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Welcome to the modern world of racing and racecourse economics. Don’t forget, the course has to pay Tom Jones to attend and I suspect he doesn’t come cheap.
They’ll reckon on a sell-out and they can recover their costs and make a profit by charging a minimum of £33 to attend. They will argue (with a degree of truth) that if you wanted to see Tom Jones at any other concert, you’d have to lash out more than £33 and for that you get an evening’s racing for nothing.
Let’s be accurate – this isn’t racing with music, it’s music with racing and almost all courses with evening meetings have gone down this route because the racing on its own doesn’t bring in enough people to make it economically viable.
To be honest, given events in Japan, Libya and elsewhere, Cheltenham has simply not had the focus or the coverage this year that it has enjoyed in previous years and its limitations have been laid bare.
Even in sport, the cricket World Cup and the Champions League have got more headlines and a semi-detached view from a more Flat racing fan is that there seems a very introspective attitude within NH racing this week.
I don’t know why – perhaps the Irish economic and political problems have taken some of that joie de vivre away from the fixture. Perhaps it is so over-hyped by RUK and ATR and the RP that we simply have got tired of the endless talking about it, the stable tours, the jockey interviews, the panels, the preview nights. The whole thing is dissected and analysed and talked to death from mid-January onward and it just gets boring.
You don’t get the same pre-meeting build up with Aintree, Royal Ascot, Goodwood or any other meeting. Ultimately it is because the NH season is too Cheltenham-centric. The meeting has become a bloated corporate-stuffed monster and it needs to be cut back and cut down and a proper festival set up on a right-handed track earlier in the season to act as a counterpoint to Gloucestershire in March.
The AW horse population isn’t as large at this time of the winter season as earlier. With the turf Flat season only a month or less away, most Flat runners are being aimed at that.
With no 2-y-o races on offer and only a limited population of 3-y-o ready to run this early, it’s down to the older horses to make up the numbers and there just aren’t the numbers.
It’s probably reasonable to argue that by early March, there should be fewer AW cards and more NH cards unless we get a late cold snap. The converse is probably true in November.
I’ve visited almost all the British tracks and the vast majority have something to recommend them though I’m not a big fan of Windsor if I’m being honest.
I think for the overall experience Sandown Park gets my vote though I’m a big fan of Lingfield having been a Member there a few years back.
Elsewhere York is superb and I can see why it wins awards. A fine sunny evening at Goodwood having backed a couple of winners is pretty close to heaven and I love the Scottish tracks, especially Kelso and Perth.
Nothing to do with it being one of the showpiece races of the whole season, and with one of the richest prizes, then?
Bookmakers, punters, the press, trainers, owners and jockeys all want it to take place, and more power to Newbury and the BHA for facilitating it – or maybe it’d suit the whingers better if the course was covered in snow?
Though of course the prize money is being greatly reduced apparently so that argument doesn’t hold water.
IF the Totesport was such an important race, why put it on a Friday when betting turnover will be down whereas it COULD have augmented the Ascot card on Saturday.
As for the ludicrous argument that it is "the only place to run it", that only happens when it is in a bookamker’s interests as we all saw from the King George. In the past, we have seen races moved around in a cavalier fashion to suit vested interests so we can leave that one alone as well.
The point is that NH racing and training is a winter sport and the skill (or should it be art) of training is to deal with interruptions or forced changes to preparation and still prepare your horse to run in its championship race.
Nowadays, all the likes of Nicholls and Henderson is to complain through their newspaper or other articles and racing runs round like frightened rabbits to appease them.
Had it been me, I would have moved the Totesport to Ascot with its existing prize money fund and bumped up the Ascot chase further.
One of the very best handicap hurdles run throughout the whole season, and punters are up in arms because it’s re-staged?
Unbelievable!
No, not at all, it’s winter and had Newbury been under three feet of snow on Saturday I doubt we’d be having this conversation.
In the past, extra prize money would have boosted other handicap hurdles or chases to make up for the loss of a particular meeting and series of races.
If the Tote Gold Trophy has to be re-staged (and no one has convinced me of that) why not run it at Ascot on Saturday ? Boost the prize money for the Ascot Chase and draw in those that were going to run in the Game Spirit and Aon but that’s not how trainers want it – they want the race they want over the distance they want at the time they want.
There is so much redundancy built into the NH season I cannot for the life of me understand why (apart from basic commercial greed) whole meetings are now being restaged.
As others have said, apart from the Tote Gold Trophy, which wouldn’t be an insurmountable loss either, races like the Game Spirit and Aon have equivalents coming up so aren’t needed.
There are far too many Conditions races between Christmas and Cheltenham and we get farcical situations such as happened with Sandown and Ffos las running almost identical conditions events which became paid exercise gallops for one trainer and his horses which is frankly absurd.
There needs to be a rigorous overhaul of the post-Christmas pattern to eliminate these paid exercise gallops and put on proper competitive races between the main championship contenders as the Irish seem to do so much better.
Of course, the Irish are also happy with 30-runner maiden hurdles (a couple per week) while we have three 10-runner races because the bookies want the extra races for the punters to lose more money and so pay the courses to hold them.
Two thoughts: first, the surface at Wolverhampton is very different from that at Lingfield – I was watching the racing on Monday afternoon and thought the kickback was reminiscent of the Equitrack whereas there is very little at Lingfield.
Second, the stock response to ANY attempt to reduce the fixture list, as with so many things, is to simply throw more money at it whether it be from the bookies, exchanges, racecourses and others.
IF there is so much money sloshing about in racing, why can’t it be used to improve the lot of stable staff, betting shop staff, small breeders etc instead of being used for more low-grade racing which, in truth, almost no one wants ?
Had these 150 cards not seen the light of day, I doubt it would have made an iota of difference. In my view, the BHA should cap the fixture list at 1,000 meetings and if that means the immediate scrapping of twilight betting-shop fodder, so be it.
Morning all
As I’m intending to be at Lingfield on Monday, I can’t say I’m that bothered not to see a Nicholls, Henderson or Pipe horse running. Such horses usually make races woefully uncompetitive from a punting angle.
On the wider issue, a number of thoughts – first, winter Flat racing was brought in for a number of reasons but one of which was to keep the shops busy during a protracted spell of winter weather. With the advent of fleeces, meetings have been saved which would have been lost just a few years ago.
That said, there aren’t enough horses in training to maintain an extended schedule of two winter Flat cards a day for say two or three weeks. The advent of the bumpers for jumpers cards was a response to that but as betting mediums, they probably don’t generate that much.
The key commercial equation is that bookmakers currently pay racecourses to stage races. This is why seven and eight-race cards proliferate and are often stocked with small fields. The courses are happy – they get raid to stage them. Of course, we see more overseas racing (Meydan, South Africa etc) so ATR is only interested in showing races and the betting shop punter is overwhelmed by a constant gluttony of racing.
The law of diminishing returns is kicking in but from the racing side, fewer races means a little more cake for fewer people while more racing spreads the crumbs more evenly round the table. We are seeing established trainers and owners leave the sport and the economic consequences of even a 10% reduction in fixtures are made to sound apocolyptic.
I fear that as the economy recovers, there will be a temptation to get back on the merry-go-round of more racing and more meetings.
I don’t watch C4 racing and my main exposure to Mac now is on The Sunday Forum. When it’s him, Claude Duval and Chappers, it’s all good-natured banter and he seems comfortbale.
On other occasions, he strikes a more discordant note against a quieter, more thoughtful panel with younger journalists.
He rightly lauds David Ashforth as a great journalist but he has been in his time a superb investigative reporter and he has done much to improve the lot of the punter. He is well informed on internal racing politics (no question).
I’ve never liked his politics and I do think at times he has been given more licence to put across a particular political standpoint than any other presenter.
My main thought is that he is becoming a face of racing’s past – his points of reference are the 50s and 60s when the sport was different, society was different and the people in racing were different. He exhibits a faux deferrence to people in authority which seems curiously misplaced in these more egalitarian times.
I wish him well, respect his history and hope one day he commits his experiences to paper – it will make a hell of a read !!
I watched the race from Lingfield on Saturday and there was an audible gasp as KAUTO STAR failed to quicken with the winner turning for home and a louder gasp as he blundered through the second last.
I’m not a huge devotee of the jumps to be honest but the one-sided eulogising of the horse, trainer and jockey perpetrated by the media (especially the Racing Post and C4) was an insult to the other quality performers in the field.
KAUTO STAR, as a French bred, was running over hurdles at three and those who say that at eleven, he’s too young to retire, might be overlooking that fact. Not for KAUTO STAR an Irish ptp at four, a couple of bumpers and novice hurdles and nothing serious until six. The fact is he was running in Auteuil novice hurdles before LONG RUN was born and has been in training for eight years or more.
I do think these French-breds that start earlier finish earlier and that, Nicholls and Smith notwithstanding, we have seen the best of this horse. His decline can be managed through handicaps and perhaps hunter chases if they are bothered but even if they get him to Cheltenham in good heart, why should he do better this year than last?
If he were mine, I’d bypass Cheltenham and look at Punchestown which I think would suit him better.
I’m at Lingfield tomorrow – I gather there’s some chase going on in the Sunbury area. Fortunately, we’ve got a strong card of handicaps and condition races.
I was at Lingfield yesterday, too, Phil. I thought it was one of the poorest NH cards I’ve ever seen and hardly surprising with cards at both Plumpton and Folkestone the previous day.
The weather didn’t help and neither did the closure of the Brasserie.
As for Windsor, there is no chance of NH racing returning – it’s not something Arena are interested in at that venue. There are some issues regarding the ground – they race every Monday during the summer and effectively use two tracks up the straight as Newmarket and Nottingham do to save the ground. The turn past the winning post is too sharp for racing and it causes problems with pulling-up on the Flat on occasions.
I think Arena want to improve the stands and the viewing but will face formidable planning problems.
I’m hoping to attend Lingfield tomorrow though a heavy frost tonight would cause problems.
Southwell is an additional fixture (not sure why this was added as the thaw has set in for days).
This is an unusual Bank Holiday given the timing of New Year and won’t be repeated for some time so I imagine Lingfield will be disappointed to lose the meeting.
The King George is being run on the 15th because the sponsors (a bookmakers, therefore very important) wanted it run then and weren’t prepared to dovetail it onto someone’s else card this week.
Nicky Henderson (a trainer, so less important) had enough clout to get the Fighting Fifth rescheduled because it suited him but he’s not important enough to get the King George run at Newbury today.
For once and for the wrong reasons, Hills have done the right thing. The King George is a championship race for 3-mile chasers and it provides a contrast to Cheltenham. For a horse to prove itself a true champion, it has to be the best on different tracks and different ground at different times of the year.
Trainers bleating on about this interrupting their schedules ought to learn how to train horses – if you train in Britain in the winter, there is the possibility of snow and frost interrupting racing. A good trainer deals with these problems, works round them and brings their horses to the racecourse when the race is run – the bad trainer whinges on about how their precious schedule has been disrupted.
Jump races on surfaces other than turf isn’t coming back. No one really wants it and comparing exercise pace to racing pace is foolish.
The Winter Flat (my term) courses have done a lot by providing the "Bumpers for Jumpers" meetings and I’m sure if there is another cold snap there will be more meetings like this.
Undersoil heating of racecourses is ludicrous – it would be prohibitively expensive and in most winters would never be needed. You simply can’t equate covering a football pitch with covering a racecourse.
As to the performance of the Winter Flat venues, the Fibresand has done the best – Southwell is prone to fog but that’s not down to the surface. The various Polytrack surfaces have all had a few issues but I don’t think anyone claimed there wouldn’t be problems at -10 or -15c.
The loss of Boxing Day fixtures will hit some tracks very hard and it would have been nice to see the smaller tracks considered in the re-allocation of races. I hope that when the BHA is forced to respond to the clamour for more fixtures it will allocate the best slots to those courses which have lost out.
The annoying thing about this is the inconsistency of approach to the transferring of major races which makes the whole thing farcical.
The Fighting Fifth was moved down south for no other reason that Nicky Henderson wanted the race run. The Tingle Creek, the championship race for two-milers run on a right-hand track, was shamelessly moved to Cheltenham thus ensuring that the two chammipnship races for two-mile chasers are run on the same course thus devaluing the whole concept of the championship pattern.
In other words, consistency is swept aside in the name of short-term commercial expeidency or the lobbying of a powerful trainer.
Frankly, it stinks.
By the way, January 15th is my 50th birthday and I will be at Lingfield.
