New Year’s Resolution for the Racing Industry: Bring in 1,000+ Horses and Retain More Owners

Hope everyone has enjoyed (?) the Christmas festivities and New Year’s Eve. One of our owners commented after our 2m novice chaser, Future Gilded, ran at Plumpton, “If only we could become racehorses” …. go for one 5-minute run and lose 16kg of weight, which is what Frankie did. May all your dietary resolutions be successful.

Anyway, just before Christmas I saw a number of comments that really had me thinking more seriously about resolutions. The first was in the Racing Post under the headline “Crisis mounts as flood of races hit by small fields”. David Williams of Ladbrokes painted a gloomy picture when he said, “The reasons for the small field sizes are complex, but the impact will be painfully straightforward: recreational punters will look elsewhere for their betting entertainment”, while Robin Mounsey of the BHA commented, “We’ve already stated this issue (field sizes) is our top priority. We have already announced a range of initiatives designed to address the situation, but that is not the end of it. We continue to focus on the issue and it will remain a priority for some time.” Completely agree with both of these comments – finding solutions to the problem has to be right at the heart of racing’s overall strategy and operational planning for the future.

But what to do about it? Personally I believe that there should be open acknowledgement of the problem, and then a clear decision taken by racing to resolve its central strategic dilemma. For a number of years, and particularly through the recession, there has been a steady decline in the numbers of both owners and horses in training. That has coincided with a significant increase in the number of races within the overall racing calendar, at a time when all-weather racing has grown considerably. Basically there are just not enough horses to go around and make races sufficiently competitive, with eight or more runners.

So strategically the industry either accepts a contraction so that there are fewer races (and therefore less revenue), or it pushes for an expansion in the horse population (with significant financial gains across all the stakeholders). I know what my preferred outcome would be – go for growth and expansion by making a number of fundamental changes across the whole racing spectrum. I would love to see racing’s new year resolutions aligned to that statement.

This is clearly a multi-layered and complex problem to solve, which is why another comment in December also caught my eye. It came on Twitter from John Basquill, of whom I have no knowledge. He said:

“Experience the joy of horse-ownership by paying a stranger two grand a month to phone sporadically and describe an array of equine ailments.”

Indeed, this stopped me in my tracks. If I were involved in the “training of trainers”, I’d run a workshop on all the implications of this comment, because in many ways it goes right to the heart of the problem. For too many owners, the level of engagement and return on investment just doesn’t add up. That shows in all the statistics on British racing to do with the horrible term, “owner churn rate”. Every year, hundreds if not thousands of owners leave the sport, never to return. Racing doesn’t really know why they leave, and this ought to be a prime target for research. If we want more horses we clearly need more owners but, just as importantly, to keep current owners in the sport. To do that they need genuinely to experience “the joy of horse ownership”.

And I think there is an enormous amount that can be done in racing to help them obtain that experience. I will revisit that again during the year, as the Owners for Owners new year resolution.

May you all be lucky and have a great 2015.

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Lamborghinis, Bingo and Beer – and Encouraging News on the Prize-Money Front. Plus a Few Reflections on the Cheltenham Festival

If you didn’t already know it, you can tell I’m a retiree because I watched the budget live, and was extremely pleased with some of the announcements made by the Chancellor, George Osborne. I suspect I won’t raid my pension pot too quickly for the Lamborghinis, but not surprisingly, it may well help fund a couple of new horses for the Autumn. We’re planning to buy one with both Charlie Longsdon and Philip Hobbs during the Spring / Summer – if you’re interested in joining either or both of these new partnerships, please let me know. I didn’t really mind the Chairman of the Conservative Party taking the mickey with his “beer and bingo” tweet, but I did celebrate the budget with a few pints of Donningtons’ Old Grobbler in the Plough at Ford.

However, the really encouraging news in the Budget from the horseracing industry’s perspective was a clear commitment from the Government that it intends to address the key issue of the levy and racing’s funding. The levy is going to be extended to cover offshore bookmakers (which ought to bring c. £25m back into racing over the next year or so) and a “Racing Right” will be introduced, which can readily be enforced as part of levy reform. As an example and putting this into context, over 60% of betting with William Hill is now offshore. It significantly boosts their profits but does nothing for racing. That will change under the new regime, which will now be worked on in detail by the Government, in conjunction with racing’s stakeholders.

In the past I have been quite critical of the BHA, but I think they have done an excellent job here. One of our owners is Steve Harman, Chairman of the BHA, and I know that he has put considerable effort into developing stronger relationships between the BHA and key politicians. The Budget announcements clearly signal that we now have much greater Government support for our industry. This is a significant step forward, and in many ways a necessary precondition for levy reform. I am hoping that Steve will write a blog for us in the not too distant future, covering some of these issues.

Also in March, another organisation of which I have been critical in the past – Arena Leisure Company – decided to end their stand-off with the Horsemen’s Group and sign a three-year deal, underpinned by the BHA, which should increase their prize-money by 25%.

So at the moment it looks as though there will be an excess of £123m of prize-money for 2014. This is a record amount and shows what can be done by more proactive lobbying and negotiation.

Not that I’m going to stop being critical – an immediate target being the five courses that haven’t signed up for the Horsemen’s Group Prize-Money Agreement: Catterick, Hexham, Plumpton, Redcar and Towcester. Hopefully they will be shamed into action. If not, as owners, we should stop sending our horses there.

Finally, a few reflections on the Cheltenham Festival:

• Happiest trainer award: must go to our trainer Jamie Snowden for gaining his first Festival win. An experiment was conducted at the Festival: heart monitors were put on a trainer, an owner and a jockey to see what happened to their pulse rate. When the result of the stewards’ enquiry came through and the race was awarded to Present View, Jamie’s was 196. There were lots of ribald tweets and emails afterwards about what else might cause his pulse rate to reach these heights.

• Unhappiest trainer award: alas, must go to Martin Keighley whose Any Currency was beaten in a photo finish by Balthazar King, trained by another of our trainers, Philip Hobbs. He provided the TV image of the meeting as the frustration spilled over and he threw his race programme to the ground in disgust.

• Oddest quote award: Michael O’Leary, when he said, “I couldn’t care a rat’s backside what people will think or say”. Anyone who has flown Ryanair well understands this. But this was in the context of the doping investigation at Philip Fenton’s yard, and his horse Last Instalment running in the Gold Cup.

• Quirkiest image award: to the Racing Post reporter who said that being in the Guinness Village reminded him of penguins keeping warm in the Arctic: hardly seeming to move, but somehow finding their way from the cold outer edges to the warm and cosy centre, and then back out again.

• Best horses award: a three-way photo finish for me between Sire De Grugy and the joy of the Moore and Preston families; Vautour for the scintillating way that he won the Supreme Novices; and the beautifully laid-back More Of That in the World Hurdle. Mind you, there were a few more horses who should probably win awards for bailing me out on the betting front!

• Stingy b******s award: to Cheltenham Racecourse itself, for daring to be so greedy that they charged Owners for Owners £90 for additional owners’ badges, just so that we could stand in the paddock for one race. We thought the figure was £75 but it was increased even further on Gold Cup day when Shantou Magic ran in the Martin Pipe. Not even a free cup of tea! I think I’m going to write to Cheltenham asking when they intend to introduce a soup kitchen for impoverished owners. We invest so much money, and to be treated like this at the NH Olympics is an absolute disgrace.

On to Aintree now. It’s just a pity that Doncaster and the start of the Flat intervenes with such a whimper.

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.