Jump owners who play the long game need better reward
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The concept of establishing Premier League meetings is a good one for Flat racing. The conferred “badge of excellence” will entice punters who reside abroad to wager on those meetings, which is the best way for racing in this country to generate more income.
The additional earnings a fixture receives if it can become a World Pool fixture is around £800,000. But no National Hunt meeting will ever be allowed into the World Pool.
In spite of the Grand National and the Cheltenham Festival being way out in front of any Flat race or meetings in this country as far as betting turnover is concerned, most punters around the world have either never heard of jump racing or would not risk their money on a horse with obstacles in its way.
Shoehorning the elite National Hunt meetings into better-funded Premier League fixtures is not going to move the dial as far as expanding revenue is concerned. And there is a concern that doing so may actually be damaging jump racing.
Since the Cheltenham Gold Cup last year, no Grade One steeplechase has attracted eight runners or more. It is an alarming statistic that lays bare the fact that the sport is on the wrong track, because clearly where the good horses run is not about the money.
And given that there is only so much prize money to go around, maybe less should be thrown at the top races and more invested in grass-roots novice hurdles?
The beginning of a steeplechaser’s career is a slow, expensive burn; a process that a declining number of owners can or want to stick at.
So rewarding those connections better when their potential chaser finishes third or fourth in a novice hurdle is going to do more to increase the number of runners in Grade One chases in three or four years’ time. It would also keep more people in the sport.
When Sir Alex Ferguson and his partners paid €740,000 (£633 million) at auction for a six-year-old gelding a month ago, they were talking about the races they could win with the horse, Caldwell Potter, not the amount of prize money.
Presumably the same goes for anyone who pays six figures for a gelding, unless they are clinically insane. Those horses also tend to end up in the same few yards, exacerbating the problem of small fields.
French and Irish prize money is way better than in the UK, and those owners influenced by that have long departed. What jump racing needs to do now is look after the owners who go through years of paltry returns to develop an old-fashioned steeplechaser.
Racing must deliver message on gambling affordability checks
The so-called “debate” on gambling affordability checks in Westminster Hall last Monday was an affront to democracy.
It became apparent that gambling minister Stuart Andrew is either not intelligent enough to engage in a debate which involves reacting to issues that are raised, or too arrogant to address the concerns of more than 100,000 voters. Or perhaps he just does not care about jobs in the horse racing industry. My back channels into Westminster assure me it is the former.
The Government may feel that it has sleepwalked too far down the road to acknowledge that the technology to carry out frictionless checks does not exist, but addicts’ markers of harm do.
Given that the bookmakers already have access to the technology that can spot the markers of harm, why are they not more vocal in this debate?
I am led to believe that most of the major online bookmakers have given up on the UK as a market to invest and expand in. It has become too much of a hassle, whereas the US is opening up.
The online bookies are now much more interested in not falling out with the UK regulator, which could have a knock-on effect abroad, rather than helping to make the case that the Government, led by the Gambling Commission, has got this one badly wrong.
Enormous credit should be given to MPs such as Philip Davies, Laurence Robertson, Peter Aldous and, dare I say it, Matt Hancock for trying to have a debate.
Unfortunately, they now know that Lucy Frazer, the minister for the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, is cloth-eared and has the skin of a rhinoceros.
It is time for racing to deliver a very clear, succinct message to the Prime Minister that a trial using markers of harm technology must be given a chance to satisfy both sides of the debate.
Anyway, in the great scheme of things, who cares? One of the best racehorse trainers, Mark Bradstock, died last week.
