Horse racing on the island has always had to compete with the need for land. The Singapore Sporting Club was founded by Scottish merchant William Henry Macleod Read in 1842, when the country was still a British colony, and held its first competition the following year on Farrer Road, north of the city centre. The event was such an occasion that it was declared a public holiday. In 1911, the first flight from Singapore, piloted by Belgian aviator Joseph Christiaens, took off from the line, one of the few flat open land areas available. As the city grew and interest in the sport increased, the Singapore Sporting Club changed its name to the Singapore Turf Club and moved to a more remote location after purchasing the Bukit Timah Rubber Estate. The new track opened in 1933 and remained the club’s headquarters until 1999, when it was reused for other recreational sports. It has since been earmarked for more homes. Horse racing is not the only sport affected by housing development plans. The last 18-hole public golf course closed earlier this year for redevelopment. The Turf Club’s final home was built with state-of-the-art facilities valued at S$500 million ($384 million), with air-conditioned booths, floodlights for night races, and a grandstand capable of seating 30,000 spectators. “Singapore is a world leader in horse racing” and the track is one of the best, said Tim Fitzsimmons, head coach and director of Fitzsimmons Racing, who owned more than 50 horses last year and moved back to Australia after coming to Singapore in 2007. “I don’t think it will ever happen again.” Many of the thousands of people who travelled on Saturday were pensioners who have been campaigning for decades. The smoking passengers cheer for the real horses, a woman in a wheelchair chats with her friends in a Chinese dialect, the bald men scrutinize the crumpled sheets of the newspaper for details about the horses: all gather for this last hurrah. “It’s a nice and beautiful place, but its heyday is over and the maintenance costs are too expensive,” said Song Ya Jing, a 77-year-old part-time Cook who accompanied her husband for the last series of bets. . “Maybe one day my son will be able to live in public housing. At the end of the day, a short video montage on the main screen and a small fireworks display put an end to almost two centuries of horse racing in Singapore. Most of the spectators had already left before sunset under 41 towering lampposts.