all-weather racing. surely less would be more.

​To know how impoverished British horse racing is in comparison to Hong Kong, Australia, Japan, France and the U.S., we need to ensure we are comparing apples with apples and not pears or bananas. How many racecourses operate in Australia, Japan, France and the U.S.? How does the funding of racing in those countries compare to how we fund the sport in Britain? How many individual races are there throughout the year in the aforementioned countries? Are we comparing British prize-money only against prize-money in the metropolitan racecourses we are familiar with? I suspect, and I may be wide of the mark here, the crisis of now, though it has been on the boil for decades, is one of over-indulgence and a lack of forethought.
Over the past twenty-five years or more new racecourses have been constructed, many turf tracks have converted to all-weather, with the knock-on effect of flat racing now taking place all-year round and not restricted, as in racing’s history, from mid-March to early November. We also now have summer jumping, an initiative that during the zenith of National Hunt in the sixties and seventies would have been considered unnecessary and counter-productive.
If you want to search for the core reason why field sizes have shrunk and prize-money has continued to decline, the profusion of all-weather tracks and the creation of Chelmsford and Ffos Llas is a good starting point.
As with all initiatives in horse racing the argument for all-weather racecourses is based on sound principles. National Hunt is vulnerable in the winter months to abandonment from frost, snow, waterlogging, fog and low sun, so to ensure there is racing to feed the High Street betting shops all-weather racecourses were the obvious solution, even if the term ‘all-weather’ has proved a misnomer at times.
If all-weather racecourses were a planned exercise, one track in the north, one in the midlands and one in the south would have been a sensible way to go. Newcastle, Wolverhampton and Kempton, perhaps. Three all-weather racecourses should easily have kept the show on the road between November and mid-March. Yet we also had sanctioned Lingfield, Southwell and Chelmsford. Why? More racecourses requiring more fixtures, more funding, more everything. On some days Kempton and Lingfield race on the same day, as do Wolverhampton and Southwell. It makes no sense whichever way you look at it.
We have too much racing, a fact accepted by 99% of the racing population, yet in a week in high summer there can be more all-weather racing than turf. It is plain madness. It is over-indulgence. I am not suggesting we axe three of the all-weather tracks but could we not limit any of the three to operating solely through the winter, with the other three operating through the summer months. Lingfield and Southwell can race on turf for both flat and jumps racing, and both Newcastle and Kempton have National Hunt tracks to be proud of. Limit the number of all-weather meetings, especially during the summer months, and a significant step forward would be achieved in increasing field sizes. It’s not rocket science. In fact, given the bare facts primary school children might come up with the same answer. They might even come up with a solution to leave mine in the shade.
Summer jumping has its place in the calendar but there needs to be less meetings, with the creation of more local festival meetings over two and three days, with no more than three-days of National Hunt per week, with the summer jumping coming to a climax with a Galway-style summer championship fixture, though not extended to seven-days, followed by a three-week hiatus before the start of the new season.
I would also remove all Group 3’s – controversial, the European Pattern Committee will be livid – converting them into limited handicaps. Race conditions should also be more flexible, with the removal of some bandings to allow for larger fields and races designed to help the small-time owner achieve a level of success that will encourage them to continue in the sport. There used to be a thing called ‘upside down handicaps’ where instead of balloting starting at the bottom weights, as is the policy today, when there are too many entries horses from the top down are balloted out. The sport needs solid foundations and the small-time owner/breeder must be given encouragement to invest in the sport.
And no restrictions that have the potential to limit field sizes, as with the needless ban on lower grade Irish horses coming across to run in Britain.
The present ‘crisis’ is long in the making, yet it is comparably easy to fix. Of course, as things stand, the B.H.A. have no powers to cancel unnecessary meetings; it is a toothless authority. Indeed, it is not in any real sense an authority, given it must always go cap-in-hand to its stakeholder partners. On the flat, the problem is quite clearly the profusion of all-weather meetings during the summer months. 
A spade is a spade with me, it is not a shovel. And a trans woman with a prostate is still a man in women’s underwear. Just saying it as it is. This sport is poorly governed, with those at the apex lacking both the short and long-term knowledge of the sport to lead on any bedevilling issue. 
For instance, we have a crisis of small-field sizes, yet with Bath having no irrigation system two meetings were transferred to all-weather tracks. Why not just abandon the meetings? Wolverhampton has enough meetings already. By common consent we have too many race-meetings and here was a golden opportunity to rid the calendar or two meetings. A drop in the ocean, yes, but a marathon must always start with a single step.