Cheltenham draws huge crowds but financial strife threatens Turf future
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Version 0 of 1. The sun was beaming down on the famous rolling hills enveloping a record first-day crowd as they roared home a succession of favourites in an atmosphere that seemed giddy even by the standards of the opening day of the Festival. As they rolled around the Guinness Village, gorged on lobster in the ever-mushrooming hospitality complex, or packed the steps of a new grandstand that will be fully operational by next year, this did not look like a sport with a “corrosive issue at its heart”. A total of £45m is being spent upgrading facilities to cater for demand. The number of punters travelling from Ireland has doubled from last year to 20,000. But as organisers celebrated a bumper crowd that is on course to top the record of 237,000 over four days, the Jockey Club chief executive, Simon Bazalgette, said another less immediately enthralling but vitally important battle looms. Like racing’s version of Bleak House’s endless court case Jarndyce v Jarndyce, progress towards a replacement for the Levy through which bookmakers fund the sport remains painfully slow. On Thursday, British racing will deliver its response to a government consultation to finally come up with a replacement mechanism for the annual bunfight – proposing a commercial negotiation that would result in long-term deals with bookmakers, underpinned by an independent tribunal. “With the consultation we’re further down the track than we’ve ever been. The problem is that they’ve still got to enact legislation to make it happen,” says Bazalgette, the chief executive of the owners of Cheltenham and 14 other courses. “We’ve got an election coming up in May and although the Levy replacement has cross-party support, any government coming in is going to have a priority list of things they need to do and this is probably not going to be at the top. We have to keep getting across that there is a corrosive issue at the heart of the sport that the government needs to address.” Nick Rust, the Ladbrokes director who recently crossed the tracks to become the chief executive of the British Horseracing Authority, has been tasked with finally bringing the two mutually dependent but endlessly warring sides – bookmakers on one side and racing on the other – together. Rust says it is simply common sense to deliver a system that closes a loophole that means all bookmakers licensed by the Gambling Commission now pay tax in Britain but only around half of all bets placed online contribute to the Levy. While Cheltenham week shines a light on the sport at the top end – super‑rich owners, household-name jockeys, blanket media coverage and all – he says there are signs of stress at the fringes. Without increasingly popular music nights, Rust says attendances would be down 10%, while betting on racing as a proportion of the overall total is declining and ownership is down by around 10%. “I was at Stratford yesterday and I have been to about 15 racecourses at the grassroots of our sport since I started. There are about 85,000 people who either earn their living from racing or are largely dependent on it, many of whom earn the minimum wage,” Rust says. “It’s easy to forget on days like this just how many people’s lives depend on it and what an impact it has on local communities. We need to look after them with a fair deal.” Bazalgette and Rust have sympathy with man of the moment Willie Mullins’ recent call for more prize money – though they say it should be targeted at the “bottom and middle” of the sport rather than the top end – but say that too is an argument for finally delivering a Levy replacement. “The solution to that is not to take money away from the top and give it to the bottom. Given the amount of money we have at the moment, it’s pretty much invested in the best way we can,” Bazalgette says. “The real focus has to be on getting more prize money in. The bit that’s really falling down is what the bookmakers put in through the Levy. That’s not the fault of the bookmakers, it’s the fault of the legislation.” Too often an industry guilty of failing to speak with one voice, Rust says a new tripartite arrangement between the horsemen, racecourses and the BHA will be signed next month and can provide a new platform for growth. “I’m the luckiest man alive, it’s a fantastic passion for me. But I know I’ve got to deliver. You meet people on the racing side and they soon realise you haven’t got four heads,” he says. “They may need widescreen for me and I may not be a media smoothie, but I’m someone they can work with.” |