Jockey Club (Blue)

The Jockey Club at Buenos Aires is located at San Isidro and it’s an exclusive club that attracts the capital’s best-heeled golfers as well those more interested in horse racing and polo. Founded way back in 1882 (by former national president Carlos Pellegrini), the Jockey Club started out in life as an organisation to control horseracing at a national level, as well as an active social centre.

There are two courses at the Jockey Club, the Red (Colorada) and the Blue (Azul), both of which were designed by Alister Mackenzie and both opened for play in 1935, a year after his death.

The Blue course has a split personality – holes 3 to 7 are separated from the all other holes, lying across the street beside the Jockey Club’s horseracing track and holes 4, 5, 6 and 7 are protected by water hazards. The rest of the Blue course is very similar in style to the Red, where mature trees flank many of the fairways.

Undeniably this layout is the understudy to the Jockey Club’s Red course, but the Blue’s back nine is considered by some to be better than the Red’s front nine.

In Volume 2 of The Confidential Guide to Golf Courses by Tom Doak, the author commented as follows: “Unfortunately the Blue course at Jockey is the scapegoat child of the family; they neglect the course whenever the budget is tight, and the up and down nature of the Argentine economy means it is neglected most of the time. Members say the back nine of the Red and the back nine of the Blue are the club’s best eighteen holes, though the long 8th here deserves special mention. I do wonder if there’s a composite routing that would increase the challenge for big events.”