After years of uninterrupted galloping growth, the 131-year-old Hong Kong Jockey Club has hit a hurdle, as the economic slowdown and corruption crackdown in China filters down to one of the city’s most venerable institutions.

The not-for-profit bastion of Hong Kong society, long considered among the most powerful and influential bodies in the territory, has reported a year-on-year decline in turnover — the first contraction since the global financial crisis — of 3.5 per cent so far this season, bucking a trajectory that saw annual turnover jump 80 per cent to more than HK$105bn (US$13bn) in a decade.

The development is the latest setback for the former British colony, which, alongside neighbouring Macau, is struggling with the fallout of the economic tremors and anti-graft probe on the mainland.