The World’s Most Unusual Race Days

The Melbourne Cup has been doing this since 1861, and there’s a good reason it’s still the race that stops a nation. But for every Cup, Ascot or Kentucky Derby you’ve seen on television, there’s a race day somewhere in the world that looks nothing like it: run on snow, on sand, up a dirt ramp or across a ditch with a reputation of its own.

These are six of them. Race days held on frozen lakes, tidal beaches and outback claypans, some more than 150 years old, most of them a world away from a marquee and a dress code. And at the end of this list, we’ll show you how EHG members are already going in the draw to win holidays to exactly these kinds of places.

1. Birdsville Races, Birdsville, Queensland

The first Birdsville Races were run in 1882, an unofficial meeting on the Queensland and South Australia border that drew a crowd of around 150. The Border Jockey Club was formed soon after, and the meeting has run almost every year since, cancelled for the first time in its history by flooding in 2010. Today it’s held over two days each September, and a town of around 100 people swells to roughly 7,000 for the weekend.

Getting there is half the story. Many visitors fly in, and hundreds of light aircraft line the town’s airstrip, while everyone else makes the long drive into the Simpson Desert country on dusty outback roads. The track runs anti-clockwise, one of only a handful in Queensland that do, and the money raised goes to the Royal Flying Doctor Service. Expect red dirt, cold beer, a campsite that doubles as a small city and a genuine sense that the whole outback has turned up for the same party.

2. White Turf, St. Moritz, Switzerland

White Turf has been racing horses on snow and frozen water since 1907, which means 2027 marks its 120th anniversary. The races are run across the frozen surface of Lake St. Moritz, with the Engadin mountains rising on every side and more than 35,000 visitors turning out across the event. The 2027 edition runs from 6 to 21 February, with race days on 6, 7 and 13 February.

The programme includes flat racing and trotting, but the event that makes first-timers stop and stare is skikjöring: a skier on skis, towed at full gallop by a riderless horse, racing others doing exactly the same thing across the ice. It’s equal parts elegant and slightly unhinged, which is very St. Moritz. Pack the warmest coat you own, book a long lunch in town and don’t expect a fascinator to survive the alpine wind.

3. Laytown Races, County Meath, Ireland

Laytown’s races started in 1868 as a sideshow to a rowing regatta and have outlasted the regatta by more than a century. It’s the only race meeting in the Irish and British calendars held on a beach under the official Rules of Racing, run for a single day each September on the strand less than an hour north of Dublin.

The course doesn’t exist until the tide goes out. Weeks beforehand, the race committee studies the tides and the sand to pick a spot, and on the day workers mark out a straight course of six or seven furlongs and pack down the sand once the water recedes. Spectators gather in a field above the beach, some sitting in an improvised grandstand cut into the dunes. Short races, no turns, salt spray and a crowd of thousands who’ll tell you there’s no race day quite like it.

4. Carreras de Caballos, Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Spain

Sanlúcar’s beach races have been held officially since 1845, making them one of the oldest horse races in Spain, with the 2025 meeting the 180th. They run across the beaches of Bajo de Guía and Las Piletas in Andalusia every August, but never on the same dates two years running: the low tide decides the calendar, and racing usually starts in the evening and finishes around sunset.

More than 20 races are run over several days, and around 300,000 people come to watch. Entry is free, and the crowd lines the sand while the horses race along the shoreline with Doñana National Park in the distance. Sanlúcar is also the home of manzanilla sherry, so a glass of the local drop and a plate of fried fish from a beachside bar is about as close to a dress code as it gets.

5. Velká Pardubická, Pardubice, Czech Republic

Run every year since 1874 on the second Sunday of October, the Velká Pardubická is one of the toughest steeplechases on earth: a cross-country course of 6.9 kilometres and more than 30 obstacles through fields and over hedges. The most feared of them is the Taxis ditch, a wide ditch hidden behind a tall hedge that’s been softened several times over the years and still makes seasoned jockeys nervous.

It’s the kind of race that builds legends. Countess Lata Brandisová won it in 1937 on a mare called Norma, and she’s still the only woman to have done so. A horse named Železník won four times between 1987 and 1991, and jockey Josef Váňa Sr. won it eight times. Pardubice is an easy day trip from Prague, so you can pair the race with a long weekend in one of Europe’s most beautiful cities.

6. Ban’ei Racing, Obihiro, Japan

This is the one for anyone who thinks horse racing has to be fast. Ban’ei is run at Obihiro on Hokkaido, now the only racecourse in Japan still holding the races regularly. Draft horses that often weigh more than a tonne, about twice the size of a thoroughbred, haul iron sleds weighing anywhere from 450 kilograms to a tonne along a 200-metre dirt track.

The catch is two hill-shaped ramps in every lane, the second and steeper of them known as the Ban’ei Point, where horses stop, gather themselves and push up the slope while the crowd walks alongside them cheering. A horse isn’t finished until the whole sled has crossed the line. The sport grew out of the farm horses that worked Hokkaido’s fields, and races are held most weekends, all through the winter.