Svensk Galopp’s delegate assembly, the “fullmäktige”, voted down on Saturday by 18 votes to 17 the outsourcing agreement that was to have secured the sport a new racecourse at Bara in Skåne. The board has been asked to return with an amended proposal at the general meeting on 31 October. 2027 will be the last season at Jägersro.
The vote took place at an extraordinary general meeting in Stockholm. Svensk Galopp itself states only briefly that the meeting did not approve the draft agreement put forward by the board, and that the board has been given a mandate to come back with an amended proposal on 31 October. The organisation gives neither the vote count nor the content of the agreement.
The figure of 18-17 comes from Jockeyklubben.se, which also sets out what the agreement involved: an external financier was to fund the construction of a racing facility and then lease it to Svensk Galopp at the same cost the sport has been paying to rent the track at Jägersro.
A no with two meanings
Jockeyklubben reports two readings of the result, and they cannot both hold. The majority of those who voted no believe, according to the outlet, that they rejected this particular agreement and not the Bara project. Representatives of Skånska Fältrittklubben take the opposite view: that a no was in practice a yes to winding up racing in Skåne — «som det ser ut just nu».
Both positions are reported as opinions, not as established fact. How the individual members voted has not been made public.
Svensk Galopp is owned by Stockholms Galoppsällskap, Skånska Fältrittklubben and Göteborgs Galoppsällskap, and decisions are taken by the fullmäktige, which has 35 members — 17 from Stockholm, 12 from Skåne and six from Gothenburg.
Skåne therefore cannot carry a proposal on its own, and a result of 18-17 means the no cut across the lines between the three clubs.
Why racing has to leave Jägersro
Skånska Travsällskapet owns the facility at Jägersro and has sold parts of the land.
A supplementary agreement, passed by the fullmäktige in May 2024 by 28 votes to five with two abstentions, extended the sport’s access to the racetrack until the end of 2027. Svensk Galopp left the training grounds at Husefältet as early as 1 August 2024, and the trainers’ leases had been terminated the year before.
The road to Saturday’s vote
Bara has been on the agenda for five years. In April 2021 the fullmäktige ended the project in its then form, but in July 2022 an extraordinary general meeting decided that design work on a facility at Bara should begin, and in June 2023 the decision was confirmed.
In December 2024 the fullmäktige decided that Svensk Galopp and Skånska Fältrittklubben should negotiate an agreement on racing in Skåne. At the same time the alternative — co-location with the trotting track at the new Jägersro — was taken off the agenda.
In May 2025 the board was given a mandate for outsourcing: Skånska Fältrittklubben was to stage racing in Skåne from 2028, provided a new facility is ready, while Svensk Galopp AB remains the race organiser. A number of conditions had to be met by 31 March 2026, failing which the agreement would lapse.
In January 2026 the board announced that it stood unanimously behind the Bara project. In May 2026 it found that the majority did not consider it had a mandate to extend the outsourcing agreement any further, and that there were delays in the work on the local plan.
It was the new draft agreement that fell on Saturday.
The facility on the drawing board
The track is planned south of Bara in Svedala kommun, around 15 kilometres from Malmö. Behind the project stands Fastighets AB Bara Hippodrom, owned by Swedish YCAP and Danish Heiberg-Brodén Holding and represented by Lotta Strömgren Jönsson and Kathrine Heiberg. It is drawn with room for around 200 permanent stalls and 100 guest boxes on race days.
Svedala Kommun put the local plan out for consultation in September 2025, with a deadline of 6 October that year. What has happened to the plan since has not been made public.
Where the sources have an interest of their own
None of the central sources in this case stands outside it, and that is worth keeping in mind.
Svensk Galopp is both a party and a publisher, and its own announcements are brief, leaving out both the vote count and the content. Jockeyklubben, the only source for the figure, has together with Skånska Fältrittklubben lent money to the Bara project in its early phases and has previously taken a position in favour of a track in Skåne. Skånska Fältrittklubben is itself a party to the agreement.
And ATG, which funds the sport through betting, went out in November 2024 in an open letter signed by chairman Peter Norman and chief executive Hasse Lord Skarplöth with the opposite message: co-location with the trotting track at the new Jägersro is, in ATG’s view, necessary for both codes.
The company called a separate track at Bara a «vision utan verklig förankring», put the extra cost of two separate facilities at a minimum of SEK 20 million a year, and offered to renegotiate Svensk Galopp’s bank loan of SEK 100 million.
Skånska Fältrittklubben rejected ATG’s premises in the same exchange and argued that no complete costing exists for the new Jägersro. None of the figures has been verified by an independent party.
What nobody yet knows
The content of the amended proposal for 31 October has not been made public. Nor has the name of the financier the model requires, the status of the local plan after the consultation, or what is to happen to racing in Skåne from 2028 if nothing is passed.
Skånska Fältrittklubben has not published a reaction to the defeat.
For Danish trainers, owners and breeders the matter is close to home. Jägersro is the nearest racecourse abroad, just across the Øresund, and Danish horses run there all year round.
Svensk Galopp’s general meeting is held on Saturday 31 October at 13.00.
