- This topic has 69 replies, 26 voices, and was last updated 17 years, 1 month ago by
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the real reason why it starts on saturday is simply that ch4 no longer showed the opening two days so its gone just like the whit monday at sandown and maybe the becher chase sunday at aintree.
Max, I’ve a lot of sympathy with your point of view. I regard myself as a "traditionalist" and I have for example posted on here in the past deploring the extension of Cheltenham and York (Ebor) to four days. I am also pretty angry about the willy-nilly movement of Chester, York (May) and Newmarket July from Tuesday-Thursday to Wednesday-Friday without any apparent thought for those who don’t want to be travelling the motorways of this country on a Friday evening or for the other racecourses directly affected by such a move. We have the ludicrous situation, for example, that on the Friday of the Newmarket July Meeting there are also meetings at York, Chester, Ascot, Newbury and Chepstow. That is self-evidently ridiculous, to me.
I just think that the Lincoln Meeting is the wrong target for your anger. It wasn’t working for anyone apart from the absolute diehards and this new arrangement deserves its chance. It’s a bit like the Derby and those who want to see it run on a Wednesday. They hanker after days which no longer exist. The Wednesday Derby was dying on its feet and I speak as one who went to the 1991 running which was significantly lacking in atmosphere.
Can anyone explain to me why the Queen’s Prize, as last year, has been relegated to being the last race on the card?
Couldn’t it have swapped places with the run-of the-mill sprint handicap earlier in the proceedings?
Such a time-honoured race deserves better than this.
Gus whils agreeing with your post , its the overall point that max is making that we must not lose sight of , ie , on Saurdays we compete with a myriad of other sports mainly football , weekdays give us centre stage , we need newcomers , new victims to be fleeced by the trilaterals and waiting eagles on exchanges like Glen
seriously its not just the Lincoln , its the whole emphasis on saturday multi meetings thats killing us , and who are the chief culprits , well of course its the trilaterals and the BHA who feed the madness with more fixtures tha anyone could stomach in a 100 yrs , most of it is dross , but we carry on regardless
Can we not just step back and give racing a chance to breathe , and forget the levy and the ramifications , just for once could the BHA run racing and not the bookies !!!
End of Rant
Ricky
Can’t agree with a lot of this – it makes lots more sense to stack racing’s main events at weekends.
Racing takes centre stage when big races are held during the week? Really – what stage is this exactly? Royal Ascot and Cheltenham are the only racing events that hold up during the week and only one of those is a true racing event.
Look at the attendances, sales of the Racing Post, betting turnover and TV viewing figures for a midweek meeting and compare it to a Saturday – there is no contest.
Glorious Goodwood – the biggest day in all those terms is the Saturday as it is every other week.
I know Chester in May is well attended but it’s a social event and they could be racing donkeys off Blackpool beach for most of the crowd. Betting turnover and national interest would be much higher for the Chester Cup if it was on a Saturday. It doesn’t compete with football during the summer and the major jumps races seem to do OK on a Saturday.
We can’t live in the past – racing exists on its current scale because of betting turnover and nothing, nothing else.
We risk the sport becoming like four-day county cricket – completely irrelevant outside the few thousand people who turn up to watch it over the season. The Grand National, Derby, Royal Ascot, Cheltenham and few other meetings will be our Test matches and the rest will fade away.I always thought the flat began the week after Cheltenham on the Thursday with the 1m4f Apprentice Handicap and it used to be the case that the rider was Champion Jockey for 30 minuites.
So already the flat is a week late due to the Winter Derby not being run the day after the Festival.
I agree that the three day format was ideal as it brought out all the die hard flat fans from hibernation with the cries of "Have you wintered well"
Thursday with the Doncaster Mile was a good day and made you look forward to oncoming months of meetings such as Epsom,Ascot,York,Newmarket and Goodwood but now its going to be on a packed Doncaster with the lager louts drinking until the England Kick Off.
I cant see Sunday being busy at Doncaster and will be amazed if 3000 turn up to be quite honest, one other thing is that from last Saturday to Easter 3 of the 4 big flat meetings will be on the AW, so for the next two Sats after the Lincoln the feature races even thought Turf 09 will be going will be on the AW.
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I’ve waited so long for this moment, having to endure that jumps tripe with the dodgy sand has been unbareable, bring it on saturday!
I used to be able to list, in order, all the significant flat meetings from April to October.
Lincoln
Craven
Greenham
Guineas
Chester
Dante
Goodwood
Epsom
Royal Ascot
Plate
July
Glorious
Ebor
Leger
Ayr
QE2
Cambridgeshire
Cesarewitchagreed?
Do the Eclipse and King George and QE Diamond Stakes meetings count as meetings.
Hi Drone, nicked your template and made a few additions. It all depends on your definition of major!
Did this in the pub earlier on the back of a beer mat. Duration after the name is how I remember the summer pattern pre-2000 and some notes on the tinkering.
Lincoln 3 days (now 1 day)
Kempton Easter Stakes 1 day
Craven 3 days
Greenham 2 days
Guineas 3 days
Chester 3 days
Sandown Classic Trial 2 days
Dante 3 days
Lingfield Derby Trial 2 days
Goodwood Predominate 3 days (significantly changed for the worse)
Epsom 4 days *sigh*
York William Hill Sprint Trophy 2 days
Royal Ascot + Heath 5 days
Plate 2 days (including Gosforth Cup Friday night)
Eclipse 2 days
July 3 days
Magnet Cup 2 days
King George 2 days (now expanded)
Glorious Goodwood 5 days
Brighton (I’m kidding – or am I?) 3 days
Ebor 3 days
Newbury Hungerford 2 days
Leger 4 days
Ayr Western 3 days
Haydock Sprint Cup 3 days
QE2 2 days (now expanded)
Cambridgeshire 3 days
Cesarewitch 3 days (now 1 day)
Newbury Horris Hill 3 days (truncated)Then theres the Salisbury mid-week two dayer before Ascot in September(The Sovereign Stakes?).
Carlisle Bell meeting before the Plate.
Blue Riband Derby Trial
Sandown Brigadier Gerard and National Stakes…which are all important two dayers, in their own way.
Gus, strong post, but I have always believed that the economic upturn of the mid-nineties would have saved the Derby even in its original slot. The indignity of fitting the magic race into the half time break of a football match was too much of a price to pay, imo. And it may happen again one day.
Mulls, disagree with you. The Australians run the Melbourne Cup on a Tuesday and the country stops still. Almost all the meetings I’ve mentioned have strong, often local, representation and good crowds in the week. The midweek press can pay attention to our sport for a page, rather than run a swop-card, boys in the playground story about whether Steven Gerrard is the best player in the world or not.
If they STILL run that non-story when the Chester Cup is running, then we can forget the press and row our own canoe and by essence, stop running races on a Saturday to suit people who aren’t interested and run races on a Wednesday to suit people who are.
Then there’s Windsor, Beverley, Musselburgh, Hamilton et al who run well attended Monday and Tuesday meetings. Go to Beverley one afternoon and tell me there’s no market for midweek racing.
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Yeeaaah; more power to your elbow, Max.
We all used to complain when racing was run by the stuffed-shirts, landowners, and ex-army types, but by God, they made a better fist of it than the bean-counters and bookmakers ever will.
Give us back our sport; please!Fair enough about Melbourne Max – but the point is our country doesn’t and wouldn’t stop for a race that’s run in midweek. It didn’t stop for the Derby and doesn’t stop for the Cheltenham Gold Cup.
1.7million people watched the Gold Cup this year on Channel 4. To put that into perspective, 2.1million watched Eggheads an hour later on BBC2. None of the Cheltenham broadcasts made it into the top 30 shows on ch4 during festival week.
3.7million watched last year’s Derby.
Even football have cottoned on and are moving the Champions League final to a Saturday afternoon in two years’ time.
I wish it wasn’t so but without the weekend stag dos etc, there would be many fewer courses in this country. Even the large venues struggle midweek, places like Newbury are half-empty except at the weekend. We can’t organise racing around the social season any more – there aren’t enough toffs to keep it going!
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Mulls
But even football is going in the opposite direction to racing, as it no longer seeks to compress all its best bits into 2 hours on a Saturday afternoon?
We now have wall-to-wall soccer on Saturdays and Sundays, with at least one major match on almost every other day of the week (and, seemingly, throughout most of the Summer). Maybe the horserace marketing guyshave
got it all wrong, and all this condensing of the product into a brief weekly fix of much of its crown jewels, is the cause of its problem, rather than the effect?
Newbury is half empty for midweek meetings because it’s run by low grade people with no imagination.
They’ve known for many years that traffic problems deter people from attending midweek afternoon meetings and despite a lot of talk, have done precisely nothing to ease the problem.
But they also suffer from a problem hinted at earlier in this thread and one that I reckon is key to attracting crowds. Newbury have continually fiddled with their fixture list over the past twenty years, so that only the Saturdays (Schweppes, Greenham, Hennessey) remain as fixed points in the program.
They’ve changed the Hennessey from Fri/Sat to Sat/Sun to Fri/Sat/Sun and now to Thur/Fri/Sat. They’ve fiddled around with evening meetings to the point that even I have no idea when they are staged any more. The post Christmas two day meeting was cut to one day at some point, etc etc.
The successful meetings are crowded because people know they are there – Ascot, Goodwood, York – and they don’t change the days or dates. Windsor works because it’s every Monday, Newmarket Pop concerts work because they are fixed on certain summer Friday evenings, so that they attract regulars.
What doesn’t work is a break in the program – look what has happened to courses that have closed for a period. Ascot, Doncaster, Kempton all show what happens when people lose the habit of attending a particular place.
You could call it ‘familiarity breeds content’ – even Cheltenham and Aintree took time to reach the current crowd levels. It’s hard to believe now, but 25 years ago, I attended both meetings in a year when I kept a diary. The first day at Cheltenham had a crowd of under 17,000, the Thursday at Aintree, less than 10,000. Both now get the benefit of massive repeat business, people booking year on year – as soon as one meeting ends, they prepare for the next.
Newbury, by contrast, keep fiddling around, and get what they deserve.
I think the Flat season should start on a Saturday. I’m not sure what the benefit is of taking ‘centre stage’ on CH4 on a Thursday when everyone is at work.
On a Saturday afternoon, there is much more exposure. As far as television is concerned, no football matches are televised on a Saturday afternoon so racing is the major sport televised live.
I agree that fixtures shouldn’t be swapped around for no reason but there seems to be a very good reason for this particular change.
From a personal point of view the fact that the second day of the meeting is on a Sunday is good news for our syndicate as one of our fillies makes her seasonal debut in the 7f maiden
We can’t live in the past – racing exists on its current scale because of betting turnover and nothing, nothing else.
Muls this is the core of the problem , the other member of the ABB , namely the bha planning dept , has single handed turned a reasonable programme into a dross fest , all to feed the beast that is the levy mechanism ,
PLAINLY ITS WRONG
Alan , as always you are right about the tinkering and the regularity of fixtures , we mere mortals are such creatures of habit , but for some reason I cannot understand why all the good meetings are crammed into a saturday , and we are competing with all other sports ….its crazy
, CAN we go back to normality pleasecheers
Echo Ricky’s points. Good post AP – I didn’t think of the habit breaking angle – but I do know Donny were struggling last year, which I marked down to the pricing structure (Arena are seemingly trying to recoup their entire investment in one hit).
I get 20 days holidays every year, 5 of which have to be taken at Christmas. That leaves 15 days to do with what I please. Assuming that 10 are normally used up on a 2-week family holiday, that leaves me with 5 days for myself.
Last year I missed an inordinate amount of racing because I just don’t have the holidays to be able to watch them. And I’m not talking about mickey mouse races either, I’m talking about meetings like
Craven Meeting
Oaks day
Royal Ascot
Glorious Goodwood
York Ebor meeting
Chester May meeting
Newmarket JulyNo wonder most people prefer the jumps – at least we get to see those horses running! It’s a miracle I’m still arsed about the Flat.
The Australians run the Melbourne Cup on a Tuesday and the country stops still.
I bet you that at least half the population of Australia couldn’t tell you who won the race or who went off favourite. The Melbourne Cup is no more about horse-racing to Australia than the next piss-up!
The Melbourne Cup is also arguably the premier horse-race in the entire Southern Hemisphere so to compare it to a midweek meeting at Doncaster with a Listed race worth maybe £25K to the winner is a nonsense.
But even football is going in the opposite direction to racing, as it no longer seeks to compress all its best bits into 2 hours on a Saturday afternoon?
If the Premier League had its way no 2 matches would ever clash but you still don’t see them attempting to hold any matches at a time when the vast majority of the population is working and has little or no chance to attend.
So if the most watched sport worldwide knows that it won’t get the audience for a midweek daytime fixture, then what chance has a minority sport like racing?
, CAN we go back to normality please
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