A newspaper clipping from August 1976 makes today’s Bangalore Turf Club controversy look like an old race being run again. Fifty years ago, Chief Minister Devaraj Urs was already talking about shifting the racecourse and putting its 116 acres to better use.

The idea did not materialise. Successive governments later offered BTC more than 200 acres on Airport Road for a new racing complex. At the time, that land could not possibly have commanded the premium it does today. The new international airport was still decades away. Nobody could have imagined how dramatically that corridor would develop after the airport opened in 2008.

In hindsight, the offer looks extraordinary. More than 200 acres could have given racing a modern home with proper stables, training facilities, parking and room for expansion. Instead, BTC chose to remain where it was.

What is particularly difficult to understand is what the club has been so reluctant to leave behind.

Horses worth enormous sums are housed in underground stables, many barely 12 by 10 feet, with asbestos-sheet roofing and facilities that do not come close to international standards. Substantial numbers of stables have subsequently been lost to road expansion, while even parking outside the premises has been taken over.

The contrast is almost absurd. Bloodstock can command crores, but the animals are expected to live in facilities that are hardly a showcase for a sport aspiring to international standards.

And then comes another curious piece of arithmetic. BTC once argued that 116 acres was inadequate. The land now being offered for relocation is reportedly around 108 acres.

A senior bureaucrat once offered a possible explanation for the club's reluctance. Many BTC members, he observed, live within roughly four kilometres of the racecourse. Moving would therefore mean leaving behind an extremely convenient neighbourhood.

If that is indeed part of the thinking, the irony is difficult to miss. A new facility could potentially give the horses more space, better stables and better infrastructure, while the members would have to sacrifice a few extra minutes on the road.

Perhaps that is the real race BTC has been running for half a century: not to find the best home for racing, but to avoid leaving the old one.

Has BTC been protecting a racecourse, or merely protecting its address?