There will be quite a few individuals at Royal Ascot this week for whom £17m is the rough equivalent of the small change that the rest of us put in a pot by the front door for emergencies. Racing as a whole, however, still considers £17m to be quite a lot of money and it also happens to be the size of the dent left in the sport’s finances by the Cheltenham and Aintree Festivals this year.
The results at those two meetings were, overall, very good for the punters and therefore very bad for the bookies. At Cheltenham nine of the 28 races went to the favourite, including a six-race sequence on the middle two days when the backers could do no wrong. One of the winners was Tiger Roll, probably the most popular horse in training, who compounded the bookies’ misery three weeks later when he won the Grand National.
Bookies pay a percentage of their profits on racing bets back to the sport via a mechanism known as the Levy. If their profits dip, so does the Levy. But even so there was general astonishment last month when it transpired that the 2018-19 Levy scheme had come up £17m short of expectations.
The shortfall will translate into cutbacks over the coming months: less prize money, reduced investment, lowered expectations. And while the punters, as ever, will be cheering for the favourites at Flat racing’s showpiece event, those in charge of the sport’s cashflow may be hoping for an upset or two – or even four or five – to ease the pressure.
They may well be disappointed because the trainer the punters will be backing above all others is Aidan O’Brien, a dominant force in Flat racing for two decades and someone who seems, if anything, to be tightening his grip year by year.
O’Brien is expected to field the favourite in around a third of the meeting’s 30 races, is odds-on to finish the week as the leading trainer and could easily trouble the all-time record of seven winners at a single Royal meeting, which he set in 2016.
Ryan Moore, O’Brien’s principal jockey, is around 5-2 to equal his own record of nine winners, set in 2015.
Punters will be impatient to get proceedings underway with the first of the O’Brien-trained favourites, Le Brivido, in the Queen Anne Stakes, the first race of the meeting on Tuesday. O’Brien also has the favourite for Wednesday’s feature event, the Prince of Wales’s Stakes, in Magical, while Hermosa and Ten Sovereigns, in the two big races on Friday, will also be paired in countless win doubles, currently paying out at around 5-1.
The Gold Cup, the feature event of the meeting, is one of the few when O’Brien does not have the first or second favourite. But Stradivarius, the 5-4 market leader to win the race for a second year running, is due to be ridden by the other man the bookies fear: Frankie Dettori. Moore is odds-on to be the week’s top rider and Dettori is second-favourite at 3-1. If they both have a good week, any bookie with a thumping profit at the end of day five will have earned every penny.
Any filling-in of that £17m hole, in other words, is unlikely to be much more than superficial – not that there will be any hint of incipient crisis in Berkshire itself.
Royal Ascot is, it is said, the first engagement to be inked into the Queen’s diary each year, to ensure that nothing less important can get in the way. Do not tell Donald Trump but he probably took second billing in June behind a bunch of racehorses.
The meeting has been immortalised on film and in literature, most famously in Ulysses, which James Joyce set on Gold Cup day in 1904 and littered with references to the Royal meeting’s main event. Cheltenham in March is a bigger event these days in betting terms but Royal Ascot is still the meeting with truly global recognition.
The hope of a winner at Royal Ascot is why many of the billionaire owners who dominate Flat racing get involved with the sport in the first place. It is not about the money – there are plenty of races around the world that offer more cash to the winning owner. It is about the event, with all its traditions and trappings, from the moment the Royal procession makes its way down the track before racing each afternoon.
The threatened strike on South West Trains will be a pain for many and the weather forecast, too, could be a little sunnier but the crowd and the occasion will look just as it has throughout the 67-year reign of the most racing-mad monarch since Charles II. Who knows, it might even be possible to blank out Brexit for a few precious hours at least.
