Vastly reduced prize money at Newbury tomorrow

[Black Sam Bellamy]

Has any ‘official’ reason been given for the decision to vastly reduce prize money tomorrow ?

[apracing]

Vastly reduced income would seem the logical reason. They won’t get 9,000 through the gate tomorrow and those that do come are being charged half what they would have paid last Saturday.

They won’t fill the corporate boxes and the restaurants at such short notice, the sponsors won’t provide so much money as they won’t be able to entertain and the smaller crowd and TV audience reduces the value of the exposure.

The Tote turnover will be lower, so the racecourse get a smaller cut from that, and with Sandown on as well, there won’t be so many bookmakers paying for their pitches.

Plus they have the administrative costs of refunding all the admission fees from last Saturday, the costs of paying all the staff a second time.

Etc, etc,

Actually apart from an attitude of ‘the show must go on’ it’s very difficult to see how Newbury benefit from restaging this card.

AP

[Black Sam Bellamy]

Surely the prize money is already ring-fenced though ?

[Cav]

In 6 days, they’ve isolated and sorted the paddock problem, rescheduled the meeting, supplemented the standard refund policy, are half price entry tomorrow and provide us with a decent days racing to boot. Connections would probably race for free anyway.

Credit where its due, imo.

[cormack15]

Agreed – whatever you may think of how events were handled last Saturday, Newbury racecourse and the BHA (plus the host of other parties who muct have been involved) deserve all credit for getting this fixture on tomorrow. We all want to see good racing and I’m sure connections are delighted that they are getting a chance to race at all, regardless of the prize-money.

[yeats]

If they wanted a bigger crowd why didn’t they go for Sunday instead of Friday. They had already decided Friday and the drop in prize money with or without C4 coverage. What exactly do Newbury get from C4 showing it on a Friday?

[apracing]

Yeats,

Probably the C4 coverage was the key factor for the sponsors in agreeing to go ahead, even with a reduced contribution from them.

AP

[Matron]

The sponsors are certainly not likely to get many viewers between 12:05 – 14:10 on a Friday with Channel 4.

I would imagine Channel 4 would not budge with timings so, as not to upset their regular afternoon viewers and advertisers. (Cookery School, Countdown, etc; brings in far more revenue for them.)

Regards

[Anonymous]

So the interests of the sponsors are taken in to account in the re-staging of the meeting, yet ante-post bettors are forced to shoulder the financial burden of what were truly unforeseeable circumstances?

[Author]

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