The Jockey Club achieved the impossible on Tuesday morning. In fact, it did so twice before lunchtime. First, having spent as long as any of us can remember insisting that British racing’s rich heritage is “priceless” and safe in its hands, it put a price on it, as it announced a proposal to sell Kempton Park to a housing developer. Then, as news of its proposal spread, it managed to do a second extraordinary thing: unite a notoriously disjointed sport in almost unanimous opposition to its plans, for Kempton at least.
Of course there is more to the scheme than simply cashing in on the land value of Kempton’s 200-acre site in south-west London, close to the M25 and M3 and with its own station serving Waterloo in less than an hour. The headline on the Jockey Club’s press release on Tuesday announced a “10-year plan to invest at least half a billion pounds into British racing”, including the construction of a new all-weather racecourse on some of its land in Newmarket. Sandown, which will be the new home of the King George VI Chase, one of the most popular and historic races in the National Hunt calendar, will also get a multimillion-pound makeover.
The plans for Newmarket and Sandown are sensible and positive. The price tag, however, is the end of racing at Kempton, the track where horses such as Arkle, Mill House, Desert Orchid and Kauto Star have inspired a passion for National Hunt racing in generations of racing fans.
That, at least, was the line being pushed by Simon Bazalgette, the Jockey Club’s chief executive. It has, he insists, maxed out its current lines of credit, and can afford to execute its 10-year plan only if Kempton succumbs to the bulldozers. “Some people”, he conceded at one point, will feel that the price is too high.
Many, many people would be much closer to the truth. Kempton, like plenty more tracks around the country, only sees a proper crowd on two or three days each year, but these tend to be days that spectators never forget. They remember the horses, the winners, the sights and sounds and the people who shared the day with them. And the King George itself is not just another big race. Its date is synonymous with celebration, with families joining together, and its venue was woven into the fabric of the sport long before most of us were born.
Of course, racing is a business too, and sentiment alone has never been enough to keep a racecourse open if the numbers do not add up. Kempton staged 70 meetings in 2016, but only 13 were over jumps and the remaining 57 attracted an average of barely 1,500 paying spectators. Just 317 people turned up for a card in February, and 20% of its entire annual attendance of 153,000 was accounted for by the two-day King George meeting.
This is not, however, the profile of a loss-making track. The big days will make handsome profits, more than enough to cover the lesser jumping meetings, while the Flat meetings pay their way via media rights payments from off-course betting. But it does not make as much money, or from Flat racing’s point of view, as much sense, as an all-weather track in Newmarket.
For jump racing’s fans and supporters, though, the loss of Kempton, if it proceeds to plan, will be a terrible wrench. It is a historic course which has played a significant role in the growth of National Hunt racing throughout the latter half of the 20th century into the hugely popular and significant sport it is today.
With that in mind, many will question how the Jockey Club can square its decision to bulldoze an iconic jumping track and spend a good deal of the money on the home of Flat racing with the commitment in its Royal Charter to act “for the long term good of British racing” as a whole. It is easy to make a business case that the scheme is in the long-term interests of Jockey Club Racecourses, but that is not the same thing at all, even if Bazalgette seemed to assume during Tuesday’s press conference that the two are synonymous.
He also declined an invitation to put a figure on the total value of the Jockey Club’s assets, which include several thousand acres of land in Newmarket, another 500 acres in Lambourn – where all stables, Flat and jumps, will rue the loss of Kempton – plus property and other holdings in Newmarket. The paintings by Stubbs alone which hang on the walls of the Jockey Club Rooms would cover the cost of a new racecourse, yet Bazalgette insists that the Club cannot – or will not – borrow to fund its investment.
The initial reaction on social media and racing forums as the news spread that Kempton’s days are probably numbered was astonishment, closely followed by anger. A concerted campaign to persuade the Jockey Club to think again will surely follow before there is any general acceptance that the closure of Kempton is either necessary or inevitable.
