Selangor Turf Club

There is a good chance you have already seen where the Selangor Turf Club used to be — you just didn't know it was a racecourse. For nearly a century the club ran its races at Ampang Road, on the patch of central Kuala Lumpur that is today occupied by the Petronas Twin Towers and KLCC. When the city wanted that land for its most famous landmark, the racing moved out, and the modern club rose a few kilometres south. That single fact — a racecourse swapped for the tallest twin towers on earth — tells you most of what you need to know about how central, and how old, this institution is.

From Ampang Road to Sungai Besi

The club was founded in 1896, in the era when British administrators and traders ran horse racing across Malaya as the social fixture of the colonial calendar. Its original home was the Ampang Road course in the heart of what would become modern KL.

By the early 1990s, the city had other plans for that prime real estate. The course made way for the KLCC and Petronas Towers project, and the club relocated to its present site at the Sungai Besi racecourse in Serdang, where it races today.

The premier club today

Selangor is comfortably the leading racecourse in Malaysia, and increasingly an ambitious one. For the 2026 season the club scheduled 61 race meetings — more than it ran the year before — with a total prize pool lifted to around RM36 million, the largest in its recent history. Racing happens year-round, mainly on weekends, with double-figure cards and healthy field sizes.

That growth is not happening in a vacuum. The club has spent heavily on prize money and facilities precisely because it sees an opening to become, in the words of its own management, a genuine destination racing jurisdiction rather than a regional backwater — a shift driven in large part by events across the causeway.

Why Selangor matters more than ever

For most of its history, Singapore's Kranji was the region's marquee racecourse and Malaysia the quieter neighbour. That order is now reversing. Singapore's government is reclaiming the Kranji land and the city-state's 180-year-old racing industry is winding down, with its final meetings already run and the site bound for redevelopment by 2027.

The horses, trainers, jockeys and stable staff have to go somewhere — and the natural destination is north. Selangor has positioned itself to absorb the exodus: it expanded its stabling capacity from about 780 boxes to roughly 900, and stood ready to take up to several hundred of Kranji's horses along with a number of its trainers and riders. The practical effect for punters is a deeper, more competitive product — better horses, bigger fields, and broadcast deals carrying Selangor's cards to bettors in New Zealand, South Africa and beyond.

A racecourse that spent decades in Singapore's shadow is, almost overnight, becoming the most important in Southeast Asia. The land that built KL's skyline is now helping to inherit a region's racing.

The races that matter

Selangor's calendar is anchored by a set of feature races. The crown jewel is now the Selangor Mile; the historic prestige sits with the Triple Crown.

The three Group 1 races — Tunku Gold Cup, Selangor Gold Cup and Piala Emas Sultan Selangor — make up the Triple Crown, run across the year. It is a notoriously hard sweep: since the series began in 2003, no horse has ever won all three legs in a season. The closest anyone has come was in 2005, when Superb Classic took the first two.

Visiting the club

The racecourse sits in Serdang, on the Sungai Besi side of the Klang Valley, reachable by the major highways or by rail to Serdang (KTM Komuter) or Sungai Besi (LRT). Grandstand entry is RM10, with an air-conditioned HEST enclosure at RM30, and parking is modest. A race day runs around ten races, thirty minutes apart, most Saturdays and some Sundays.

If you've never been, we've written a full walk-through — getting there, what to wear, reading the card and placing your first bet — in a day at the races. Beyond racing, the club also runs an equestrian and riding centre on the same grounds.

Selangor is one of two racecourses still operating in Malaysia. To understand the full picture, read about its northern counterpart, Perak Turf Club in Ipoh, and the now-closed Penang Turf Club, the oldest of them all.