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http://www.independent.ie/sport/horse-r … 42038.html
In the Irish Independent.
Doesnt sound very hopeful.
John
SHL
An excellent article, imo, if a bit too defeatist and much too kind to Brough Scott’s overly simplistic take on political history.
Sums it up nicely.
My reading of the next steps sees these commitees as coming up with ideas, not actual implementation; that is still some way off.
Whilst we all know the issues, and the consequences of not addressing them, a successful change programme demands a number of things one of which is a charismatic, dynamic leader, almost a benevolent despot. And if we don’t have our own Bernie Ecclestone then we should have spent £250k on finding him or her. IMO
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£250k wouldn’t even get you 6 months from a disgraced banker!
I’ve read umpteen articles like that one and none of them actually go to the root cause of the problem. They don’t really need a committee to tell them how to sort out racings, self inflicted wounds. They could read through this forum for a day or two and save themselves a fortune.
Furthermore, there is nil representation from related interests like Channel 4 or the Racing Post, who might be in danger of presenting some sort of alternative external perspective. On the point of diversity,
the swarm of committees is made up mostly of white middle-aged men — which seems at peculiar odds with the brief to "engage a younger new audience"... why do we always have to have silly racist statements in articles like this that don’t mean anything .. Is the journo saying that if the committee engaged the RP or C4 we would be awash with young, vibrant, one-legged Ethiopians and everything would be sorted out in a jiff.
I’ve read umpteen articles like that one and none of them actually go to the root cause of the problem. They don’t really need a committee to tell them how to sort out racings, self inflicted wounds. They could read through this forum for a day or two and save themselves a fortune.
Furthermore, there is nil representation from related interests like Channel 4 or the Racing Post, who might be in danger of presenting some sort of alternative external perspective. On the point of diversity,
the swarm of committees is made up mostly of white middle-aged men — which seems at peculiar odds with the brief to "engage a younger new audience"... why do we always have to have silly racist statements in articles like this that don’t mean anything .. Is the journo saying that if the committee engaged the RP or C4 we would be awash with young, vibrant, one-legged Ethiopians and everything would be sorted out in a jiff.
I think he is saying that the committees are not connected with the wider public due to age and social demography.
SHL
He said:
…the swarm of committees is made up mostly of white middle-aged men — which seems at peculiar odds with the brief to "engage a younger new audience".
Or, the committees appear out of touch with the sort of people they are trying to engage.
Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Brough Scott, for the delectation of Zorro:
There is actually something more seriously wrong with racing than needing to change ‘Brian’ into ‘Ben’ as suggested this week by the latest marketing suits to trouser six figures for stating the obvious. It is that nothing ever works when capitalists try playing at communism.
Communists confront problems by forming committees. This latest wheeze has formed no fewer than eight of them. What’s more, they are stuffed with solid citizens who all agree that what they should do is to meet and talk about everything.
No they shouldn’t.
To recycle one of the Fleet Street’s favourite headlines: ‘Stop this farce now!’
It’s a nonsense. It won’t wash. As solutions go it’s as convincing as the King’s New Clothes. Everyone is supposed to look on in admiring wonder when there isn’t actually anything there. Well, sorry folks, I am the little boy in the film of the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale who sings "Look at the king, look at the king, he’s all together as naked as the day that he was born".
Come on you committee men (and shamefully they are virtually all men), you all know what the problems are in racing. They are the same as they have been for years, only they are getting worse because no-one does anything about them.
They are- in one sentence – that racing is confused both in what it offers and how it is run. That was perfectly well expressed by our new friends on Monday, just as it was by the last bunch – and the lot before that.
The question is not what the problems are, it is whether you have any mechanism – bar forming committees – to act on them. It’s not about rebranding – it’s about slimming down and reshaping. And now. But something can come from this latest fiasco.
When people realise their nakedness they are going to ask how on earth they have allowed guys as good and sensible as Paul Roy and Nic Coward, and indeed all of themselves, to get caught up in the whole thing.
That’s when they will realise that another ‘ism’ is eating away at the game. It’s called cannibalism, and if the committee men don’t cede some power to a true capitalist executive structure the racing body is going to look very chewed indeed.
Everyone who looks at the situation for five minutes knows that racing offers three different activities: a social day out, a betting game and the sport of equine athletics. If you overindulge the first two, you eat into the flesh of the third.
Yet we have a situation where, in their hunger for revenue, racecourses blot out their core attraction with boozed-up partygoers and bookmakers insist on wall-to-wall racing through which only an anorak can see the thread.
Racecourses insist on competing head-to-head when there never was the audience. TV channels do exactly the same, and most newspapers now display racing as merely grids for the betting game with less actual written coverage than tennis or rugby league.
This is a situation that cannot and will not be tolerated by the people who really matter and who are notably absent in the great raft of new coffee-and-biscuit-takers on whom, apparently, depends our future.
These key people are the sports editors of national newspapers and the producers of network television, and the truth is that within five years – maybe three – they will have changed the face of racing as we see it.
The worst-case scenario is that it will go into satellite TV oblivion like showjumping and wrestling. But even the best case will see only major races on network TV – and then on one channel not two – and newspaper coverage will be confined to just two meetings a day.
What’s needed now is a combined executive – not committee – effort to maximise the opportunity of what, by necessity, will be a much clarified national vision of racing as a sport while absorbing the financial shock of doing without the ‘fast food’ revenue that has got racing into its present bloated state.
Believe me, that is the best-case scenario. Don’t start listening to siren voices who think we can somehow put millions on the viewing figures and hundreds of thousands through the gates. In the modern age we never did. What we must do is to use this debate to get real. British racing as a sport, a betting game and a great day out can still be a very successful enterprise. But, as with all capitalism, it will hurt first.
Only communists insist on keeping everything open. In five years’ time there will be a ‘Premier League’ set of racecourses, horses and people into which the wider world will be invited to take interest. Below that will be a ‘Championship’ tier covered by one satellite channel and a specialist website. Below that there will be the British equivalent of Australia’s ‘bush tracks’, popular locally but not something played out to the wider world.
The change will be enforced by a mixture of a TV agreement and bookmaker backing. It is not a new vision. I remember the late Simon Weatherby saying something similar back in the 1970s and Greg Nichols outlining it very specifically when he was trying to help Peter Savill wrestle the game forwards six years ago.
But it is a vision conceived out of real, direct knowledge of both the racing business and of the wider media interest. It has never worked so far because the assorted stake-holders have preferred to hold on to their own, complain about the status quo, form new committees, and then ask the stupid, unanswerable question "who runs racing?".
Since he is by some margin the most impressive current operator on the planet, it is worth remembering what Barack Obama said when challenged about the present financial crisis. "Some are to blame," he said, "but all are responsible."
I doubt we will get the president to Epsom but we might use him to skewer the lie that communism and committees can ever be the answer.
What needs to happen, and again let’s confine it to one sentence, is for the principal parties to accept this three-tiered vision and then to have the executive courage to implement it.
It will be difficult but where’s the alternative? Hands on heart, committee boys (and girl), and tell me you really think that by spending millions we haven’t got on marketing you will transform an increasingly overblown and therefore unattractive body into a more interesting and slim one.
You know what ought to be done. Be honest about it.
He said:
…the swarm of committees is made up mostly of white middle-aged men — which seems at peculiar odds with the brief to "engage a younger new audience".
Or, the committees appear out of touch with the sort of people they are trying to engage.
Seems pretty straightforward to me.
No place for the white man in the future of racing then, according to him.
No, it is not that black and, errm, white.
Just no place for an overwhelmingly male elite selected from a very narrow demographic to try to expand racing’s own demographic and its appeal to both genders. It sends out completely the wrong message, besides anything else. IMO.
Clearly the most important things to come out of these committees will be the ideas and recommendations. But these ideas need to be varied and relevant to a wide range of racing enthusiasts, existing and potential, and not just good.
It is very difficult to envisage this bunch of clones coming up with anything remotely so all-encompassing, good men and (in a few cases) women though most of them undoubtedly are.
IMO, some things won’t ever appeal to everyone. Racing should concentrate on the audience they already have instead of trying to engage yogurt knitters, young people or somalian pirates .. the only thing these so called diverse groups have in common is that they are collectively skint. Some young people will have white middle class parents who might pay for them to go for a day at the races, if they feel they have earned it.
Racing desperately needs to change it’s image, trying to lure in a different type of mug isn’t going to work, if the mugs following racing currently are slowly drifting off and losing interest, or dying of old age.
Bit disappointed by the Brough effort to tell the truth, Pru. Nothing obvious to cackle at except the absurd stuff about communism and capitalism – unless you count the usual ‘Brough Scott is a splendid and unique human being’ subtext which distinguishes everything he writes.
Although we’re all used to that so not many larfs there either.By the way, accuse me of being obsessive if you like, but the real way to get more people in is to lower the cost of getting in, and the only way to do that is to get rid of bookmakers so that costs can be met out of turnover as they are everywhere else in the world. The Japanese wouldn’t get 200,000 to their big race days if admission cost 50 quid or more.
The bookmakers dictate the agenda in almost everything to do with the sport including the ghastly fixture list. And are therefore responsible for most of its ills. This is the truth that dare not speak its name. Or rather the truth nobody in a position of power or influence has the bottle to admit.
Spot on Zorro, anyone professionally involved in racing knows that full well – the off course bookies run the sport.
But how to change it? A Tote monopoly would be the glib answer, but governments aren’t going to buy that, so what can racing do to liberate itself from the bookies’ control?richard
Not sure that the government has to "buy" anything.
The off-course bookies have precisely as much power as they are given by the punter and the BHA.
On the punter side, nobody has to bet with them. In fact they offer Tote Direct in 7000 of their shops (as does Betfair online). Why is that not sufficiently taken up by the punter ? If persuasion has failed, why is compulsion the answer ?
On the BHA side, a confident sport would decouple itself from the off-course bookies’ wholly betting-centric trajectory of blurring for their clientele the differences between cartoon racing and low-quality real-life racing.
A confident sport would restore to centre stage such aspects as the welfare of the breed, the spectacle of high-class racing, and the intellectual puzzles in breeding and race analysis.
Leave ’em wanting more, rather than leave ’em wondering if its ever going to end.
Trouble is, even once you’ve got the off-course bookies out of the picture, you then still have to convince everyone else (courses, owners, trainers, jockeys, stable-staff, breeders, auctioneers, etc) that a smaller operation of increased quality is really what is needed, even if it means scaling back their livelihoods.
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