The confusion surrounding Future Champions Day at Newmarket in October appeared no closer to a resolution on Wednesday night, with the racecourse insisting it has presented two possible options for its mid-October schedule to the British Horseracing Authority, while the BHA could say only that it had “received a proposal from Newmarket in the last 24 hours”, but not how long it would need to consider it.
As a result, the date when Newmarket will stage both the Dewhurst Stakes, the most significant and prestigious two-year-old race in the calendar, and the Fillies’ Mile, another of the Group One highlights of its season, remains unclear. The only certainty is that the Group One Middle Park Stakes, which also formed part of Future Champions Days last season, will move out of the congested mid-October schedule to be run on 26 September, giving the best juvenile colts the opportunity to contest the Middle Park and Dewhurst.
The decision to stage Future Champions Day in 2014 only 24 hours before the Champions Day card at Ascot in mid-October was described as “another big leap forward” for the climax to the Flat season when it was announced by the BHA in March 2013. Yet the new card did not attract the media coverage and television audience that would normally be expected for a fixture with three Group One events.
The decision to change the distance of the Group One Prix Jean-Luc Lagardère in early October from seven furlongs to a mile, removing an obvious clash with the seven-furlong Dewhurst Stakes, was greeted with similar delight by the BHA this week as a chance to stage the season’s top juvenile event six days earlier, on Saturday 10 October. Newmarket, however, is already due to race on 10 October, when the Cesarewitch, one of the season’s most historic handicaps, is the feature race on the card. It cannot stage a 13- or 14-race card, so a simple shift of Future Champions Day to the Saturday slot would effectively remove a meeting from Newmarket’s fixture list and leave several races with significant prize funds with nowhere to go.
“I’m proud of what we achieved in 2014,” Amy Starkey, Newmarket’s managing director, said this week. “It wasn’t that it didn’t work for us or anything like that. [An attendance of] 10,607 is something we were proud of, but the change to the distance of the Lagardère obviously opens up the potential to relook at the Dewhurst. It would be remiss of us not to look at all the options.
”What we created in 2014 is 10 great days over the autumn. We invested over £10m in prize money in the year and £4m in the autumn season alone, and we’ve staged new and existing races that it would be a shame to lose. Where would we put them all? Things like the [£60,000] EBF fillies’ nursery, the [£100,000] open heritage handicap [on Cesarewitch day], the [Group Three] Cornwallis Stakes and we’ve got a new Tattersalls Book 3 [sales] race.
“There’s a lot of races and prize money and we don’t want to lose those to the industry. We are working towards staging 39 race days this year and [losing a day] is not something that we are in a position to do. We’ve submitted a paper to the BHA and we have presented them with two options, so the ball is now very much in their court.”
Starkey declined to comment on the detail of Newmarket’s two options to resolve the issue, while on Wednesday the BHA was unwilling to do anything more than acknowledge receipt of the proposals. Given the track’s determination not to sacrifice a meeting, however, it seems the BHA has been presented with a choice between leaving Future Champions Day where it is, or sanctioning an additional card at Newmarket on Sunday 11 October, probably with the Fillies’ Mile as its Group One feature event.
Extending Newmarket’s programme across the weekend could have knock-on effects, not least for Goodwood, which is due to stage its final meeting of the year the same afternoon and is currently the only British track with a Flat fixture on that day.
Goodwood draws many of its runners from the same, relatively small, pool of high-end horses as Newmarket and a significant number of potential runners are likely to be trained in Flat racing’s headquarters too. A trip to West Sussex could lose much its appeal for owners and trainers based in Newmarket and the surrounding area if there is an alternative target close to home.
As so often in racing, there may be internal politics involved in the process too. The BHA has its offices in London but the Jockey Club is based in Newmarket and still owns property and land in the area worth many millions of pounds, in addition to Newmarket’s two racecourses and several more of the country’s leading venues.
There is a strong sense of loyalty to the town and racecourses in the Jockey Club’s Rooms on Newmarket High Street, where many would see the Rowley Mile as Flat racing’s spiritual home. The loss of the Champion Stakes to Ascot in 2011 to become the centrepiece of Champions Day was, for some, a wounding blow to Newmarket’s status that has yet to heal. Against that background, the loss of a fixture to further accommodate the BHA’s plans for a grand autumn finale would not be well received.
