do we want horse racing to survive or perish?

​I am currently reading a book written by Tim Fitzgeorge-Parker, published in 1968, ‘The Spoilsports. What’s wrong with British Racing.’ I will start by quoting the first paragraph of the first chapter. ‘Britain is no longer a first-class racing nation. Since 1947, British racing, once both the mine and crucible of the thoroughbred horse, sport of the rich, recreation of the rest, long recognised by successive governments, has been slipping towards disaster. Throughout the rest of the world the racing and breeding industries have never been more prosperous, particularly France and the United States, with Japan, perhaps rather surprisingly, challenging for the lead; yet in Britain, racing is struggling for survival.’
So, in 1968 Tim Fitzgeorge-Parker was chronicling the slow demise of horse racing. which he suggests had its starting point in 1947. It is now 2022 and his words, at least to my ears, are even more sombre than when his book was published. In fact, reading from the future, his words come across as prophesy – the shape of things to come.
I believe, certainly with regards to flat racing, that since the late 1960’s we have lived in a fool’s paradise, believing without thinking that horse racing in this country was second to none, our racing the envy of every racing nation. It’s untrue, though, isn’t it? We have lurched from standing still to sleep-walking while the Far and Middle East have shovelled on the coal and ransacked the money vaults to first keep pace with us and now, at perhaps our eleventh hour, are about to stride away from us. The Sheema Classic, the Dubai World Cup and the Hong Kong Cup are amongst a multitude of multi-million-pound horse races soon to become of greater esteem than the King George & Queen Elizabeth and Eclipse Stakes.
We are the poor relations of worldwide racing. If Charles Dickens were alive, he might pen a novel on the fickle tendencies of the wealthy foreign owner/breeder, the plight of trainers coerced by poverty to turn to all methods of cheating to survive, the champagne lifestyle of those who overlord the sport, seeing and hearing no evil, no empty bellies.
What I find sickening are those people in the media who go on at length at the lamentable state of British racing, the small fields, the concentration of big prizes going to but the lucky few, how this must be done, no, that must be done – you know the likely suspects and you know they talk solely from personal interest. I am sure many of these loud talkers would rather the sport went to the wall rather than look at the facts and draw the only possible conclusion that those facts present.
The United States, France, Hong Kong, Dubai, Japan, Australia, to name but a small number of successful horse racing nations, do not live hand in glove with bookmakers. We do. They are with smiles on their faces and a song in their heart spiralling towards the sporting heavens, while we languish at the gates of pecuniary hell. In one form or another, horse racing in those countries names is funded through what we used to refer to as a ‘Tote Monopoly’.
I am sick to death of hearing that the bookmaking jungle brings atmosphere to the racecourse! Atmosphere will not be the saviour of our sport. I would rather have the silence of Sunday prayer to a sport reduced to little more than the financial abode of the point-to-point. I have only thus far read three chapters of this book and already a picture is painted of a great ship riding the waves of destruction at an angle that only a superhero might right. If only there were a superhero amongst those who earn a salary at the B.H.A. Some hope!
Horse racing has been a life-saver for me for nearly sixty-years. It has been the constant of my life and I would hope that if reincarnation were a reality, that if I were to be born again in fifty, eighty or hundred-years-time, the sport would not only have survived but would be thriving.
I am not particularly bothered if the Cheltenham Festival is extended to 5-days or shortened to 3-days, yet if there is a strong enough case for 5-days being financially expedient for both the racecourse and the sport, I say, let’s give it a shot. Let’s make it work. Yet people far more noble, knightly and prominent in the sport than I shall ever be, have already turned their hearts and minds against the idea. It’s not for them. It’s stretching the elastic to breaking point. No thought to wondering if it might be viable. No looking to the Punchestown Festival and its 5-day bonanza, with its novelty races, the farmers race, the La Touche, the Ladies Perpetual Trophy, the multitude of bumpers.
I remember the call for a 2½-mile Championship Chase, for those horses unsuited by both the Champion 2-mile Chase and the Gold Cup. Now the call is that the quality is being diluted; there are not enough top-class horses to go around. It was even suggested there should be a hurdle equivalent to the Ryanair, which did not, as yet, catch the wave.
There is far too much racing in this country. Too many all-weather tracks. There is no imagination in the conditions of races. There seems a belief that the sport must grow from the top, with million-pound races and unnecessarily large prize fund increases for the major races, when, as with any walk of life, growth must stem from the bottom, from the roots, which will enliven all the strands above.
As Tim Fitzgeorge-Parker basically predicted back in 1968, horse racing in Britain is heading for disaster. It will only be saved by dynamic intervention, by imagination, by a course of action that steers the sport towards the bloody obvious destination.