A winner of the World Series of Poker is said to have observed that poker is not a card game played by people but a people game played with cards. When the stakes are at their highest, and at Royal Ascot above all, Flat racing can feel much the same. For the next five days it will be a people game played with horses.
On the face of it, this is nothing new. From its earliest days in the first half of the 18th century, the pinnacle of horse racing has been the domain of a super-rich elite. The list of winning owners in the Derby and Ascot’s Gold Cup, first run in 1780 and 1807 respectively, could be a crib sheet for students of social and economic history.
For a century or more, both races were dominated by the landed aristocracy, men who lavished a great deal more love and money on their horses than they did on the labourers working their estates. New players slowly emerged to take them on as money made during the industrial revolution or in the colonies - the Joel family’s riches from South African mines, for instance - found its way to the racecourse. American billionaires like Raymond Guest and Nelson Bunker Hunt were major owners in the 1960s, while Robert Sangster, the heir to a immense pools fortune, teamed up with John Magnier and Vincent O’Brien to dominate the turf in the 1970s.
Magnier, of course, is still a player at the top table, and a legacy of Sangster’s investment is the long list of champion racehorses and sires that have emerged from their Ballydoyle base with a new O’Brien in charge. Sangster, though, could not compete with the oil wealth which emerged from Dubai, Saudi Arabia and most recently Qatar, building strings of a size that would have seemed unthinkable 50 years ago.
Through all the social, industrial and economic upheaval of the last two centuries, British racing has survived and flourished by attracting immensely rich individuals from one generation to the next to invest in bloodstock, and the priceless asset that has kept the super-rich coming back for more is its heritage. You can win a Derby in many countries, but you can win the Derby only in Britain. And when it comes to Royal Ascot, there is quite simply nothing like it anywhere in the world.
It requires extraordinary wealth to be a player at the Royal meeting. Anyone who needs to count the cost would be better off trying to compete in a less expensive pursuit like Formula One. But it is worth every cent if it allows an owner to feel first among equals at this annual gathering of the global elite.
This time the heavy-hitters will be a mixture of established names like Magnier, Dubai’s ruler Sheikh Mohammed and the Saudi Prince Khalid Abdullah – and the new enthusiasts from Qatar’s ruling al-Thani family, who have accelerated from a standing start to a combined strength of several hundred horses in scarcely the time it takes for a colt foal to reach its Classic season.
The importance of Qatari investment in British racing was further underlined last week when Qipco, a private investment company owned by Sheikh Fahad al-Thani and his brother Sheikh Hamad, the prime movers behind the Qatar Racing string of horses, extended its sponsorship of the British Champions Series to 2024. Said to be worth at least £50m over the next decade, which makes it the biggest sponsorship deal in British racing’s history, the contract also includes a significant bump to the prize money for the 1,000 Guineas and 2,000 Guineas, both of which will now be worth £500,00, and a stated intention that the total prize fund for Champions Day at Ascot in October will be worth £5m by the end of the deal. Qipco’s status as an official partner of Ascot - a common-or-garden sponsor being deemed as too commercial for the Queen’s own racecourse - has also been extended to 2024 and it will have “branding rights” on two days at this week’s Royal meeting.
So far so traditional. British racing appears to have hooked its next generation of billionaires. But the latest deal follows close behind a huge contract, also for 10 years, to turn Glorious Goodwood into the Qatar Goodwood Festival and to redefine the Flat season for the jockeys’ championship to run from the Qipco-sponsored Guineas meeting to the Qipco-sponsored Champions Day, thus taking out nearly two months of action.
A £50m investment is, on the face of it, unalloyed good news for a sport that never tires of claiming to be woefully underfunded and the reaction from the British Horseracing Authority and the racecourses concerned has been predictably euphoric. It has all been faintly reminiscent of a scene in The Simpsons when Homer’s long-lost, millionaire half-brother tell him that he wants to put him on the payroll at $200,000 a year. To which Homer replies: “And I want to let you!”.
But the latest Qipco investment is not just the biggest or longest sponsorship deal that racing has ever seen. It is very different in its structure too. For one thing it is not intended as an advertisement. The rest of the world is not being invited to buy a piece of Qipco, while Sheikh Fahad himself was at pains to stress when the deal was unveiled that Qipco is a private enterprise, “operating independently” from the state of Qatar, which sponsors both Glorious Goodwood and Arc weekend in Paris.
The same Qatar is, of course, under immense and continuing scrutiny over its acquisition of the 2022 World Cup and the shocking conditions in which an army of migrant workers is building the venues at which it might, or might not, take place. The fallout is likely to increase as the FBI continues to investigate Fifa’s endemic corruption, which could be one reason why Qipco seems so keen on 10-year deals. In a year or two racing might be one of the few friends that Qatar and its ruling al-Thani family have left.
But above all, these multi-million pound deals are an abrupt departure from the billionaire’s traditional route into British racing: via horses. Both Qatar Racing and Al Shaqab Racing, the main operation of Sheikh Joaan al-Thani which employs Frankie Dettori as its main jockey, are buying plenty of horses too, of course. The last fortnight has seen several battles between both these operations and Sheikh Mohammed’s Godolphin to acquire any promising two-year-olds with Ascot entries that they missed at the yearling sales.
It is not just horses, though. Qipco in particular is buying into British racing’s foundations and structure too, via 10-year deals that involve several of the most important tracks. The BHA itself is deeply indebted to Qipco since its cherished Champions Series and Champions Day would not have got off the ground without its support.
Whether this will be positive for British racing in the medium to long term remains to be seen. Will the next generation of billionaires after this one be tempted in if many of the fixtures and fittings belong to somebody else? It is also another example of the trend among major tracks to turn away from the Levy and betting as a primary revenue stream towards alternatives that serve their own interests but not necessarily those of the sport as a whole.
Attention will turn to the track at the Royal meeting, as Flat racing’s superpowers vie for ascendancy and, perhaps, a place in the Royal procession. It will be a surprise if £50m does not guarantee that, at least.
The evidence of Qipco’s immense investment in racing, meanwhile, will be written across Britain’s Flat season for a decade at least. This is not merely an advertisement. Ten years has the permanence of a tattoo. It may turn out to be a match made in heaven but there are few things that cause as much regret as the tattoo that seemed like a wonderful idea at the time.
