The Stewards’ Cup will return to the programme at Goodwood next summer while the Sussex Stakes three days earlier will become the sixth £1m race in the British calendar after the course announced a 10-year sponsorship deal with Qatar on Monday for the five-day Glorious Goodwood meeting.
Rebranded as the Qatar Goodwood Festival, the track’s showpiece event will receive significant increases to the prize funds for seven Group One and Group Two events, while Qatar will guarantee a prize fund of at least £500,000 for any Group Two event which achieves an upgrade to Group One status.
In all, £4.5m in prize money will be on offer at next season’s Glorious Goodwood, with no race worth less than £20,000. The Qatar Stewards’ Cup, controversially renamed the 32Red Cup last year under a one-year deal with a casino games and betting firm, will be worth £250,000, while the fund for the consolation event for horses missing the cut for the six-furlong handicap will rise to £75,000.
Lord March, Goodwood’s owner, said that last year’s agreement to remove the name of one of the sport’s most popular and historic races from its programme “maybe wasn’t our best decision”. He also made it clear that there will be no attempt to force either the media or racegoers to refer to the meeting by its new name rather than as ‘Glorious Goodwood’.
The renaming of the Stewards’ Cup “was a decision we had to make at the last minute”, March said, “and we were very happy with it at the time. I listened to what everyone said and I think they had a fair point. I’m very keen on branding and how things are presented and on reflection I think that maybe it wasn’t our best decision. We shouldn’t have got ourselves into that position really. Those last-minute decisions are often not necessarily the best, but we’re in a different place now.”
The value and length of the deal with Qatar should help to make Glorious Goodwood in late July a more significant competitor for both Ascot, which stages the Royal meeting in mid-June, and York, which hosts the Ebor Festival in mid-August.
The Group Two King George Stakes over five furlongs, with a prize fund increased from £100,000 to £300,000, will be worth more next year than last season’s Group One Nunthorpe Stakes at York over the same trip, while the £1m prize fund for the Sussex Stakes is more than the combined value of Royal Ascot’s most prestigious Group Ones at a mile, the St James’s Palace Stakes and the Queen Anne Stakes. A £400,000 increase in the prize for the Group One Nassau Stakes at 10 furlongs, from £200,000 to £600,000, will mean that it is a serious rival for the 12-furlong Yorkshire Oaks less than three weeks later, which was worth £325,000 in 2014.
Adam Waterworth, the course’s managing director, said that he hopes to attract more runners from Europe and beyond, while the seven-furlong Lennox Stakes, with a prize fund which will double to £300,00, is a candidate for an upgrade to Group One status in the near future.
“The prize money levels we are offering really do stand comparison against any races,” Waterworth said. “The £1m Qatar Sussex Stakes puts us right up among the most valuable mile races in the world, never mind the UK.
“The most exciting bit for me is that this is the beginning of a 10-year agreement and we can work with Qatar to really build it up. The race that I’ve always been on record as saying we would like to get up there is the Qatar Lennox Stakes [because] as we’re all aware, there is no seven-furlong Group One in this country. It’s a gap I would love to fill on behalf of British racing.”
The deal runs up to and beyond football’s 2022 World Cup, which is scheduled to take place in Qatar. The bidding process which awarded the tournament to Qatar remains controversial, along with the tournament’s proposed timing at the height of summer, while the poor pay and dangerous conditions endured by migrant workers building the stadiums to stage it have also attracted widespread criticism.
March, however, does not believe that the association with Qatar will have any complications for Goodwood. “I think there are always sides to everything,” he said, “but there’s been such a relationship between Qatar and Britain over the last 100 years.
“This is a pure sponsorship deal. There’s a shared passion for horses, so I think it’s the right thing for us to be doing in terms of British racing and the racing public.”
Boxing Day racing
• Friday’s Guardian will include the Kempton card, featuring the King George VI Chase, plus our preview of chasing’s midwinter championship
