Finally, and I do boast this as some sort of triumph for my own thoughts on the subject, the people who matter in this sport are challenging the B.H.A. and its stakeholders to show more faith in the sport’s core product. I have said this many times, in many different ways: if we do not put the horse and the jockey, and the race, to the forefront when we are promoting the sport’s big days, we, or those responsible for promotion and marketing, are doing the sport a great disservice.
Back in the seventies and eighties, the sport, to my mind, was handed over to the influence of the bookmaking industry and their groupthink that horse racing’s great attraction was the punter’s ambition to win big, was where, if there is a rot, is when it set in. Bookmakers, pundits, racing journalists, even handicappers, were united in their wish to have the sport’s rules slanted toward the benefit of the punter, with loud calls for all horses to be ridden out to the finishing line, with no thought to the potential injury risk to the horse. Remember, John McCririck’s determination to have jockeys hung, drawn and quartered (I exaggerate) for dropping their hands prematurely or riding an injudicious race? What the Jockey Club (then) and the B.H.A. (now) missed was that in the main racegoers are more concerned for the welfare of the horse than any disputes that might arise between bookmaker and punter. While innovation is to be encouraged, innovation for the sake of innovation will only prove a fruitless quest. There is only one standout problem in British horse racing and we all know what it is – prize money. It is, at the lowest levels, an embarrassment that should shame the sport’s administrators. The B.H.A. and its stakeholders must as a priority be setting as its goal a revenue stream that for well into the future will inject the sport with sustainable and reliable levels of prize money that is on a par with our competitors, and that should be from the bottom-up not the other way round. And as all our competitors are funded through one sort of ‘Tote Monopoly’ or another, journalists and administrators should stop using the phrase ‘that ship has sailed’, as though it may have sailed it has not sunk to the bottom of the ocean. I am sick to death with people seemingly preferring to have the sport suffering than to ditch their prejudice and actively support the surest method of funding the sport. If we want a thriving sport, to have Cartmel style attendance at every country racecourse and York-sized attendance at all our premier racecourses, ‘we’ have to bite the bullet, whether ‘we’ like it or not, that the whip and jockeys over-reliance on its use, is the biggest stumbling block to the public’s acceptance of the sport. And this promoting of the sport sits cheek by jowl with the race programme. Conditions races, as Ireland have in abundance, may be uncompetitive at times and, as in Ireland, they may be mined by the top trainers, and may be poor for betting turnover, but I challenge anyone to disagree with me that if, for example, Wincanton staged a 3-mile conditions chase in October or November, if Frodon was to run, attendance would be substantially larger than on ordinary weekday Wincanton fare. Or if Shishkin ran in a similar race over 2-miles. Or any horse that has caught the public’s affection and admiration. Horses are the attraction, especially over jumps, but with flat horses becoming more likely to stay in training beyond their three-year-old days, the flat, too, has a dynamic worth promoting. The jockeys, too, are an attraction for the public. Tom Marquand, Hollie Doyle, Hayley Turner, Sean Levy, Oisin Murphy and Frankie Dettori, of course, are wonderful spokespeople for the sport, as are many others. And who cannot be but inspired by Bryony Frost. In fact, at the moment the flat jockeys are more camera-worthy than the jump jockeys. Seduced by the gift of better prize-money, the B.H.A. have endorsed ideas such as the Racing League, the Sunday Series and the accident waiting to happen that is City Racing, without giving any consideration as to where, if any or all of these ‘innovations’ were to be successful, they would lead the sport. The first and third of these ideas were taken from Formula 1, a sport that is as competitive as flies walking up a wall, whilst the middle one takes for granted and takes advantage of stable staff by the concept of starting the meetings mid-afternoon and finishing early-evening. As I have said repeatedly; if you want to get fresh faces on the grandstands of racecourses, run free local coach services, either charge no admission fee or greatly reduced admission, and put on something other than the racing to keep everyone entertained between races, and have staff on call to guide and help first-timers get an understanding on how racing and racecourses work. Sell the sport; stop selling the sport down the river. We have beautiful horses in harmony with brave and skilful jockeys. We do not need gimmicks. We need a ruling body that believes wholeheartedly in the core product.
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