Colombo Racecourse

Few sporting venues in Colombo have shifted purpose as dramatically as the Racecourse. In little more than a century, this Cinnamon Gardens ground has hosted thoroughbred horse racing, served as a Royal Air Force airstrip during the Second World War, and now anchors Sri Lanka’s international rugby union programme, alongside a modern shopping and dining precinct.

Built to Give Racing a Proper Home

Before 1893, horse racing in Colombo took place on Galle Face Green, under the Colpetty Race Course banner, sharing space with pedestrians, carts, and everyday city traffic in a way that occasionally produced genuinely bizarre accidents, including, according to one contemporary account, a beer cart being run into mid-race. The Ceylon Turf Club decided the sport needed a dedicated, enclosed venue, and acquired land in Cinnamon Gardens to build one. The new racecourse opened on 22 June 1893, and quickly earned a reputation as one of the finest racing venues in the East, admired for both its design and its facilities. In 1922, it became the first racecourse in the region to install a totalisator, an automated betting system, cementing its status as a genuinely sophisticated sporting venue for its era.

From Horses to Hurricanes

The Racecourse’s role changed dramatically with the outbreak of the Second World War. As Japanese naval expansion across the Indian Ocean escalated following the fall of Singapore, and the Royal Navy relocated its East Indies Station to Colombo and later Trincomalee, military authorities ordered a temporary airfield built at the Racecourse. D.S. Senanayake, then Minister of Agriculture and Lands and later Ceylon’s first Prime Minister, oversaw the airfield’s construction. Two Royal Air Force squadrons operated from the single-runway strip, No. 258 Squadron flying Hawker Hurricanes and No. 11 Squadron flying Bristol Blenheim bombers, using nearby Cinnamon Gardens bungalows as headquarters and officers’ quarters, with a military hospital established at the adjoining Royal College premises.

Horse racing resumed after the war and continued until 1958, after which the grounds passed through a long period of institutional use, at various points hosting the Sri Lanka Army, serving as a helicopter landing area for the Air Force, and gradually falling into disrepair.

A Modern Sports Complex

Renovation efforts began in 2011 under the Urban Development Authority, and by 2012 the site had been transformed into the Colombo Racecourse Sports Complex, Sri Lanka’s first venue built to international standard for Rugby Union, now hosting all home matches for the national rugby team. Further upgrades in 2014 added floodlights and converted a substantial portion of the historic grandstand into shops and restaurants, blending heritage architecture with a modern retail and dining experience. The complex has since hosted a range of other sporting events, including football tournaments.

A Venue That Tracks Colombo’s Own History

Few single sites in the city trace such a direct line through Sri Lanka’s colonial, wartime, and post-independence history as the Racecourse. Built by the Ceylon Turf Club as a piece of elite colonial-era leisure infrastructure, requisitioned almost overnight for frontline military use when the Second World War reached the Indian Ocean, then left to decline through decades of institutional neglect before a 21st-century redevelopment gave it new purpose again, the ground has effectively been rebuilt to serve whatever Colombo most needed at each stage of its history. That its current incarnation supports Sri Lanka’s national rugby team, a sport with a relatively small but passionate following on the island, feels fitting for a venue that has never quite settled into one permanent identity.

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