The financial plight in horse racing.

​I purchased ‘The Spoilsports. What’s Wrong With British Racing’, by Tim Fitzgeorge-Parker, from Greg Way of Newmarket, with little idea of its content. The title suggested it might be a dire read; a personal and perhaps biased catalogue of all that was once wrong with British Horse Racing. The book was published in 1968, the era in which my fascination with the sport flowered into a life-long love-affair.
Of course, in 1968 I was ignorant of racing politics and could only internalise the bravery and courage, the colour and grandeur, the grand lottery of sporting endeavour. Apart from the threatened demise of Aintree and the Grand National, a constant thorn in my adoration of the sport, I had no conception of the financial collapse that might destroy the sport in the coming years.
And you may think, considering the present plight of racing’s finances, that it is a case of ‘as then, the same now’. But the tardiness in forward thinking and positive action did not begin with the B.H.A. Nor was the decline at its starting post in 1968 under the auspices of the The Jockey Club, as the opening two sentences of ‘Spoilsport’s’ makes plain.
‘Britain is no longer a first-class racing nation. Since 1947, (my emphasis) British racing, once both the mine and crucible of the thoroughbred horse, sport of the rich, recreation of the rest, long recognised as such by successive governments, has been slipping towards disaster.’
Prize money was a contentious issue even in 1968. As Fitzgeorge-Parker, quoting Peter Willett, the Sporting Chronicle’s breeding expert, informed his readers. ‘How much happier a lot have the breeders in France. There the leading owner received more than two-hundred-thousand in stakes and more than twenty-five-thousand pounds in breeders’ prizes last year (1965) in contrast to this country, where the leading owner, a Frenchman, won sixty-one-thousand pounds.’
With the exception of the classics and other major races, mainly due to sponsorship, we have made no progress in equalling-up our prize-money with that of France, let alone the ‘Third-World’ countries that now boast a racing and breeding empire.
The problem of prize-money has stifled the racing and breeding industry in this country for decades. According to Fitzgeorge-Parker, once an assistant trainer before he turned his hand to journalism, Atty Persse confided to him that he was losing ‘one pound every week on every horse in his stable on his training fees’. And that was in 1950. I wonder how many of the modern-day successful trainers could tell a similar tale of woe?
And as with the terminal length of time it is taking the B.H.A. to come to a conclusion about the whip in racing, the same can be said for the slowness of the Jockey Club during their long period at the helm of the sport to get to grips with the necessity for starting stalls, ensuring stable-staff were adequately rewarded for their dedication and expertise, and to bring to book the dopers who got away with their crimes for decades, possibly tens of  decades.
Money was always the driving factor in the decline, as it is today. Not enough of it to fund the necessary, let alone the fripperies. Of course, the golden grail, the answer to the financial conundrum, was given scant consideration, even though Tote Monopolies of one sort or another was the revenue stream that allowed all our competitors to have state-of-the-art racecourses, amazing prize-money that we can only dream about achieving, with money to spare for fripperies and the expensive necessities required by any thriving industry.
Writing in the mid-sixties, Tim Fitzgeorge-Parker wrote effusively on the common-sense of funding our sport in a similar way to other successful racing nations. He favoured, I believe, and his argument has swayed my thinking on the matter, of only allowing bookmakers to bet on-course, with all High Street betting shops becoming Tote-only outlets.
Those people who argue that a ‘Tote Monoploy’ is a ship that has long sailed should get out their binoculars and scan for that boat moored close to the horizon, in wait to become the White Knight that saves our sport from a disaster long predicted.
Which way your thinking is on this matter, I urge you to track down a copy of ‘Spoilsports’ so that you are aware of how long this problem of funding has hung over our sport like a grim reaper.