Racing

Racing race_id and status

How a race is identified, where its status comes from, and what changed_at means.

race_id

A race is identified by its race_id, built from the race record:

track/number/(R|G|H)/country/date    e.g. gawler/2/(R)/au/2026-10-05

R is thoroughbred, G greyhound and H harness.
date is the race day on the Australia/Melbourne calendar, so a UK evening race and the next Australian morning card share a day. start_time is always UTC.
country is a token such as au, nz, gb, ie, fr, us, canada, hk or za.

Get it from /racing/meetings and pass it back unchanged. Do not build one yourself.

A race's status comes from Betfair, never from the clock. betfair_status is OPEN, SUSPENDED or CLOSED, or null when Betfair has no market or has purged it. in_play is Betfair's in-play flag. race_state reconciles the two with the settle states we see: upcoming, in_play, interim or finalised.

Field	Values
`betfair_status`	`OPEN`, `SUSPENDED`, `CLOSED`, `null`
`in_play`	true or false
`race_state`	`upcoming`, `in_play`, `interim`, `finalised`

A race running late is still OPEN after its start_time. Do not treat the start time as the off.

Results

result on /racing/race comes from TAB and is null until TAB has one. It becomes official once TAB is paying. Placings and scratchings are always served.

changed_at

Each book's price carries changed_at, the time we last recorded that book's price for that runner change. A price that has not moved keeps an old changed_at, so it is not a freshness stamp and it is omitted when unknown. Racing prices have no updated_at.

Tote

AU and NZ races carry TAB tote data for NSW and VIC: per-runner win and place approximates in runners[].tote, pool totals in tote_pools (stamped by tote_updated_at) and every dividend in result.dividends once the race is official. Fields are absent until TAB has published them. Values are dollars per $1 staked and are never converted by format.