- This topic has 51 replies, 26 voices, and was last updated 17 years, 10 months ago by
.
- Posts
I have absolutely no issue with promoting the sport to a wider audience.
However I cannot help but think the sums of money being discussed are obscene and could be better spent elsewhere. Yesterday morning I spent almost three hours in my local A&E department and looking at the state of it I was wondering how much more they could do with even a half million pound investment, yet alone a £4-5 milion boost.
OK some will respond that even greater sums are spent on other sports, that still does not make it right in my mind.
I think the Order Of Merit for jump racing has worked well and on a budget far less than being proposed for this Sovereign Series, covering only ten seemingly randomly selected races.
The extra money is to come from sponsors not taxpayers money and the NHS has in the last 10 years had double the money spent on it and output has increased by only 50% but hey that is ano story and off topic.
Comparing the flat and the jumps is not a fair analogy as the UK is the centre of the jump racing world while flat racing is a worldwide sport and prize money is hugely different between the two. Whether it would be better to boost prize money elsewhere is a good question but then how would you get anyone to sponsor boosting for instance class 4 handicaps. If this idea generates more revenue for the industry perhaps it will enable prize money for such races to be increased.
Last years winner would have been Authorized. The horse would have been the ¨clubhouse leader¨ for almost 2 months before the series ended having spent a total of 10 minutes on track in the preceeding 4 months having competed in less than half the events of the series
They seem to want one terrestrial broadcaster to cover the whole series. As C4 now hold the rights to everything except Epsom and Ascot this is going to cause a lot of aggro- hard to see the Beeb stumping up for rights to all the other meetings, or being particularly happy about letting C4 snaffle their only decent Flat rights.
My gut feeling is that it won’t get off the ground- too much negotiation and movement of long-standing fixtures and rights for too little reward.Carvills
Aussie Jim in the telegraph seems to agree with you.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/main.j … cgr103.xml
Should we be worried ?
The extra money is to come from sponsors not taxpayers money and the NHS has in the last 10 years had double the money spent on it and output has increased by only 50% but hey that is ano story and off topic.
I’m not going to get involved in a party political discussion. The NHS is just an example of where that amount of money could be better spent, regardless of the source of the money.
However the basic argument that spending so much money on the promotion of a series of ten races is obscene still stands in my view.
I’m not a fan of this idea.
Racing is not football and never will be, so all these attempts to dumb the sport down and "make it accessible" to a new audience are destined to failure.
Part of the beauty of the sport is that you don’t know in advance where the real "Championship" showdowns will take place. It could be the Prince Of wales, the Irish Champion, the Arc, the Breeders Cup – who knows…
All this series is going to do is redirect TV money into the pockets of most likely the Coolmore team, and if not, then Godolphin or the other big owners. And if in turn it kills the TV coverage of the other races we currently enjoy, it could be a complete disaster (are C4 going to be happy just to show the ordinary Saturday cards??)
It also suffers from the same weakness as the "Order Of Merit" – whereby you could have a horse like, say, Duke Of Marmalade last year who could run in nearly all of the possible races and get placed in all of them (without worrying the winner in any of them). Champion racehorse? I think not.
I can picture Ryan Moore in the post race press conference, sporting a baseball cap festooned with bookmaker logo’s, the big jug of orange beside him…¨So Ryan tell us about your start…..¨
Racing is not football and never will be, so all these attempts to dumb the sport down and "make it accessible" to a new audience are destined to failure.
But its not trying to be?
I think its more direct comparison is with the (godawful) formula one. Somehow someone has managed to sell that rubbish to a gullible public
The TV rights business does bother me though and I can see it all falling down around that
I agree negotiations with broadcasters won’t be straightforward and perhaps it will flounder when they get down to the nitty gritty as it does appear they would prefer one broadcaster but it doesn’t mean it couldn’t work with more than one. As for McGrath well he may well be more concerned about losing his nice little earner at the beeb who would never bid to be the single broadcaster as they don’t have a high enough commitment to racing.
But its not trying to be?
My Racing Post said this was to be Racing’s "Champions League"!
To assume that the general population is going to ¨invest emotionally¨ in a horse is daft beyond belief.
clivex wrote:
But its not trying to be?
My Racing Post said this was to be Racing’s "Champions League"!
Oh dear
Well…lets see if it becomes racing’s Watney Cup
You really seem to be saying that the Irish horses and to an extent the French horses are better than the British which in recent years has alas often been the case so we should include include their races. However I assume the objective is to promote British racing so including French and Irish races is illogical and there are enough top class races here.
While the arc winner is often the best horse of the year this is not always the case. It is fair to say it is laid out for the race on many occasions with few outings and that one race as the main objective which is understandable as it is run towards the end of the season but it hardly draws people to follow racing. Last year Dylan Thomas proved this approach is not the only one to victory in the arc and why he was imo such a great horse. As for unsuitable ground imo the best horse can handle any ground and course and if it only relishes good or soft ground or a particular type of track it is only the best horse on that basis. I don’t think this initiative is perfect but it will be interesting to see if works.
I am not saying that the Irish or french horses are better than the British, just that those races (irish champ and arc) are consistently better quality races, than most of the ones in the sovereignn layout (mostly through timing). My point about the arc, is that there are little 1m4f races because there are not any other top class 1m4f races in britain than the two featured, if the competition is to not be balanced in the favour of milers, they have to bring in some of the other countrys group 1s, otherwise it is a bit of a joke.
I too was under the impression that this was to be like a horseracing champions league, which it doesnt seem to be. Its just that IMO to have the title of winning this means very little because it is not a test of a champion.
The fact that under its rules Phoenix Tower is second in it at the minute and will go top if he wins on saturday says that the competition is not necessarily a measure of a quality horse, more more a case of who had the most poorly contested races at their distance (and especially if their distance is circa 9f).
You are missing the point of this entirely
The objective is to create an easy to follow narrative for a public not easily engaged by ratings and so on.
Its not designed to be definitive in any way
If it ever gets off the ground I’d give it 5 years maximum.
By which point it will be bigger than Wimbledon, the Open, the FA cup and the Ashes all rolled into one.
As the money is destined to stay within the sport then it would surely be put to much better use at the bottom end (or at least evenly distributed) rather than enabling the seriously wealthy to become even richer.
It’s a bit like the FA injecting £100 million into football and giving it to any of the 92 teams that win the most premiership matches in a season.
Lee
Lee,
Unfortunately it appears no-one in horse racing except for connections of the horses who finish in the op 3 in these rces/overall will see any of the £10m.
I know mate but that was sort of my point – although not particularly well put I grant you.
The connections (let’s face it Ballydole or Godolphin) will earn another £10 million while the small time owners have no chance whatsoever of collecting.
If an injection of that amount of money is going to be injected into the sport why not try to do it in such a way as that makes it possible for anybody, however big or small ?
Why – because the media want the marketing for the money (and rightly so) and believe that will come from the best horses being in attendance in the top races – which they invariably would be anyhow.
That doesn’t have to be the case though.
Lee
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.