Tiresome Touts Thwacked by the Courts …. But the Beastly Badge Bureaucracy Remains Too Complex

I had a marvellous time at the first Cheltenham meeting of the season, as I’ve always seen it as the start of “proper” racing. It was great to see so many friends and owners there, with everyone dreaming of future successes and races to be won. Here’s hoping the dreams stay alive for as long as they possibly can.

One feature that was an enhancement to the owner / racegoer experience was the absence of the wretched touts who have tended to badger people from the minute they turn into Cheltenham racecourse. Jockey Club Racecourses elected to go to the High Court to apply for an injunction, which was successful, in what Ian Renton has termed a “landmark decision”. Basically it prohibits the selling and buying of tickets by touts on the racecourse property, and it is the first time ever that an injunction has been granted to stop this. If touts persist, then it becomes a criminal offence and they can be prosecuted for contempt of court, which carries a custodial sentence. This is far more effective than the tactic deployed at last year’s Festival where Cheltenham council issued Public Space Protection Orders, but with the maximum fine of £80 it was no surprise that this was no real deterrent.

So, well done Cheltenham on this ground-breaking initiative which is very likely now to be copied by other racecourses and sports venues, particularly rugby, tennis and football. Apparently the number of fake badges sold at last year’s Festival was over 1,000, with many racegoers then denied entry, having been fleeced by the touts. JCR believe that the touts were costing them an estimated £1m a year across their 15 racecourses, and the total cost to British Racing has been estimated at between £10m and £15m a year. From the racegoers’ perspective, it has finally removed the intimidatory presence of touts and their often aggressive behaviour. It will be interesting to see what happens now over the next 12 months because the injunction has only been granted until July 2019.

However, from an owner’s perspective, the subject of badges always raises the problems that still exist in both obtaining and allocating them. It is not really a problem for a sole owner. However for those who are actively involved in shared ownership, particularly partnerships and syndicates, it remains as I said in the header to this blog, a “beastly badge bureaucracy” which still causes anxiety and embarrassment when owners struggle to convince staff at Owners & Trainers desks that they are entitled to them.

The pass card system is OK as far as it goes, but clearly the quality of the owner experience is then determined by the people encountered behind the O&T desks. That remains very variable. In fact I don’t necessarily blame them, even though their social skills are sometimes lacking, because there are lots of opportunities for mistakes to be made and for badges, records, emails, requests etc. to be mislaid. To illustrate the problem using Cheltenham as an example, the course has two entrances and there is quite a steep slope separating them, so elderly owners can easily go to the wrong entrance and then struggle to get to the other one; the number of badges for shared ownership is different to the number of complimentary lunches, which leads to irritating negotiations within the ownership group; they require owners’ badges, arm bands and also tokens for lunch, and not every owner welcomes this festooning with accreditation; they post four badges and two car park labels to the syndicator and / or first-named owner, who then may find it difficult to forward the badges to co-owners in the time available. And then unfortunately, looking across UK racing the arrangements and bureaucracies vary from course to course.

It often feels that the owner is at the bottom of the pyramid, from an owner badge perspective. There are plenty of people who have automatic entitlement, not least the huge network of individuals under the Racecourse Association (RCA) auspices who are deemed to be eligible for access; the press; trainers, jockeys and also conditional and apprentice riders. As a result, many in racing, particularly from the training ranks who are immediately recognised by the O&T staff, fail to appreciate the embarrassment that occurs for “ordinary” owners. I’ve deliberately put this in inverted commas because the pass card system, when it was introduced, completely ignored best practice in customer relationship management (CRM) so it is impossible for courses to assess whether the individual proffering the card is a small shareholder in one horse or someone investing huge amounts of money in the sport every year. I always compare this to the CRM systems deployed by airlines, which have huge amounts of data on the value of their customers from a profitability perspective. Whenever they can, they upgrade the customers of greater value to better quality facilities. At the moment this is totally impossible in British racing – partly because there is no tiering of facilities so the 40th syndicate shareholder can be treated in the same way as someone who owns 20 horses outright, and also the pass card doesn’t retain any data that can be accessed on the owner’s individual profile and importance to racing.

Basically the pass card system, although an improvement, is not fit for purpose when evaluated from three perspectives: properly controlling abuse and the illicit market in owner’s badges (obtained by and for people not entitled to them); maximising the overall owner experience through the tiering of benefits; and incentivising owners to invest more in ownership in order to obtain those greater benefits. A big opportunity was missed, but then it was motivated primarily by the RCA trying to address the first of my three perspectives rather than, just as importantly, the other two.

Finally, and perhaps the subject of another blog, not many successful consumer-orientated companies would survive on a totally fragmented basis with every part of their business doing their own thing, in their own way. Ideally the whole of British racing would participate in a Shared Service Racing Transaction Centre where all the administration to do with racing and ownership would be done using state of the art systems, software and communications processes from one site. We are light years away from that, and I’d be pretty certain that there has been no discussion of an initiative which would lead to a huge improvement in efficiency, a much better customer experience and considerable cost savings. Such a pity!

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Glorious Goodwood: Racing at its Absolute Best, and Broader Implications for the Racing Industry

Just back from a couple of days at Goodwood while staying in the truly beautiful South Downs National Park. Increasingly my wife and I, when we go racing, try to make it a proper trip and there is no shortage of places to stay. It amused us that both the hotel we stayed in and the restaurant where we ate were both frequented by a very well-known retired football star, now owner. He must read the same guidebooks as we do! Like us I’m sure he was raving about The Barn at Roundhurst and the excellent food at The Duke of Cumberland in Fernhurst.

The Qatar Sussex Stakes lived up to its star billing, bringing together the winners of the English, Irish and French 2000 Guineas – apparently the first time this has happened at Goodwood. The Gurkha had looked an unlucky loser in the St. James’s Palace at Royal Ascot, under one of Ryan Moore’s less impressive rides. This time however the horse was ridden much closer to the leader, Galileo Gold, and always looked as though he was going to beat him inside the final furlong. The only disappointment was that the French 2000 Guineas winner, Awtaad, failed to show his form on ground that was probably too quick. With over £1m of prize-money, it was hardly surprising that the field was top class, although one of the common themes being expressed after the race was that at the platinum level of racing the money is really just being shared out amongst a very few privileged people: the winner was owned by Derrick Smith, Mrs. J. Magnier and Michael Tabor; the second by Al Shaqab Racing; and the third, Ribchester, by Godolphin. Having said that, I doubt whether any of these care much about the actual prize-money, since the bloodstock value is what really matters these days. Great battles though between top horses such as Galileo Gold and The Gurkha are thrilling to the core racing fan and the whole racecourse was buzzing afterwards.

As always there was a fair bit of publicity about Goodwood in the national press, with interesting coverage of Charles Gordon-Lennox, Earl of March, and his passion, even obsession, with raising the total Goodwood experience year on year. Managing the 12,000 acre estate, which is completely self-funded, employing well over 600 staff full-time, and dealing with all the various commercial ventures is a huge undertaking. So he must have been delighted when last year the entire Glorious Goodwood meeting was sponsored for the first time by Qatar Racing and Equestrian Club, which is Sheikh Joaan Al-Thani’s Al Shaqab operation. They have committed to a ten-year sponsorship deal and it has already led to substantial injection of additional prize-money with around £5m on offer at this meeting. There is definitely considerable affection for the quintessentially English “Goodwood Experience”, not just amongst Qatari sheikhs but the racing public across all the levels from the privileged Richmond Enclosure (which is where my wife and I went courtesy of the ROA arrangements for their members) through to the bucolic (alcoholic?) pleasures of Trundle Hill overlooking the course, as well as the large number of picnics around the various car parks.

One aspect on which the Earl of March has been outspoken is the need for racing to “reinvent itself”, particularly through marketing, branding and strengthening its overall customer proposition. He clearly feels like many of us that racing is still not exploiting its assets and customer appeal in the way that it could do across the widest possible range of customers. This theme has also been reinforced recently by Simon Bazalgette, CEO of the Jockey Club, who is currently leading a strategic overhaul of what the Jockey Club actually stands for. At one level they are clearly a commercial success, turning over £183m last year, and that level of financial strength has enabled them to invest £415m in prize-money and improvements in facilities over the last ten years. Over 2m customers a year go through their gates, with a similar number for non-racing activities, notably pop concerts. However Mr. Bazalgette believes that the Jockey Club can raise its game hugely, and apparently is working with M&C Saatchi on exactly what the next phase of their commercial mission should be about, and how to communicate it.

It is hard not to be really optimistic and encouraged by the restlessness and strategic endeavour that Messrs. Gordon-Lennox and Bazalgette are putting into driving their racecourses forward. While I don’t think many of us were thinking like that while watching The Gurkha storm home, you cannot help but feel that the whole racing experience at the top of the sport can still be developed much further. Let’s hope that is the case and that there is a substantial trickle down in revenue and funding from it to the less exalted, day-to-day, grassroots racing.

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On NH Racing, Couch Potatoes and Collaboration with Bookmakers

Normally I’m criss-crossing the country supporting our horses, but with the dreadful winter and apparently never-ceasing soft ground it has been one of the quietest few months for ages, notwithstanding attending all four days of the Cheltenham Festival and the three of Aintree. However, since then I have to say that I have been “enjoying” the delights of sitting at home, wood burner blazing and chilled white wine at my elbow while cheering on my (mainly losing) bets at Sandown and more recently, Punchestown. So, as I knock on the door of becoming a pensioner, I’m also becoming a couch potato. Bliss!

It was absolutely terrific to see Richard Johnson finally become Champion Jockey after all those years of being runner-up to AP. There isn’t a better rider over jumps at the moment, and there certainly isn’t a nicer guy. He’s marvellous with owners and it is always a pleasure when he is riding one of our horses for any of our trainers but, obviously, mostly Philip Hobbs. Indeed we gave him his 100th winner of the recent season when He’s A Bully won for him at Wincanton. With typical modesty, when I complemented him on the ride, he said, “They’re always easy when they win”, despite our horse hanging badly over most of his fences.

Reflecting on the NH season, who would now be your top three horses? For me the performance on Thursday of Douvan would make him my top jumper. This was his 11th consecutive win, and he has won the last three by a cumulative 32 lengths, bagging all three top novice chases at Cheltenham, Aintree and now Punchestown. We have a Getaway with Anthony Honeyball, and he keeps referring to him as “Douvan”. Dream on, dream on. My second top horse would be the wonderful Thistlecrack, who waltzed home in the World Hurdle and then the Liverpool Stayers’ Hurdle, on both occasions by 7 lengths. I’ll then have three joint thirds: Annie Power (could she become the first mare to win the Champion Hurdle twice?), Don Cossack (not just for the Gold Cup but because we have a Sholokhov 2yo who we have nicknamed “Don Caster”), and then Sprinter Sacre (as well as the superb training performance by Nicky Henderson in bringing him back, and similarly My Tent Or Yours, Simonsig and Bob’s Worth).

We couch potatoes also have lots of time to read the newspapers from cover to cover. Two articles about gambling and bookmakers caught my eye. The Sunday Times Rich List goes into the category of tittle-tattle with me, but I noticed that a number of Britain’s wealthiest tycoons in the betting industry saw their collective wealth jump by almost £3bn to £19bn in 2015/16. Amazing really when you think that their normal stance is that they aren’t making money, particularly through racing. And yet the Coates family, who founded Bet365, saw profits double to £410m and their fortune increase to £1.4bn; the co-founder of Betfair, Ed Wray’s wealth jumped by £68m after the Paddy Power merger; and that almost-destitute winner of Group 1s on the Flat, Michael Tabor, the majority stakeholder in Bet Victor, added another £25m to his net worth of £600m. Never believe a bookmaker when they tell you times are tough.

While the Sunday Times article produced steam out of my ears, another in The Times I found really encouraging. When I attended the BHA strategic forum at Newbury on 1st March, Nick Rust emphasised that three of their four strategic goals for British Racing are to grow betting participation by 5% by 2018, generate £120m of extra income for the sport and increase racecourse attendance to 7m by 2020. In the last couple of blogs I have been praising Jockey Club Racecourses for their investment in facilities and prize-money and now, according to The Times, their Racecourse Media Group (RMG) (which recently negotiated the £30m racing rights deal with ITV) are facilitating plans to bring the Tote under the control of British racing. RMG have an excellent track record and indeed in 2015 ploughed back over £80m to their 34 racecourse stakeholders via profits from Turf TV, pay-TV channel Racing UK, streaming pictures to online mobile betting sites and the current deal with Channel 4.

If you’re an avid reader of the blog you’ll know that I’m highly critical of the way the Tote, as a gaming asset, has been milked by Betfred and also the dismal lack of innovation on the part of many of the retail bookmakers, particularly the non-ABP partners Ladbrokes, Coral, William Hill and Betfred. Apparently RMG is likely to broker a collaborative business model between racecourses and a number of bookmakers so that they can take the contract back over when it comes up for renegotiation in 2018. There could be significant money for racing if this collaboration were successful: when Betfred took over the Tote, they paid £265m and committed to making annual payments back into racing of around £10m. RMG intend to involve all 58 racecourses to come up with an agreement with as many bookmaking firms as possible to develop a credible alternative to Betfred’s control of the Tote. If successful it would be a really significant step forward, not just in generating more revenue for British racing but also facilitating a far more creative use of the Tote’s assets and betting possibilities, both in the UK and worldwide.

On that note, I’ll put a few more logs on the burner and pour another glass of white wine. Cheers to RMG!

I am always interested to hear your views so please do leave a comment. If you can't see the comment box at the bottom of this post then navigate to the post using the right hand navigation or click here > and scroll to the bottom of the page. Look forward to hearing your views. Thanks very much for sharing them.

2014 Prize-money – Both Good & Bad News with Arena Racing Company (ARC)

I’ve always loved Private Eye as a magazine, and have long been a follower of Lord Gnome. Much of the content has varied over the years, but as many of you will know, some themes have remained the same, with the hardy chestnuts of HP Sauce, Rotten Boroughs, Nooks and Corners, Colemanballs, Pseuds Corner …. and the immortal Glenda Slagg with her ability to argue both ways at the same time. Over the last week or two, there have been a few Glenda Slagg moments in terms of prize-money – both good and not so good.

ARC was formed from the merger of Arena Leisure and Northern Racing in 2012. They control 15 tracks and 40% of the racing calendar. The former leader of the Conservative party, Michael Howard, is chairman and Tony Kelly is the MD. The company is owned by the extremely astute Reuben brothers.

Much of the lowest grade racing in the country is under ARC’s auspices. With notable exceptions such as Doncaster, prize-money is lamentable – over 70% of the Flat races run at ARC tracks carry total prize-money of £4,000 or less. The good news though is that they have pushed up prize-money by 18% in 2013, 24% in 2014 and are now committing to a rebranding of all-weather racing, including £2m extra annual prize-money as part of an initial three-year commitment to improve the sport. 52 new Class 2 and Class 3 races are going to be included and they are launching (in conjunction with their partners Ladbrokes, Coral, 32 Red and Bookmakers.co.uk) an A/W championship series between 26th October 2013 and a new fixture on Good Friday, 18th April 2014. Horses can take part in “win and you’re in” A/W qualifiers at their Lingfield, Southwell and Wolverhampton tracks as well as at Kempton Park, owned by the Jockey Club. The Good Friday bash will have six championship categories, with each race worth £150,000, including a 7f 3yo race, 6f sprint, mile and middle distance races and a 2m marathon. It will be the richest A/W card ever staged in Europe.

Lots of people are dead against the Good Friday meeting. Traditionally there has been no racing on that day, and it is when Lambourn and Middleham hold their popular open days. Personally I thought it inevitable that this would happen, and am more than prepared to support the ARC initiative. If it raises the overall quality and prize-money throughout the winter, then that is all to the good, even though it is not a form of racing that I particularly like – not because of its being run on the all-weather so much as the dreary quality of it. I see it as just dross racing for the betting industry, but if it drives revenue and people want to support it, then why resist it? This subject will get an airing in the next blog.

So where is the bad news? Philip Freedman, Chairman of the Horseman’s Group, and Rachel Hood, President of the Racehorse Owners Association, have been working for some time, together with the authorities, on collaborative negotiations with the racecourses to secure contractual commitments linking the rapidly increasing media revenues to prize-money contribution. These negotiations have gone well ….. or at least they were doing until ARC announced, on 9th October, that they were not going to sign up to these prize-money agreements. This is a major blow, with all the key players “extremely disappointed”.

Unless there is a change of heart, this is going to put ARC at loggerheads with the industry, and may well lead to sanctions. Race fixture allocation over time can be changed so that fixtures go to the racecourses that have signed up to the contracts; bonuses such as the European Breeders’ Fund and the Racing Post Yearling Bonus Scheme can follow suit; and of course trainers and owners can vote with their feet and not support ARC courses. Collaboration has a lot going for it, but it now seems as though ARC just doesn’t want to play ball at the moment. I’m sure there will be a lot of negotiation going on behind the scenes.

Glenda Slagg would probably say: “Hats off to ARC. Can’t wait for Hunky Howard, the man in the big Chair, to put me under starter’s orders. He’s my long shot, I can tell you!! Always welcome for some late-night negotiation round at Glenda’s gaff ….. Seen the new ARC deal. What a car crash ??! Hateful Howard. Couldn’t run the Tories and can’t run a racecourse. What a loser – all bets off for me!! Send that nice John Gosden round and we’ll soon get collaboration cooking. Byeee!!”

(Get back to your blog. You’re fired. Ed.)

Aintree and The National – Grand Result for Racing

As readers of the blog will know, I’m a huge fan of Aintree and much prefer it to Cheltenham. Alas though, in recent years I’ve been going up to the Grand National meeting with an increasingly heavy heart, in view of all the controversy surrounding the course and injuries / fatalities to horses, not helped by the stance adopted by the RSPCA (Royal Society for Permanent Criticism of Aintree).

But what a result this year, and a really fantastic outcome for our sport. When all 40 runners sailed over Becher’s, the roar from the crowd was truly heart-warming. Hats off to Aintree for all the work they’d done to maintain the going, and the softening of the fence cores has clearly helped enormously, as did the far less frenetic than usual start, with a shorter run to the first fence. Without doubt, the National is the most famous race in the world, and the only time that our sport truly takes centre stage. Lots of statistics were being bandied about, such as that half the UK population bets on the race, £150m staked, 600 million people watching worldwide, etc. This certainly goes right to the heart of racing’s brand value and the aims of Great British Racing that were covered in the last blog.

The other statistic that I welcomed was that there were no more than 20 protesters at Aintree. I really hope that the BHA and all the bodies connected with racing do everything possible now to maintain the high ground in defence of National Hunt racing, and challenge the nay-sayers who argue that in some way jumping is cruel. As the Aintree changes have shown so purposefully, we’re doing everything possible to exercise our duty of care towards the animals that we all love and admire.

When I saw Frankel thrash Excelebration in the Queen Anne at Royal Ascot, I felt that was the best horse-race that I’d ever seen, or would probably ever see. But then to be present to watch the sublime performance of Sprinter Sacre destroy Cue Card and Flemenstar in the Melling Chase was to my humble eyes even better. Stupendous.

I was also interested to see the announcement from the Jockey Club that the £45m make-over at Cheltenham will go ahead straight after the 2014 Festival meeting, with the aim of completing it for 2016. There is going to be a new grandstand complex, some spectacular tiered viewing of the parade ring and much improved crowd circulation around it. As always in racing, there were a few vested interests fighting against it, but no doubt they will be adequately compensated and it certainly looks as though this investment plan is going to go forward quickly.

So with the Aintree spectacular and an imminent huge upgrade at Cheltenham, it really looks as though National Hunt racing is going from strength to strength. Having said that, I was wondering what other changes would make a real difference. I would certainly like to see much higher prize-money at the October Cheltenham meeting and really use this to kick-start the jumps season, and hopefully not clash it with Ascot’s Champions Day. At the other end of the season I’d also love to see either Ayr and / or the Sandown mixed meeting similarly revamped so that we really have a grand finale through March and into May. And then the race planners can have a look across the season and plug some of the weaker periods with bigger races as part of a high profile National Hunt series. Anyone against, please take one step forward.