records of any Irish track for those held up, while front-runners have been far more productive. As the analysis puts it, it matters less where a horse is drawn than how it is ridden, and tactical speed to race prominently is a clear asset.

Ground and the shape of the year

The going changes with the seasons. The summer festival is typically run on good to yielding ground, with the course watering through dry spells, though rain frequently arrives mid-week and can change the complexion of the racing. The autumn meetings, by contrast, are run on softer ground. Galway stages around twelve race days a year in all: the seven-day summer festival, a two-day September meeting, and October fixtures that include a single early-month day and a three-day meeting over the last weekend of the month.

Galway is a handicap festival, which means it rarely crowns the same superstars year after year in the way a Group 1 track might. The horses who become Galway legends tend to be the tough, durable types who come back to Ballybrit again and again, and a handful have written themselves permanently into the record.

Ansar: the ultimate Galway specialist

No horse better captures what it means to be a Galway horse than Ansar, trained by Dermot Weld. He won seven races at the Galway Festival across all three codes: three chases, three hurdles and one on the Flat. He took the Galway Hurdle in 2001 under Paul Carberry, then won the Galway Plate in both 2004 and 2005, back-to-back. In doing so he became the most recent horse to complete the Galway Plate and Galway Hurdle double, a feat that, by Racing Post's 2025 count, only four horses have ever managed, the others being Blancona in 1926 and Knight Errant in 1958.

Tipperary Boy: the record holder

The most successful horse in the long history of the Galway Plate is Tipperary Boy, who won the great chase three times, in 1899, 1901 and 1902. More than a century on, no horse has matched his haul in the race.

The dual Hurdle winners

A small group of horses have managed to win the Galway Hurdle twice, which on such a competitive handicap is a real achievement. Pinch Hitter, trained by Noel Meade, won back-to-back runnings in 1982 and 1983. Michael Winters then produced two consecutive winners with Rebel Fitz in 2012 and Missunited in 2013. More recently Tudor City, trained by Tony Martin, won the Hurdle in 2019 and again in 2022, the only dual winner of the race since 1988, and a perennial festival competitor who ran at every Galway Festival from 2015.

Life Of A Lord and the Ballydoyle connection

Life Of A Lord, owned by JP McManus and ridden by Charlie Swan, won the Galway Plate back-to-back in 1995 and 1996. What makes him a footnote in a much larger story is his trainer: Aidan O'Brien, in the days before he switched to the record-breaking Flat career at Ballydoyle that would make him one of the most successful trainers in the world.

The modern names

The recent Plate roll of honour is full of horses who went on to bigger things. Hewick, trained by Shark Hanlon, won the 2022 Plate at 16/1 before going on to international Grade 1 glory. Carlingford Lough, the 2013 winner, and Balko Des Flos, who took the 2017 Plate for Henry de Bromhead, both developed into high-class chasers. Nurburgring, trained by Joseph O'Brien, won the 2024 Galway Hurdle under JJ Slevin, then attempted the Plate and Hurdle double in 2025 but was pulled up in the Plate, which fell instead to Western Fold.

If Galway has a single defining figure, it is Dermot Weld, and any account of the festival has to begin with him.

Dermot Weld, the King of Ballybrit

Weld's connection to Galway runs deeper than any other trainer's, and the nickname stuck for good reason. He saddled his 500th career winner at the track in 2022, and his overall tally at Galway is well over 500, a figure no rival approaches. The Irish Times records that he was crowned leading trainer at the Galway summer festival on 30 occasions. Of 735 races run at Galway across a recent multi-year count, 84 were won by Weld alone.

His bond with the place began before his training career. He first won at Galway as a 15-year-old amateur rider, partnering Ticonderoga to victory in the big amateur race in 1964. Decades later he was still producing the festival's defining horses, none more so than Ansar, the seven-time festival winner and Plate and Hurdle double-scorer who became the embodiment of Weld's mastery of the track.

The trainers who chase him

Galway's modern roll of honour is dominated by a familiar group. Willie Mullins is the record-holding trainer in the Galway Hurdle with six wins, from Mystical City in 1996 through Clondaw Warrior, Sharjah, Aramon, Saldier and Zarak The Brave in 2023, and he also won the Plate with Royal Rendezvous in 2021. He was leading festival trainer for a tenth time in 2025. Gordon Elliott holds the outright record in the Galway Plate with five wins: Lord Scoundrel in 2016, Clarcam in 2018, Borice in 2019, Ash Tree Meadow in 2023 and Western Fold in 2025. The Hurdle, by contrast, long eluded him; he had gone 0 from 35 before finally landing it with Ndaawi in 2025, completing a Plate and Hurdle double in the same week.

Tony Martin is the Galway Hurdle specialist of the modern era, with four wins including the dual scorer Tudor City. Noel Meade has taken two Plates, with Road To Riches in 2014 and Pinkerton in 2024, and a clutch of Hurdles. Joseph O'Brien has become the leading Flat trainer at the track by total winners in recent years while also winning the Plate with Early Doors in 2020 and the Hurdle with Tigris River and Nurburgring.

Jockeys, owners and administrators

Patrick Mullins is the leading jockey in the Galway Hurdle since 1988, with three wins. The Galway-born Danny Gilligan has won the Plate twice, in 2023 and 2025, while Donagh Meyler took it in 2016 and again, on Pinkerton, in 2024. Among owners, JP McManus runs deep through Galway's story, from Life Of A Lord to Early Doors and countless festival runners.

Off the track, the modern festival was shaped by the Moloney family. John Moloney managed the course from January 1989 until he retired after the 2015 festival, overseeing more than 40 million euro of development. His son Michael Moloney, previously chief executive of Plumpton Racecourse in England, has run it since.

The Galway of today is the product of three decades of steady, expensive building, much of it carried out without losing the festival's earthy, crowded character.

Rebuilding Ballybrit

The modern transformation runs through John Moloney's 26-year tenure from 1989 to 2015, during which capital development at the course totalled over 40 million euro. The Millennium Stand opened in 1999, replacing the old Corrib Stand of 1955 and coinciding with the move to the seven-day festival. Underground car and pedestrian tunnels, a new weigh-room, offices and a media centre followed.

The biggest single project was the Killanin Stand, the main West stand, which opened in 2007 at a cost of about 22 million euro, with 10 million euro of grant aid from Horse Racing Ireland. It was built in a record 44 weeks and opened by the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern. It is named after Lord Killanin, a Race Committee member for more than 40 years, and its terrace can hold around 7,000 people, with seating for 700.

The work that goes on

Investment has continued into the 2020s. Around 5 million euro of maintenance has been spent on the two main stands, roughly 2 million on the Killanin and 3 million on the Millennium. A long-planned redevelopment of the parade ring, billed as a "stadium experience," has been repeatedly delayed, but HRI's board subsequently approved about 2.1 million euro for a redevelopment of the enclosure to the north of the parade ring under its Racecourse Capital Development Scheme.

Galway also faces a question few racecourses have to consider. In November 2024 An Bord Pleanála granted permission for new temporary stables and ancillary buildings, with permanence pending the Galway City Ring Road plans, because the proposed bypass would affect part of the racecourse lands.

Watching today

For those not on the hill, Galway is well covered. In the Republic of Ireland, RTÉ televises the festival across RTÉ One, RTÉ2 and the RTÉ Player, typically showing four races a day on the opening days and more as the week builds, with extensive live radio coverage in Irish on RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta. In the UK and Ireland, Galway appears on Racing TV, the home of all 26 Irish racecourses since they moved their media rights there on 1 January 2019. Races can also be streamed through licensed bookmaker platforms to logged-in account holders.

A closing note on the betting that is so central to the festival. The Galway ring turns over enormous sums, with Tote turnover of 5.8 million euro across the 2025 week and on-course bookmaker turnover over 7.5 million euro. None of that changes a basic, well-established fact of betting markets: backing favourites is not a profitable strategy. Over time, backing every favourite to its starting price produces a loss, because the starting price carries the bookmaker's margin. The festival's vast, twenty-runner handicaps are among the hardest puzzles in racing precisely because they resist any simple system. They are a spectacle to be enjoyed, not a formula to be solved.