Lydia Hislop on why British racing must protect the top tiers of the sport

That might sound unnecessarily alarmist at a time when eight of the 20 best racehorses currently competing around the globe are trained here and are preeminent in four of the five distance categories. It might sound unrealistic when British racecourses are facing a struggle for survival as Covid-19 continues fatally to undermine their businesses. It might sound elitist when so many owners and trainers operating below the top level are finding it hard to justify their continued participation.

But that’s the crossroads at which British racing finds itself right now. This pandemic has accelerated an issue that the industry has needed urgently to address for some time. Some will say it is not the moment to discuss this, that sheer survival is the sole priority.

On the contrary: when hard business decisions are being made, up and down the country, that will set the template for what our racing looks like in five or ten years’ time, it is precisely this juncture that demands a collective focus on what makes British racing great. It’s the horses, stupid. The best ones.

Without those horses racing regularly here, fewer people will be inspired to watch, bet on and even own horses in British racing at all. Sooner or later, that affects everyone’s business model. In ten years’ time, would ITV or any comparable broadcaster show 95 days of free-to-air coverage – and pay the sport accordingly – if we are no longer regularly producing globally relevant competition? Of course not.

There was already a problem before Covid hit. It has been accepted for many years now that Britain could not compete in terms of prize money with the richest racing nations around the world.

The Dubai World Cup, Breeders’ Cup, Melbourne Cup and Japan Cup have long flashed cash that would be unimaginable for British races. New events such as the Pegasus Cup, the Everest and, most recently, the $20m Saudi Cup have since leap-frogged most of those contests with ever more stratospheric purses.

These nouveau riche nations (in horseracing terms) have used the osmotic potential of their ample resources to persuade those with the best horses to deviate from more traditional campaigns, comprising what have historically been the best races, towards these new events and thereby confer them with greater substance. Tacitly, British racing conceded that it could not compete with these far-flung contests and comforted itself with remaining largely preeminent in Europe.

Then in 2008, France married money to tradition by securing Qatar Racing and Equestrian Club funding for its most important race, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, doubling the prize fund from €2m to €4m at one fell swoop. With a prize fund of €5m under the same sponsor for this Sunday’s renewal, it is comfortably Europe’s richest race.

By contrast, in pre-Covid Britain in 2019 the Derby was worth £1.5 million and the Champion Stakes £1.3m. Yet this is nonetheless good money for these shores. Newmarket’s Group 1 Falmouth Stakes, for instance, was run for just £200,000 last year.

Yet races don’t acquire the highest global status simply by piling the money high and calling themselves great. To qualify as a Group or Grade 1 – the highest rank of race – they must be open to all comers, meaning that buy-your-berth events like the Everest rightly don’t qualify. (Let’s not talk about how the now-open Pegasus Cup initially bypassed this criterion, inheriting fast-forwarded Group 1 status from its predecessor, because I’ll only get tetchy.)

They must also consistently attract in substantial number the world’s best horses. Put briefly, the average annual rating of the first four horses in each race over a rolling three-year period must remain sufficiently high in order for all races to retain their Group status. There is a short-term safety-net for the most historic contests but fame alone can’t save you – as Italy recently found out, in a precedent that should unsettle Britain.

These quality-control measures are pursued most strictly in Europe, traditionally the home of the world’s best horses. The Pattern, a coherent seasonal structure of races staged at Group 1, 2 and 3 level over the various distances, was founded here. In recent years, it has been the European Pattern Committee’s role to encourage other nations to mirror the rigour of their approach.

The rules of the Asian Racing Federation are based upon Europe’s and therefore almost identical, while the emergent racing continent of South America is following the same model as they start to make their mark on the international stage.

Last year, the Arc was officially the world’s best race, for the fourth time in the past five years. Britain boasted the next three in the rankings – the King George VI, Prince Of Wales’s Stakes and Eclipse, in that order – with the International equal-sixth and the King’s Stand Stakes equal-19th. Ireland’s best race, its Champion Stakes, came in equal-17th and France’s next-best race after the Arc was the Prix Ganay at equal-24th. So far, so reassuring for Britain’s position within Europe you might think.

But the unique pressures of Covid risk having broken the spell. When restrictions – lifted only this week – applied to jockeys travelling across Europe, Frankie Dettori opted to miss York’s Ebor meeting, our most prestigious Flat festival bar Royal Ascot, for the initial promise of just two rides in France. Ryan Moore was prepared to miss a fortnight of British racing for a weekend in Dublin. Any number of riders were willing to sacrifice Newmarket’s Future Champions meeting and its nine Group races next week for a ride in the Arc.

To a greater or lesser extent, individual obligations would, of course, have played a part in these decisions but the underlying lesson is that the best jockeys go where the best horses race and, now times are hard, more owners and trainers are following the money.

Ireland and France have made less drastic cuts to their Pattern-race prize money due to Covid than has Britain. France in particular has recovered its funding model more readily, with the halt called on its domestic football scene encouraging punters to bet on its racing instead and thus actually increasing its income via its highly fruitful Pari Mutuel funding model.

The resultant contrast was perhaps most starkly illustrated when Mishriff, already a Group 1 winner and trained in Newmarket by John Gosden, earned merely £20,000 less for winning Deauville’s Group 2 Prix Guillaume d’Ornano than did Ghaiyyath four days later via victory in York’s Group 1 Juddmonte International Stakes.

The latter earned the working title of “world’s best horse” by dint of beating Group 1 winners Magical, Lord North and Kameko, meaning the symbiosis between race and participants worked. But, as explained, a race must retain a critical mass of top-class horses to underpin such ratings and in Britain that very much relies on a large number of internationally minded owners not doing the math on prize money.

They have to date chosen to do this because the medium-term value of that victory in the lucrative arena of the bloodstock industry is exponentially greater than the prize money on offer. Yet the rot starts when horses that could finish third, fourth or fifth in such races instead go elsewhere. This has a knock-on negative effect on betting and, under the British funding model, spirals prize-money potential downwards. When those foundations start crumbling, the keystone comes tumbling down, too.

It should be noted that France Galop, the BHA’s equivalent across the channel, has spotted an opportunity. In recent months, they’ve started to lobby hard on the benefits of having a horse trained in France, contacting British-based owners directly with details of superior prize money.

Some eyes are focussed even further afield. It cannot be a coincidence that Aidan O’Brien is fielding his deepest Spring Carnival team yet, including a Derby and Irish Derby winner in this year’s Melbourne Cup. Usually, one might have hoped stablemate Wichita would contest the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes on British Champions’ Day rather than (to us) the relatively obscure Cantala Stakes.

There’s another powerful motivational factor that even pre-Covid was sucking British-trained horses, unlikely to win a domestic Pattern event at each level, instead to plunder French equivalents: France’s domestic thoroughbred population is not currently strong. Put crassly, their races are there for the taking – and now they’re routinely worth more than ours, too.

Since racing’s resumption in June, Britain has relied mainly on Levy Board reserves to fund its post-Covid prize money, with racecourses largely unable to contribute. There have been exceptions – purses for the Classics, Royal Ascot and other major festivals, such as York and Goodwood, were enhanced by the host racecourses and their longer-term sponsors.

Yet it is exactly those higher-profile racecourses whose businesses are most reliant on fans attending. The financial structure of British racing means that, broadly speaking, smaller racecourses derive the majority of their income from betting rather than clicking turnstiles and so, comparatively speaking, are less affected by the ongoing privations.

During the first three months of resumption, British racing’s emergency strategy was to get blood pumping to the patient in the quickest possible way. Crudely, that meant in percentage terms pruning back prize money more aggressively in Group and Listed races than lower down the food chain because the levy-generating proliferation of moderate handicaps would generate more money, more quickly and thus kick-start the industry’s recovery.

That strategy was partially reviewed from September but Pattern races have still not regained their intended levels of prize money and British values still languish below those of France and Ireland at each stratum, to an even greater degree in two-year-old races.

Should this continue to be the case, as trainers John Quinn and John Gosden have argued, Britain risks becoming no more than “a nursery for the rest of the world” via its races identifying young talent which is then sold to blossom to its full potential elsewhere.

Britain has long been a net exporter of bloodstock, selling more good horses than it buys to race here and relying on the next foal crop to replenish its resources. This is by no means a bad thing, as it oils the wheels of our domestic racing and bloodstock businesses, but it does break down if the scale and quality of the input dries up. It will be significant whether those horses purchased at Tattersalls October Book 1 Yearling sales next week begin their racing careers in Britain in the same numbers as you would usually expect.

It also becomes problematic when progressive horses start to leave these shores in sufficient number to undermine late-season races, or those they would have contested the following year, had they not been exported.

Take Ascot’s Queen Elizabeth II Stakes. In 2011, it was the second-best race in the world. Eight years later, it ranked 59th. This fall from grace is surely linked with its relocation from late September to mid-October to help create British Champions’ Day, when the ground is often disruptively soft, but there also appears to be a wider trend of decline among Britain’s miling division, with the Queen Anne and Sussex Stakes, among others, also having tumbled down the table.

Might this partly be connected with Hong Kong’s lucrative Classic Series for four-year-olds, inspiring export sales of Britain’s best eight to 10-furlong three-year-olds the preceding summer? Perhaps. This country’s emerging or foundation talent has long been vulnerable to the Next Big Thing in global horseracing – and, these days, there are a lot more of those.

There’s a problem with landing this argument, however. Understandably, the financiers will call for data to prove that a comparative lack of funding is starting to do actual harm to Britain’s global position in the sport. Sadly, by the time such incontrovertible proof exists, the damage will already have been irreparably done.

I’ll leave you with a cautionary tale. The financial crisis and political turbulence that beset Italy shortly after the turn of the century leaked into its racing industry, with its government assuming direct control of the sport via the Ministry of Agriculture. This led to a stasis of bureaucracy and ultimately resulted in prize money simply not being paid out to those who had earned it.

Overseas competitors stopped coming and the domestic industry could not sustain itself, resulting in a hammer blow to its status. Breeders quit and foal numbers plummeted. In 2006, Italy had nine Group 1s in the European Pattern. Seven years later, that had been reduced by two. By 2019, she had none. That’s how quickly a once-historic racing nation can unravel.

It didn’t prove relevant that in breeder Federico Tesio, Italy can rightfully claim one of the most influential figures in the history of the sport. Nor that it was home to the likes of Nearco, Ribot and, more recently, Rakti. Champion jockeys, Frankie and his father Gianfranco, are Italian. No matter. Along with her last Group 1, Italy lost full membership of the European Pattern Committee in 2019 and, with that, all voting rights.

Clearly, with 36 Group 1 races and data attesting that it stages Europe’s most competitive races, thereby conferring greatest value to the bloodstock industry, Britain is not an obvious or immediate candidate for such a steep decline. But the Italian precedent does demonstrate that prestige and tradition alone is not enough. Once the horses start to trickle away, the situation can quickly escalate to the point that it appears irreversible.

Let us not sleep-walk over that precipice.

Lydia Hislop is a broadcaster for Racing TV and contributing editor for Tortoise Media. She is also Chair of the British Horseracing Authority’s Flat Pattern Committee.