Strong Traditions In City Sport

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31088, 17 June 1966, Page 37 (Supplement)

Strong Traditions In City Sport

In the first few years of Christchurch there was little organised entertainment so it was natural that when the pioneers gathered for a special occasion sports should have a prominent place in the programme. Cricket, horse racing, athletics, and aquatic sports all had their beginnings in 1851. Rugby football, now the most popular of all sports, did not begin until some years later, and even then was slow in gaining popularity.

Today, Christchurch, with its spacious parks and open playing fields, gives every appearance of being a city of sportsmen, and sportswomen, on Saturdays. Practically every form of organised sport known is played in the city. But most have fallen on hard times In the past, and apparently sports were not flourishing in 1863, when “The Press” in a leading article written to encourage interest in rowing, commented: “It is a common source of complaint that Christchurch is singularly destitute of the means of healthy and invigorating amusement. The football club has languished. We have always held the game to be a very hateful one under any circumstances and it is only among boys that it can be played without fear of serious consequences; cricket demands a whole day, and requires constant practice for the attainment of any high degree of excellence. Our young men cannot afford this tax upon their time except on rare occasions. Christy’s minstrels are very entertaining but they are not exercise. A constitutional is detestable at the best of times, but simply loathsome in a colony.” Reviewing an early experiment in establishing rowing as a sport, the article said: “We fear it was not a very earnest boat club. We fear it

believed in rowing down to Sumner, but not in rowing back again. We fear it believed in beer and tobacco during the easy-alls—and that altogether it was rather a heretical and unorthodox boat club . . . We hope it will revive in a more practical shape.” Apparently rowing was the earliest organised sport in Canterbury, for on the Queen’s birthday in 1851, five months after the Pilgrims had arrived, there was a regatta at Lyttelton when four of the five whaleboat crews were Maoris. The only white crew was easily beaten over a long course round the reef to a buoy off Quail Island. Cricket and athletics had their beginnings in Hagley Park on the first anniversary day when a sports meeting was held. The horses were raced from the site of the Riccarton Hotel to the Fendalton bridge over the native tussock. Before these races were held there was a meeting to form a jockey club and it was decided to select an available site for a racecourse some miles west of Riccarton. The Canterbury Jockey Club was formally constituted on December 2, 1854, and the first race meeting was fixed for March 6 and 7, 1855. The principal race was the Canterbury Cup, of £5O, and the added money totalled £175. The stake for the Canterbury Gold Cup is now £2600, and the richest race at Riccarton is the New Zealand Cup, with a stake of £5300. Christchurch was one of the first places in New Zealand to have organised trot-

ting meetings, and is still the New Zealand headquarters of the sport. In the seventies there were trotting meetings at Heathcote, although the horses were not specially bred for trotting. Before the turn of the century enthusiasts had established clubs in various parts of the province. Organised trotting meetings date back to 1890, when the stakes offered were very modest compared with the £7lOO now offered for the New Zealand Trotting Cup at Addington.