Richard Hughes is one of the finest jockeys of the last 20 years. He has been the leading rider on the Flat for the last three years in the championship’s traditional, season-long format, and is the favourite to be the first winner of its bastardised successor, which runs from the Guineas meeting to Champions Day.
Hughes is also an articulate and engaging columnist in the Racing Post, where he explains some of the finer points of race-riding, shows a refreshing willingness to admit that, at times, he gets things wrong, and also comments on some of the sport’s wider issues.
Given his champion’s status and lifelong experience in racing, these are opinions that carry some clout. On Saturday, for instance, Hughes made it clear that he opposes any move to switch last Thursday evening’s Brigadier Gerard Stakes card at Sandown – the best evening meeting of the year by some distance – to a Saturday afternoon slot, while also suggesting that the overall standard of midweek racing is poor.
“We have saturated the sport with rubbish racing, especially midweek,” Hughes complained. “Real racing fans don’t want to go to see it because, with the exception of those who have runners, it doesn’t really mean anything to anyone. You certainly wouldn’t find me watching Kempton on a Wednesday night if I wasn’t riding there.”
Later, he added: “The whole fixture list is full of too much bad racing. It devalues everything. The more oil there is on the market, the less expensive it becomes. To increase the value of oil there needs to be less of it for sale. The same is true of racing. Less really can be more if what you get rid of is the stuff that leaves real racing fans cold.”
It could be argued that the basic premise of Hughes’s argument – that there is a headlong rush to get all the best races into a Saturday slot – is flawed. If, as seems quite possible, the July meeting at Newmarket reverts to a Wednesday-to-Friday schedule next year, then 15 of Britain’s 35 Group One contests will be run on a weekday. Is that lopsided or a reasonable balance, given that meetings such as Royal Ascot, Glorious Goodwood and the Ebor Festival largely take place midweek?
But what is most disappointing about Hughes’s view is not so much that it is the champion Flat jockey expressing it, but rather that it is shared, to some extent at least, by many in the sport. Cut out the “rubbish”, so the theory goes, and concentrate on the good stuff. Most of racing’s perennial problems – with field sizes, prize money and the like – will be solved at a stroke.
It is beguiling in its simplicity – and potentially disastrous too, not least for many of Hughes’s colleagues in the weighing room. They can only dream of competing regularly for Group-race prize money and depend instead on their riding fees in the “rubbish” racing he derides. Hughes’s three titles, for that matter, also owed a good deal to what he might well see as “bad” racing.
While midwinter all-weather evening meetings are not to everyone’s taste, meanwhile, Jack Hobbs, a 7-1 chance for Saturday’s Derby, is the latest example of a potential Group One horse who made his debut on just such a card, at Wolverhampton in late December. Those who were paying attention may have backed him to win next time at Sandown in April, or even at a fancy price for the Classic. These meetings are at the bottom of Flat racing’s pyramid, but if you remove the first few layers of bricks, you just end up with a smaller pyramid, with fewer opportunities for everyone.
If the oil dries up, the world will stop. Racing, though, is not a necessity. It is entertainment, with a wide variety of consumers. Even within one of its major customer groups – the owners – the range runs from multi-billionaire sheikhs with hundreds of horses to enthusiasts with a leg in one. Some of those in the latter group will invest a greater proportion of their disposable wealth into racing than Sheikh Mohammed, and they will do so in the hope of winning any race at all, even one that the champion jockey thinks is rubbish.
Racegoers, of course, are another vitally important sector, with total attendance above 5.5 million last year. On average, every one of those spectators spends at least a decent two-figure sum on their day out, and in some cases a good deal more.
Yet the majority of racegoers attend a meeting once or twice each year. They are the sport’s visible audience but thankfully not the only one, because there is another significant customer group for racing – one which Hughes and many other jockeys, trainers, owners and administrators often seem to ignore as if it simply is not there. It is the punters who bet on racing. They probably spend only a little on their hobby each day, but they do so regularly and reliably, and there are a great many of them, too.
Hughes might not be interested in some of our midweek racing but there are thousands of regular punters who are. Bookmakers do not fork out several thousand pounds per race in media rights payments to show the action in their shops because it makes them feel warm and fuzzy inside. They do it because there is money to be made, some of which will find its way back to racing via the Levy.
The Derby will draw a huge crowd to Epsom on Saturday, and rightly so, since it is one of the grandest and most historic events in any sport. It is also the most open Derby for several years, which will increase its appeal to spectators and punters both on the track and elsewhere, and should guarantee it a place in 2015’s top five races by turnover.
But there are meetings at Brighton, Catterick and Hamilton this week that will serve a purpose, too. They can’t all be Classics, and the races that the Flat’s champion jockey dismisses as “rubbish” are simply a different grade of the sport, to serve a different market.
