Great Leighs was a mess when it opened, so it is no surprise that it is an even bigger mess now that it has been forced to close its doors, for the moment at least. The mounds of muddy earth that greeted the first racegoers back in April have largely disappeared but the mountains of debt will prove more difficult to shift. What a miserable double it would be if the last racecourse to open in Britain also became the latest to close.
The immediate aftermath of last Friday's announcement that the company that owns Great Leighs had gone into administration centred, predictably enough, on who was to blame.
John Holmes, the entrepreneur who has spent many millions of pounds to realise his dream of a racecourse in Essex, was an obvious target. The British Horseracing Authority has also been criticised for allowing Great Leighs to proceed in the first place when its facilities for paying punters were clearly inadequate.
Holmes certainly seems to have been guilty of allowing the project to consume him, though it is worth bearing in mind that he is not the only one. Plenty of people have devoted as much as a decade of their lives to getting Great Leighs off the ground, because they believed in the plans and thought they would be good for racing. They now face the real possibility of losing their jobs in the middle of a recession.
What, precisely, the BHA could have done to save Holmes from his humiliating failure is another matter. The authority's concern was to ensure that Great Leighs' arrangements for horses, jockeys and trainers were acceptable, and these, to be fair, were better than at dozens of other tracks.
Facilities for racegoers, on the other hand, are really the track's concern, because if no one turns up, or they encounter a flea-pit when they do and decide that they will never return, they don't have a business in the first place.
We live in a free-market economy, in other words, and if a wealthy businessman decides that he wants to splurge his fortune on a half-finished racecourse, the BHA is probably obliged to let him.
The most important question, of course, is what happens next. Great Leighs has the makings of an impressive facility, one that has already attracted much praise from some of Newmarket's leading trainers, and also enjoyed considerable goodwill from the local community (though that may have been severely tested over the past nine months).
There seems to be a general assumption that one of the major track-owners – which, in practice, means either Arena Leisure or Northern Racing – will now buy Great Leighs at a bargain price and turn it into the smart, modern track that everyone wants it to be.
It is probably an even-money chance at worst, particularly since Northern does not have an all-weather track at present. Yet it will still require millions to get Great Leighs up to scratch. They want all-weather, for sure, but do they really want it that much?
Nor does there seem to be much point in re-opening Great Leighs unless, or until, it is ready, with a proper grandstand where there is currently just a hole in the ground.
The best, and probably only, option if the only track in Essex is to have a long-term future is for a new owner to take a long-term view.
In the current economic climate, however, with businesses watching their cash-flow from week to week, vision is a commodity that is in painfully short supply.
