Our spectacular team at Musselburgh racecourse in Scotland recently took home an astonishing number of awards at the Racecourse Association (RCA) Showcase Awards, including the "Champion Racecourse" award. 

For those of you that aren't aware of our ties with Musselburgh, in June of 2020, Chester Race Company took on a long-term operating contract of a third racecourse in Scotland; Musselburgh. This brought lots of exciting opportunities and benefits for both Chester and Musselburgh; which formed a beautiful partnership! 

We reached out to our team in Musselburgh for an update and they were of course more than happy to share their news with us. Here is what they had to say about recent events...

With the temperatures dropping and the leaves falling fast, we have packed away our starting stalls and waved goodbye to the summer as we concluded our Flat Season at Musselburgh Racecourse. We had another hugely enjoyable summer this year, with events catering for everybody’s taste, from our hugely popular Family Day, chilled out Ibiza evenings, some very competitive quality racing at the Edinburgh Cup, and of course, the jewel in Musselburgh’s crown, our Stobo Castle Ladies Day. 

Being constantly busy and with so many different days and themes coming thick and fast, this variety and volume really does stretch our team to the max. However, it was all worth it when the RCA Showcase nominations were announced. Musselburgh was the front-runner this year, leading the way with five award nominations! I know our whole team was immensely proud of this, it’s a truly wonderful testament to a team that really do everything they can for our boutique course. To be considered on a par with some of the much larger courses and industry leaders is a magnificent achievement. I know that our staff felt that the nominations alone were a huge acknowledgement.

We are delighted to announce we took home 3 awards from our 5 possible nominations. Musselburgh scored the highest average across three metrics and polled almost 20 per cent of the overall votes. We also won in the marketing and food and beverage categories.

Earlier this month we were also ecstatic to learn that we had retained our coveted five-star Visit Scotland rating. With this achievement, and the RCA awards I think the whole team deserves a big pat on the back for delivering an award-worthy year to our racegoers. 

As a way to reward our hard working teams, the office and grounds team took a trip to Kinross, to visit Arlary and Kilduff, the yards of twice Grand National-winning trainer, Lucinda Russell. Lucinda, along with her partner, ex-Champion Jockey Peter ‘Scu’ Scudamore, and their wonderful team were kind enough to give us the grand tour!

We got to wander around and see their fantastic facilities, including the stables, their new water treadmill and heat lamps, and horse walkers. We watched the third string of the day get tacked up and head up to their gallops, which are on a stiff hill a couple of miles from Arlary. We were then treated to some of the biggest names in racing breezing past us as they did a piece of work on the gallops. It was a thoroughly captivating, thrilling and incredibly useful day, to help us all understand the other side of racing. Thank you so much to the team at Lucinda Russell Racing! 

It is always great to catch up with our team at Musselburgh racecourse and hear about all their wonderful achievements this year! We look forward to seeing what 2024 has in store for us all.