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Racecourses - Fight or Flight
Maybe the latest budget wasn’t as bad as it could have been for the gambling industry though you suspect the chancellor has left some biscuits in the barrel in place for the next raid on as one news outlet suggested, bookies and bankers, two of the most unpopular businesses in the country.
Anyone that’s taken the time to click on this blog will know that it’s the knock-on effect to horseracing that we’ll all feel not sympathy for bookies or bankers. I don’t profess to know the figures but do know that every betting shop that closes is going to be a loss of tens of thousands of pounds in media rights going back into the sport which is going to hurt all of us that love it.
What makes UK racing so special is the unique nature of our racecourses and how diverse they all are not to mention accessible for the majority of the country, most of us aren’t too far from one. I’ve written blogs about the next bit before so won’t labour the point but racecourses are horseracing’s biggest asset for nurturing new life-long fans. I have never taken anyone racing that hasn’t enjoyed the day.
In the last couple of decades of a sport awash with media rights money there have been two types of racecourse, or rather racecourse management. Those that have made it their priority to get people to attend, by whatever method and those who haven’t bothered if anyone turns up, even shamelessly making statements to that effect. Worse still, when people did venture to the course were met with the contempt of ludicrously high entry costs, facilities closed, generally offering a low quality experience for extortionate prices. Who’d go back to anywhere they’d been made to feel like an inconvenience having paid top whack to attend?
This is now fight or flight time for racecourses. Those that haven’t considered attracting people to their meetings as part of their business model for the last couple of decades are going to need to get their arses into gear or go to the wall. Sadly, you suspect that several of those that fall into that category already have a plan B stashed away somewhere, probably involving bricks and mortar rather than promotion, which is tragic. Every single racecourse that’s cast asunder due to neglect is a jewel lost from British racing’s crown.
However, the glimmer of hope would be that there’s a positive by-product over the horizon. Racecourses are going to need to strive to live up to horseracing’s often trumpeted billing of the second most popular spectator sport after football and get people back on the turf, pull out all the stops if they are to survive. Maybe media money payments linked on a sliding scale to attendance set realistically for each course and meeting would be an incentive?
Horseracing could emerge from these troubled times stronger and more self-sufficient building a revitalised and engaged fan base from the ground up. There’s no time to waste as no amount of handwringing is going to change anything politically nobody else is going to save our sport, we have to do it ourselves.
Simon Nott
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