The entries are out for the Unibet Champion Hurdle and have left David Ord fearing for the future of the two-mile hurdling division.
I don’t want to come over as being obsessed by the Quality Jump Racing Review Group, or QJRRG to the kids.
Last week I touched on their five aims to “strengthen the performance of British jump racing at the top end of the pyramid”.
Then this week the Unibet Champion Hurdle entries landed. Now for once this isn’t a domestic issue. If there’s a IQJRRG across the Irish Sea they may need to take a look. But what has happened to the two-mile hurdling division? Where’s the fresh blood year on year?
In recent seasons it’s dried up.
Feeling flat after Champion Hurdle entries
At least this season we have the Sky Bet Supreme winner of 2021 entered but, to be fair, Appreciate It is only here because of a minor setback that delayed his novice chase campaign until the autumn.
Blue Lord, who would have chased him home in the Festival opener in March but for a final-flight fall, is now over fences himself while those who did fill the frame, Ballyadam, For Pleasure (chasing) and Soaring Glory, aren’t entered.
JCB Triumph winner Quilixios is but he’s been beaten three times since his day in the sun last March, including in a Grade Two at Limerick last time. He’s 25/1 – the same price as Adagio who chased him home in the Triumph.
This isn’t a go at last year’s novice hurdlers – or the wonderful reigning champion Honeysuckle – but genuine pretenders to the two-mile throne have been thin on the ground for some time. The supply chain has been cut off.
Then you look at this year’s Sky Bet Supreme.
Constitution Hill, Jonbon, Sir Gerhard and now Dysart Dynamo dominate the market and all four are outstanding prospects. Three of them are also all point-to-point graduates and very much seen as future chasers by their powerful connections, who in recent years haven’t been inclined to hang around for a second season over timber with such horses.
And as for those from the Flat... well, the riches of overseas prizes and the lure of the Tattersalls Horses In Training Sales ring mean we just don’t see them anymore without the odd, welcome, exception like Tritonic or Saturday's Warwick winner Stag Horn. And what a crying shame that is.
It’s inconceivable nowadays to think of Sheikh Mohammed aiming his sights at hurdling’s blue riband but he did twice, winning it with Kribensis and Royal Gait (who even wore a distinguishing white cap).
The former, trained by Sir Michael Stoute, or just plain old Michael in those days, was a useful handicapper before being sent hurdling. Royal Gait, the best stayer in Europe despite having the Gold Cup at Royal Ascot taken off him in the stewards’ room.
There’s absolutely no chance he’d be hurdling nowadays. Can you imagine Stradivarius in his pomp heading to Kempton on Boxing Day just to see if he fancied a change?
Fresh faces needed at all levels
But jumps racing needs new blood – at all levels – and if there’s a way to get even a trickle of horses switching from a winter spell on the Flat then surely that has to be explored?
It’s not going to be easy in the current landscape, though.
Only this week in an interview with Jack Haynes in the Racing Post, George Baker, one of five British-based trainers with runners in Bahrain this week, issued a stark warning for British racing.
“Sadly more and more owners are looking at international options and it’s entirely understandable. For economic reasons we totally get it. We will have to react quickly – it might be a trickle of owners looking to run their horses elsewhere at the minute but it might well become a tsunami,” he said.
“We have a fantastic product, brilliant racecourses and people running racing, but it just comes down to prize-money and it’s sad when you’re running for rosettes and chocolate cake when you can run for proper money in other jurisdictions."
Or about £6,000 to the winner for a novice hurdle at Kempton or Chepstow.
Clearly competing with the financial clout of the Flat riches is off the agenda – but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try something.
So what's the solution?
How about a series of novice hurdles for horses with a minimum rating of, say, 80 on the Flat – leading to a valuable final at one of our premier courses for starters?
Istabraq was rated 85 when he was part of the Shadwell dispersal at the Tattersalls July Sales in 1996. JP McManus’ card had well and truly been marked by the late John Durkan when he went to 38,000 guineas to secure him – but horses in this bracket aren’t being attracted to the winter game anymore - not in significant numbers anyway.
Of the four major jump divisions it’s the two-mile chasers where there is a real sense of change with second-season chasers Shishkin and Energumene limbering up for a clash (or hopefully two) of the ages in the coming months.
The second-season staying chasers have been robbed of poster-boy Monkfish by an injury that ended his campaign before it even began but the Gold Cup ranks look certain to be swelled in the years to come by this golden crop of point-to-point recruits.
Things tend to be more stagnant among the staying hurdlers, intrigue this year added by the Long Walk romp of Champ and the left-field Paddy Powers’ Stayers’ Hurdle entry handed to the talented – but somewhat accident prone – Asterion Forlonge.
In midweek the Grade One entries for the Dublin Racing Festival were also unveiled. There was excitement at Paul Nicholls again taking aim at a big Irish prize with Frodon, while Clan Des Obeaux sits there as a very able Plan B too for the Paddy Power Irish Gold Cup.
The champion trainer is eyeing the Ladbrokes Dublin Chase with Greaneteen and he could be joined in the field by Gary Moore’s upwardly-mobile Editeur Du Gite and Jonjo O’Neill’s Grand Annual winner Sky Pirate.
It’s refreshing to see – but a starker statistic is that 90 of the 129 Grade One entries for the meeting are either trained by Willie Mullins (52), Gordon Elliott (27) or Henry De Bromhead (11).
The balance of power is very evident right now and the aim has to be to provide other connections with more ammunition – not simply redistribute the current wealth.
Despite what we’re repeatedly told, not everything in this game is cyclical but while there’s no magic wand to wave here, no instant solution, at least conversations are under way.
What do you think should be done to help boost jumps racing in Britain? Send your thoughts to racingfeedback@sportinglife.com.
FEEDBACK:
Lee Cash: I very much enjoyed reading Dave Ord’s piece on the dearth of 2mile hurdlers. I agree that it is now almost inconceivable that the connections of horses like Kribensis, Royal Gait and even Alderbrook would now consider sending them over hurdles. A key factor has to be prize money. A simple solution would be to have fewer small-field, graded races and bogus ‘champion hurdle trials’ and redirect the prize funds to creating genuine and competitive trials.
I was at Cheltenham for the 2 day December meeting and was astonished to hear the course commentator refer to the Racing Post Gold Cup (ex Caspian Caviar) as the day’s feature. I always remember the Saturday as ‘Bula day’. Despite sitting between the Fighting Fifth and Kempton’s Christmas Hurdle, the Bula/International was a recognised Champion Hurdle trial. This season’s edition was an extremely poor edition won by a 147-rated horse that was subsequently soundly beaten in the Relkeel.
I recall Back In Front winning the Bula in 2004 for a prize of £70,000. The 2021 renewal was worth £69,000 to the victor. The depreciation of prize money is not going to attract owners of decent middle-distance flat horse to hurdling, despite our obsession with ‘the Glory of Cheltenham’. At present trainers can aim their 145+ rated hurdlers at a host of grade 2 contests guaranteed to attract small fields. It can appear something akin to a ‘carve up’.
Why not get rid of the bogus ‘trials’ at Haydock and Sandown, move the Relkeel back to December and the Bula to Trials Day and bump up the prize money to £150,000+? Wincanton should also be forced to make either the Elite or Kingwell hurdle into listed races/limited handicaps. Four graded 2mile hurdles before the Cheltenham Festival: Elite/Kingwell, Fighting Fifth, Christmas Hurdle and the Bula. Fewer graded races and bigger prize funds.
Steve Lapish - Hi Dave, regarding your piece this morning. Underlying the problems you identified, as usual ,that the problem is simply financial. I don’t know a quick fix to get more prize money into British racing, but I have seen other countries where horses race for much more reward. We have surely to look at and evaluate how in some countries prize money is much better than here. If the Aussies can do it so can we.
Michael Chan: Quite simple: Less is more. Every single sporting authority in the world are chasing the same holy grail: Expansion. But sports like cricket, F1, football are saturated with too much of it. It's all money driven but they are responding to demand and the authorities are all getting rich off it, despite supposedly being impartial and guardians of the game. Horse racing is a minority sport. There's no demand for more racing: just quality racing and competitive to boot too.
Small fields are a huge turn off whilst the bookies restricting accounts are turning people off: the same passionate people the sport definitely need to keep. Quite simply Irish racing is far more appealing then the British fayre of tiny fields and trainers scared to run their horses. Cut the program book by two third to match Ireland and we'll see larger fields and it may be that, racing becomes the attraction again, not the background noise in a sea of sports. TV money is key and British racing needs to find proper revenue streams to fund it as the bookies refuse to pay their fair share.
Every wealthy sport is funded by TV money. The wages of players wouldn't be covered by gate revenue. In short, middle east racing are subsidised by oil rich families. Australian, HK, Japan, USA racing are funded by the tote. UK and Ireland racing are funded by sponsors and TV monies with bookies only contributing a paltry % of their profits. Put simply, sponsor, TV monies and small levy isn't enough.
The bookies are key. Without them, there's no racing. But without punters, there's no bookies. Relationship marketing is always more cost effective than constantly advertising. The gambling review is another issue. Because the bookies have all the power and concessions. What has been missed by many is the ban on credit card deposits. That should've been the case years ago.
The government need to separate gambling as two entities. Gaming licence and Sport Licence. Bookies need to separate both businesses and we can see the improvements and distinction between problem gamblers and responsible gamblers. It's that simple. Regulate the bookies' licences, less racing and entice back the punters they've turned off with their restrictions and aggressive casino strategies.
James: Dave, you make some great points about today’s reality. To believe that everything is “cyclical” ignores the dimensional changes happening with the money coming into the sport and the affiliation needs with jump racing, on both sides of the Irish Sea.
British racing has not attracted a £10m+ per year UHNW investor, in two decades, Ireland has. Britain has made over 250 individuals with the entrepreneurial wealth in that period and the means to spend at that level but attracted none at that scale or with sustained interest (5+ years). Ireland ~40 people has (Morans, O’Leary etc). Follow the money!
Jump racing and the intellectual, cultural and social needs of ultra high net worth individuals (>£15m investable assets) in the U.K. are disconnected. A lot of wealth creators have long ceased to have historic family roots to jump racing (multi-generation wealth), or the aptitude with the discretionary wealth (firepower) to compete at the very top table consistently (Whateleys, Brooks Family, de la Heys, Ruckers etc).
The uncomfortable truth is all professional sports are increasingly moving towards “Hollywood” or “Art House”. The concentration of money and wider public interest (social cache) in a few stellar events (Cheltenham) or at the local niche events. Racing is no difference.
Jumps racing will increasingly reflect a “barbell” sport financially, a small number of large investors competing at the very top end and a swathe of smaller investors at the lower end. The biggest fall out is happening amongst those owners with 500k to 1.5m p.a. investments in the sport. Unable to reach the rarefied air of consistent festival success and disinterested in writing cheques for waning prize money, unfulfilled promises and the faded glamour of routine weekend or midweek racing.
Jump racing ownership is fundamentally about the depth and breadth of personal balance sheets and winning. It eats and spits out owners, who cease to have one or both.
I applaud them for having a “go” but the reality is British trainers and the jumps racing industry is not winning the competition to attract UHNW passion investors. It is not creating the excitement to draw them in or the success to retain them.
They are spending their discretionary wealth in other sports, leisure and cultural activities. Racing would be wise to ask why is that? Ruth Quinn and her group lack the competencies and passion to understand it. People like Charlie Liverton neither. It is not their fault, they simply lack the talent and judgement.
Racing needs to look beyond the sport to those, who are more central to those UHNW individuals’ lives.
I help a collection of wealthy individuals with they and their family’s desired lifestyle changes and issues related to wealth preservation, investments, intellectual and philanthropic interests. With a 40 year interest in horse racing I have closely followed the financial and non-financial implications for sports businesses.
