Thirty years ago this week, after Desert Orchid had winged up the Cheltenham hill as if auditioning for a role as Pegasus, the Observer’s Hugh McIlvanney noticed something unusual: everywhere he looked tears were being shed by people who didn’t normally cry.
“The flood of emotion was so extraordinary that it invited us to wonder how many human champions, let alone horses, have ever commanded such undiluted devotion from the British public,” he wrote after Dessie’s stunning Gold Cup victory, lauding the horse as the embodiment of what makes racing “an irresistible sport to so many”.
But while 260,000 spectators will be at Cheltenham this week, hoping to swell their wallets and bladders while revelling in what McIlvanney rightly reckoned was the best week’s racing in the calendar, the sport has clearly lost some of its allure. Average attendances at racetracks in general have fallen by 7.8% since 2015. Field sizes are dropping. New owners are reluctant to enter racing. Prize money away from the big festivals is flatlining. And now forthcoming research from academics at the University of Liverpool Management School suggests the picture is bleaker than thought.
Examining more than 23,000 British race days between 2002 and 2018 in microscopic detail – including the size and quality of every race, every attendance, every bit of prize money, the weather and a whole lot more – allowed it to better understand racing crowds. So when England’s footballers played a World Cup or European Championship game, for instance, attendances at a Flat fixture run at the same time typically fell by 20%. Light rain, meanwhile, typically reduced crowds by 8%, while on very wet days they fell by 12.5%.
More importantly, all this number crunching allowed it to answer a fundamental question: how had attendances for an equivalent race in 2002 changed by 2018? Unsurprisingly, while numbers for the Cheltenham Festival, Royal Ascot and other big events held up, expected attendances at a jumps meeting with the same characteristics (weather, prize money and so on) were lower by 25.3% in 2018 compared to 2002 – a decline that has steepened. That decline, incidentally, was a little less pronounced on the Flat but even worse for all-weather racing.
As the academics pointed out, there are 27.3% more race fixtures nowadays compared to 2002. Yet over the same period the number of active horses has gone up by only 12.3%. Given that the times horses race each year on average has barely changed, that has led to another problem – falling field sizes – which they showed led to less interest in the sport and less betting on it.
Pressure on prize money also looks likely given the expected closures of bookmakers’ shops after the reduction in fixed-odds betting terminal stakes from £100 to £2 is introduced next month. Indeed the Arena Racing Company group of racecourses has cut prize money – resulting in the boycotts which saw Lingfield feature four races with only two runners each last week. No wonder the academics warn that racing risks “becoming non-sustainable at its present scale”.
Part of the drop in racing attendances, as my colleague Chris Cook notes, is down to the decline of the betting ring. Once upon a time any serious gambler would feel obliged to go to the track, pick up morsels of gossip, and obtain the best prices. Nowadays the ring is weak and professional punters are betting online. And why go to the track when every race is available on the TV?
Racing is also a victim of wider societal trends. As David Forrest from the University of Liverpool points out, a sport in which the action only takes up a small proportion of the time at an event “was always going to make it vulnerable to changes in preferences over how leisure is spent”. Cricket unlocked a latent demand for shorter but intense events with the T20 format. But racing can hardly hope to rustle up an equivalent.
More controversially, the academics suggest that a growing concern for animal welfare is also a factor in racing’s decline. While praising the British Horseracing Authority for bringing in safety measures that have led to falling fatality rates, they point out that 27.2% of all admissions to national hunt fixtures were to race days where a horse was killed – with the impact higher at big meetings. “Therefore,” they add, “the risk that a spectator will be present at an event where a horse dies is rather high and likely to be a deterrent to attendance.”
Incidentally, McIlvanney was rarely more powerful than when writing about the death of Lanzarote in the 1977 Gold Cup. As he put it: “To see the brave light in his eye snuffed out so abruptly, champion to carcass in one shifting stride, was an experience to make the raucous human turmoil at Cheltenham, the betting and drinking and guessing and lying, all that marvellous nonsense that eddies through the place every March, seem like an intrusive side show. There was an emptiness that couldn’t be measured by the hand in the pocket.”
Everyone hopes that the measures the BHA has put in place at Cheltenham following six deaths at the Festival in 2018 – including the need for each horse to see a vet before it competes, a fence being repositioned and horses only allowed to run once – will allow the focus to solely be on four days of compelling drama. Yet in the longer term, racing’s myriad looming problems don’t appear easy to solve.
