Cheltenham Festival horse racing in crisis Charles Allen resigns

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Yesterday saw the start of the Cheltenham Festival, the biggest annual event in the jump racing calendar.

The four-day festival was expanded from three days in 2005 – attracting more than 160,000 racegoers in a champagne and Guinness-fuelled celebration of Britain’s second most popular spectator sport.

The festival draws a unique crowd to the rolling Cotswolds hills. Street boys from Liverpool, Manchester and nearby Birmingham, many of the latter dressed as characters from the cult Birmingham-based TV drama Peaky Blinders, rub shoulders with landlords, business leaders and city types, showbusiness figures and the farming community of Gloucestershire and neighboring counties.

Above all, there are Irish attendees – making up about a third of the crowd. The festival usually coincides with St Patrick’s Day – although not this year – and is a showcase for Irish racing.

Irish trainers, notably the great Willie Mullins, have trained more Festival winners in 14 of the last 15 years. And, in 17 of the last 18 years, Irish jockeys have dominated, most famously the brilliant Ruby Walsh, who is unlikely to beat the record for riding the most winners at 11 festivals.

Yet this year’s festival comes at a time of crisis in British racing.

Charles Allen, the respected former chief executive of broadcaster ITV, resigned last week as chairman of the British Horseracing Authority (BHA), the sport’s governing body that licenses participants, oversees disciplinary procedures and enforces rules.

His departure after just six months underscored the difficulty of reconciling the industry’s stakeholders, due to what the Guardian called “horse racing’s impenetrable politics”: racehorse owners and breeders, jockeys, trainers, racecourse owners and bookmakers.

Allen’s distinguished business career and close ties to government made him an ideal candidate to bring unity and provide a strategy to grow the sport.

Unfortunately, this proved impossible.

His downfall was the refusal of smaller racecourse owners – and in particular the Arena Racing Company (ARC), whose 16 courses include Chepstow, Newcastle and Wolverhampton – to support the idea of ​​an independent BHA board.

This is said to have been driven by the ARC’s demand that the BHA continue to charge a relatively small amount of so-called “race-day data” – mainly information about non-runners and off-times – which racecourses then sell to bookmakers along with other information and footage of races that can be displayed in betting shops.

ARC and its allies have already clashed with bookies, notably Betfred, after trying to raise the price of the piece.

Allen is said to have reluctantly agreed to the ARC’s demands and alienated others in the process.

The Jockey Club, owners of Britain’s most prestigious courses including Aintree, Newmarket, Epsom and Cheltenham, responded to Allen’s resignation by demanding a review of corporate governance at the Racecourses Association (one of the bodies currently represented on the BHA board). Other major courses – Ascot, Goodwood, Newbury and York – joined its call.

When civil war broke out between racecourse owners, it was hard to see how their differences could be reconciled. The Jockey Club operates under a Royal Charter – the King and Queen are its joint patrons – and all its profits are reinvested in the sport. In contrast, ARC, owned by billionaire brothers David and Simon Reuben, is known for being aggressively commercial.

In the meantime, racecourse attendances are below pre-pandemic levels and industry costs are rising, while betting revenues are falling. This latter point is crucial as 10% of the revenue made by bookmakers from horse racing bets is returned to the sport through a government levy.

Unity has never been more needed. But the competing interests within the sport could not have been more destructive.

– Ian King

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