Action is better than inaction.
Impossible to disagree with that stirring maxim from the leaders of British racing. Previously, they were too busy pursuing internal one-upmanship whilst the sport careered further into unmanaged – even unnoticed – decline. Now at least, they’ve agreed the reins should be used but are yet to grasp them firmly enough to change direction. Stand by for further instruction, we’re told.
Yet the clock is ticking relentlessly down. In less than seven weeks’ time, the first ‘Premier’ fixture takes place at Cheltenham on New Year’s Day – one of 170 such newly branded but largely pre-existing meetings that will be staged in 2024 “with higher prize money and more top-quality racing, featuring our best horses”, supported by “significantly enhanced promotion, broadcast innovation and fan engagement”.
Three weeks ago, we heard from David Jones, the British Horseracing Authority’s senior independent director and chairman of the committee whose remit it is to deliver this change. He spoke of the sport’s “revolutionary strategy” and hammered home its fresh spirit of “collaboration”.
“In the coming months you will be hearing much more about how we will use the sport’s new structure to maximise engagement, work with broadcasters to assist them in innovation and presenting our sport in new and exciting ways – that word again: collaboration – and what premier racedays will look and feel like,” Jones told the Horseracing Industry Conference in his keynote speech.
Yet at the time of writing, the only tangible evidence from 18 months’ project work to date are the self-styled “radical” changes to the 2024 fixture list and – belatedly, as of last week – the performance measures (with caveats about the meteor of affordability checks) via which the BHA will assess the impact of those changes over a two-year trial, and determine whether the sport is starting along the right lines.
Yet whilst there’s much that’s serviceable in the short term about the working repairs being made to this cart, surely it would have been better to place the horses before it – and in sufficient numbers to pull it? That is a key policy area seemingly conspicuous by its absence of detail – along with, to those of us on the outside at least, any developed thought about racing’s customers beyond those who like a bet.
You can perhaps trace this latest chapter in the muddled history of British Racing to early 2021, when the Racecourse Association and Thoroughbred Group (representing racehorse owners, trainers, breeders, jockeys and stable staff) initiated a governance review right under the feet of then-incoming BHA chief executive Julie Harrington. The old tripartite agreement between those three entities prevented innovation, it was argued.
In June 2022, industry leaders agreed it would be a good idea to have a strategy. (That should be a joke, but isn’t.) Three months later, “strategic areas of focus” were agreed. Then in November, breakthrough! The new governance structure was announced, crucially getting commercial racecourse representatives in the same room as the sport’s various bodies and thereby making them “better placed to deliver [a] new industry strategy”. The following month “key areas of focus” were cited.
Action on “the racing product” – by which they mean this much-loved sport – was marked as time-critical. It was acknowledged that work on horse welfare and the industry’s workforce was already under way, albeit – years after it was said to be at the forefront of the previous BHA chief executive’s mind – the latter remains comparatively more discussed than enacted.
Matters “under development” are Integrity, Owners, Betting, Product Presentation (by which they mean how this much-loved sport is showcased in the media), Fans, Investors and Corporate Social Responsibility. (Incidentally, nowhere – at least initially – did it mention racecourse customers’ everyday experience – an area anyone who has been to a handful of tracks could have told them needed attention.)
You would think that much of this as-yet-unveiled work “under development” could logically trigger changes of emphasis in British racing that should then be expressed via alterations to the fixture list and race programme, but in this world view the response came first. It must be hoped the sport’s strategic brains remain open-minded and agile enough to change their act if the answers they receive – from fans in particular – signal the need for more fundamental change, or a different direction.
How radical are the proposed changes?
Yet in truth, the known changes coming in 2024 are neither “radical” nor even about the fixture list. That is not to say they don’t contain many sensible ideas but, ironically, the one thing scarcely permitted to change during this ongoing process was the fixture list.
Generally speaking, racecourses still jealously guarded their slots in the calendar – legal action was even threatened at one point – but the “collaborative” dynamic saw their start-times pushed earlier or later on 89 Premier Saturdays to create a two-hour “protected window” during which a maximum of three meetings will take place. So, this policy change was founded on an essential compromise.
The protected window, it is said, will give those higher-quality races “room to breathe” and be “better promoted to tell the sport’s stories”, improving betting and media-rights revenues. However, it is as yet difficult to understand what difference will be noticed by racing fans who confine their interaction with the sport to the ITV broadcast, given this is how its Saturday running orders already look.
41 Saturday fixtures will shift, with 36 starting later in the afternoon and five in the morning. So, those fans who like to have lunch and spend the afternoon at their local track might be inconvenienced, and they’ll also in effect see fewer races in warmer weather and a glut during the winter all-weather circuit, when very few people attend. In other words, what has been announced so far is chiefly aimed at betting customers.
No shame in that, provided there is a clear strategic path to better things for a wider cross-section of the sport’s fan base and its constituents in the medium-to-long term. British racing’s share of betting revenues has long been falling, but so more recently have attendances at racecourses. Doing nothing was inarguably not an option, but where is this strategy headed beyond the dopamine hit of extra all-weather races?
For some participants, the trial of Sunday evening racing (pun intended) means their working week will get longer from January until early March, but this initiative is a financial cinch for the coffers that will readily achieve its target of outperforming Tuesday to Thursday floodlit fixtures by 15 to 20 per cent in total betting turnover.
To its credit, the industry has at least committed to asking its key workers about the impact on their lives, to extending breaks during the Flat and Jumps seasons, and to providing some financial incentive to stable staff and jockeys. It is not yet known whether the same financial stimuli will be applied for the sport’s regulatory field force and racecourse workers. In the long-term, however, that means the extra income from these well-funded fixtures will have to prove worth their heightened costs.
Beyond that, 2024 provides little substantively more than routine changes that a healthy, functioning administration would execute without great fanfare – removing the least competitive races (especially over Jumps in the summer), improving the quality of Sunday racing as a whole, avoiding domestic race clashes (which the sport’s treasurers at the Levy Board have been urging for about a decade and yet this Anglo-Irish landscape remains a daily mess), and taking measures to increase field sizes across every class of race via various minor mechanisms. In short, British racing required a review to enable the BHA’s racing department to do their job – at least to some degree – as they see fit.
What are the ambitions of racing's leaders?
Perhaps the most encouraging ambition is the industry’s commitment to “grow average field sizes at Premier and Core fixtures”, “increase the percentage of races with 8+ runners” and “grow the percentage of races with an odds-against favourite” – albeit this must not result in the sweeping removal of key developmental and lower-level Pattern and Listed races that alone might not always meet these ambitions but contribute to the vitality of races that fill and to the sport’s broader appeal for its fans.
This links to a lingering concern that the sport’s leaders have thus far failed to grasp the underlying problem and instead content themselves with consolidating the race programme to fit a horse population of ever-declining standards. There is zero evidence to date that incentivising the breeding, owning and training of quality thoroughbreds over the full range of race distances here in Britain is part of the Industry Strategy beyond merely pushing a little more prize money in the direction of Premier fixtures.
A healthy racehorse population has a pyramid of ability, with the greatest number of horses at its foot in the lowest classes and each rising echelon containing fewer candidates per grade, peaking with a relatively small cohort of elite equine athletes. In 2023, Britain’s collective horses-in-training resemble an advanced-stage game of Jenga.
Increasingly, greater numbers of higher-rated horses, who would in the past have been trained and raced exclusively in Britain, have the opportunity to earn their owners more money via racing for part of the year in the Middle East, America, Asia and Down Under. Or else they are sold to race overseas permanently, never setting foot here or exiting prior to maturity, or in the case of Jumps horses being trained in Ireland, thus leaving Britain’s better races short on numbers.
Furthermore, for the commercial reason of selling to shorter-term buyers, the British bloodstock industry – along with the rest of Europe – is tilting increasingly towards breeding (generally speaking) from lesser-achieving speedy colts, who as Flat stallions produce precocious but comparatively lower-quality horses at distances up to a mile. This is at the explicit expense of higher-quality middle-distance colts, who as sires produce horses most effective over ten furlongs or further and also supply Jump racing with its pre-raced or unraced stock but are perceived to be a harder sell in the short term.
Over time, these racing and breeding trends have distorted the shape of Britain’s racehorse population. Whilst other elements play a part (e.g. ground on the day, the growth of ‘super-trainers’ who attract more of the good horses and don’t run them against each other) these factors consistently underlie why – for example – most of Britain’s two-mile graded hurdles lack any depth, so many Pattern races can’t muster an each-way field, and banner handicaps are no longer full-to-overflowing.
At the end of the 2022/23 Jumps season, only 0.8% of Britain’s total Jumps population was rated 151 or higher. That’s 47 horses on which Britain relies to fill all its graded races, if no Irish or French horses travel over. Some handicapping housekeeping has changed during this time but in 2013/14, that number was 72 horses or 1.3% of the total population.
Merely 1.7% (100) of Jumps horses were rated 141-150, 4.3% (260) were rated 131-140 and 7.9% (478) were rated 121-130 at last season’s end as compared with respective populations of 2.2% (123), 5.5% (302) and 9.4% (514) of horses nine years ago. Admittedly, these numbers are merely one snapshot at a point in time and subject to flux, but they are clearly troubling.
What is the situation on the Flat?
It's far from ideal on the Flat, too. Those with their fingers in their ears will tell you there are now almost 1,000 more Flat horses in training in Britain compared to 2014. Unfortunately, merely 3.8% (348) of those horses are currently rated 101 or higher, 4.8% (444) are rated 91-100 and 8.8% (815) are rated 81-90. At the same point in 2014, those shares represented a larger proportion of a slightly smaller total Flat population at 4.6% (380), 5.4% (450) and 9.9% (821) respectively.
These figures are drawn from the BHA’s own monthly Horse Population Report, so industry leaders can’t plead ignorance. Yet instead of taking measures now to address this tricky long-term problem – one that will need ten or twenty years to scratch the surface – the British racing industry has hitherto increasingly cut its cloth to suit its diminishing and deteriorating material.
This is what was meant when the BHA’s consolidatory measures already made in 2023 referred to “better aligning the programme to the current horse population”. In plain terms, a bunch of Flat and Jumps races were downgraded.
Racecourses have long sought only to stage races that fill because their betting-related or media-rights income penalises small field sizes. As a result of following the money at the expense of a diverse and balanced programme, alternatives to handicaps have withered away, developmental races have dwindled and contests for higher-rated horses have been routinely replaced with those of a lesser grade for which the available horse population is larger. The sport has been left with what many trainers describe as an “anti-aspirational race programme”.
Furthermore, from 2017 the industry redirected a greater proportion of its funding towards ‘grassroots’ racing – a misnomer for lower-grade competition. Even now, the sport is yet fully to renounce this fundamental redistribution of income that has condemned Britain’s better racing to a divergent financial path with its closest competitors in Europe.
Indeed, it’s been stated that “as soon as financial benefits are accrued… Core fixtures will be the priority when it comes to distributing any additional industry funds”. That seems to suggest that even though Britain’s top-tier racing is neither yet internationally competitive nor as proportionately well-funded as it was in the recent past – and yet it’s the reason why most people turn on their TV or travel to the racecourse – any additional income would be reinvested in the lower grades. Of course, the Levy Board would need to approve this policy, which seems prematurely to narrow the industry’s strategic options.
The long-term effect in an increasingly competitive international environment has been to cumulatively discourage owners from racing, or even basing, better horses in Britain, and to incentivise breeders and owners of lesser horses to race and be trained here. All horses are, of course, proportionately welcome in a healthy pyramid of ability but Britain’s policies have led to distortions – a dearth of horses just below the apex and an excess of horses at its base.
This is a dynamic that that I have written about previously.
And it’s undoubtedly progress that this problem has now, at least partially, been recognised as real whereas previously it was greeted with scepticism.
It’s encouraging that among the industry’s performance measures for the two-year period in which the changes to the race programme will be trialled and assessed is an ambition to “increase the number of horses rated 85+ on the Flat and 130+ over Jumps” (meaning any horse achieving those figures at least once during the target period). The goals are, on the Flat, a 5% increase by 2024 and a further 5% the following year. For Jump racing, it’s 2.5% increases over the same periods.
Another “ownership-related target” aims to “increase the number of horses that race in Britain by 2.5% by 2025 compared with 2023”. This also seeks a reduction in the number of horses leaking abroad, for part or all of the season, and also to attract more international runners to British races.
When announcing these targets, the BHA said it was “not aware of any other sport which has set KPIs as detailed as this in public”. Setting aside the strong sense (inferred via reading its public statements with care) that the Levy Board compelled these to be published, it would be desirable for the industry’s new-found commitment to transparency to be taken further.
What should the ambition be in terms of prize-money?
The median prize money on offer in Britain’s Pattern races at each level as compared with Ireland and France could, for example, be published alongside a stated aim to match – or even, gasp, exceed – those levels over a specified period of time. Without this, the “international competitiveness” of British racing to which the BHA’s performance targets refer remains unhelpfully vague.
Domestically, it would also be beneficial to attach a percentage to the optimum distribution of available funding across the grades, from class 1 to class 6. Without this key metric, it is impossible to demonstrate or assess the rationale behind any strategy, and to explain or quantify any future deviation from that paradigm. Without this, funding allocation and the strategy that drives it remains finger-in-the-air stuff. Yet such is the self-interest that still pervades the sport, agreement on these targets would surely be fanciful.
Without a clear long-term plan to incentivise the breeding in Britain of quality horses over the full range of distances, which would probably require incentivising purchasers at each stage of a middle-distance horse’s exposure to the commercial market, Premier Racing will have finite benefits and its as-yet-unknown presentation to fans risks being mere tinkering around the edges.
So, the future of this sport also requires its power-brokers to be honest with themselves about whether the governance restructure really has achieved “true cross-industry collaboration”, given tangible voice to racing’s “customers and investors” and aspires “to deliver genuine, meaningful, lasting change”.
Has it instead ratified decision-making processes in which shorter-term commercial interests still crowd out those attempting to take a philosophically longer-term view for the benefit of the whole sport? Veto must not be replaced by faux consensus.
It's also, perhaps, not surprising that so little has been heard about the other workstreams of the Industry Strategy when the resource allocated to these projects – the actual people who must carry out that work – also have their day jobs to get on with. The sport needs to address this mismatch between its vaunting ambitions and the evidence-based blueprint – and money – needed to realise them via promotion.
I can only imagine the rising sense of urgency – even panic – as 1 January approaches. Something is going to have to feel and look different from Day One, even if we accept – as is surely now inevitable with time running out – that it is likely to be relatively minimal. A soft launch, they’ll call it.
“We must not be afraid of failure,” Jones concluded last month. “Not everything we try will work. We will learn as we go, focus on the things that do and not be afraid to let go of the things that don’t. This is not failure, it is leadership.”
Yet we have only heard about trying the relatively easy stuff so far. Necessary though it was, it will not ultimately determine whether British racing thrives or fails. Leadership only gets harder now.
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