British racing has an insatiable desire for introspection, accentuated by a business model wholly fixed on wagering, and a sense of injustice that when terms were set on the legalization of betting shops back in 1963, the sport was robbed of its future.
I’ve been 7,000 miles away this week at the Global Racing Symposium, a gloriously understated title for the annual 2 day get-together for American racing, across both North and Southern continents. The Symposium, now over 50 years young, is the brainchild of the University of Arizona, and its Race Track Industry Program, whose alumni are well represented in careers at every level in US horseracing.
US racing is a curate’s egg. The main events, reported in Britain’s Racing Post, paint a picture of a sport overflowing with money. The reality is somewhat different, and depends on which state you’re in. Kentucky and Wyoming have very supportive state legislatures, ensuring that horses like Wimbledon Hawkeye could visit from Newmarket and win a $3m purse. Yet in other states, prize money is dire.
Listening to leading US owner Mike Repole, who has invested millions in the sport stateside, I had to remind myself that he was talking about US horseracing, and not the British equivalent. Phrases like Collaboration, Working together, reducing factional interests, improving the commercialization of the sport peppered his interview with Christina Blacker, analyst for Fanduel TV, as one element of the annual Global Racing Symposium.
The US model appears on the face of it, to have little in common with racing at Fakenham. For starters, National Hunt racing is an aside to mainstream dirt and turf racing on the flat. But Fakenham faces similar problems to many marginal US racetracks: a rising cost base; difficulty maintaining its purses; challenges in winning customers to attend the sport on a regular basis.
It might surprise fans of our Norfolk venue that many provincial US racetracks are facing exactly the same issues. Often, one man and a dog are attending the races, and neither pays an admission fee. A majority of US racetracks don’t charge at all for admission, anticipating higher on-spend from fans who get in for free. The reality of this is not, as you might imagine, packed grandstands, but empty ones. After all, if admission doesn’t merit a charge, it can’t be worth watching can it?
The number of horseracing cards today in Britain has little to do with consumer demand to attend the social atmosphere of the races. Rather, it’s about maintaining a presence in betting shops and online amongst a global wagering audience, and the Americans are doing the same, through racetrack-owned betting offices in their own locality and simulcasting.
But British tracks can take pride in their active pursuit of spectators for each event, encouraging parties and individuals alike to experience live sport at our impressive range of eclectic venues. Racecourses like Fakenham know a great deal more about their fan base than their US equivalents.
Repole was postulating about a lack of central direction for the sport in the US, which sounds very familiar. Yet the sport on both sides of the Atlantic is made up of businesses of different sizes, ethos, and ambitions, some diametrically opposed to other factions within the sport. It the path to the sunlit uplands of the future were that clear, we would have taken that route by now.
Our future, just like the US and many other jurisdictions, will be better through collaborative discussion, and a willingness to bring the small independent racecourses along for the ride, as part of the wider social appeal of racing in the UK. We should consider ourselves lucky; speaking to Zurich Racecourse, which stages two days of mixed cards each year, there is no return from betting other than through their own on-course tote. So the future could become much darker without a collective approach.
Entrenched positions are difficult to unravel. After all, they require give and take, and the givers are often those in the strongest position. They have to be shown that surrendering control of assets like the fixture list has a medium term upside. And when the short term is one of not quite enough money to go round, the medium term seems a panacea to unrealistic to reach.
Thoughts provided by Peter McNeile
